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CANOGA PARK- The Los Angeles Fire Department battled a Major Emergency Structure Fire in the west San Fernando Valley on Monday, October 18, 2021.
The fire at 8423 Canoga Avenue in Canoga Park, was first noted at 12:18 PM by an LAFD Paramedic Ambulance crew returning from a nearby emergency. Within moments of their reporting the fire, flames were through the roof of the 125' x 125' one-story industrial building that also housed an adjoining but unrelated business at 8425 Canoga Avenue.
As that first-arriving LAFD Paramedic crew circled the structure to gain situational awareness and guide fellow responders, they encountered the first of three adult male civilians with severe burn injuries outside the burning building. Two proved to be in critical condition and the other in serious condition. All three were taken to area hospitals. Sadly, one of the critically injured men died later while undergoing hospital care.
The rapid spread of intense flames and multiple explosions heard within the building guided first-arriving firefighters to quickly commence defensive operations, applying multiple large diameter hose streams from the exterior, including two from atop extended aerial ladders, to prevent flames from extending beyond the well involved structure.
With the exception of a forty square-foot section of the roof at 8427 Canoga Avenue destroyed by surface fire, the tactics proved successful in holding the blaze to the pair of unrelated businesses under one roof at 8423 and 8425 Canoga Avenue.
It took 150 Los Angeles Firefighter just 75 minutes to extinguish the flames.
Firefighters remained active through the night extinguishing hotspots and minimizing hazards at the structurally compromised building with the help of LAFD's robotic firefighting vehicle and heavy equipment.
At daylight Tuesday, LAFD crews resumed a systematic search within the largely destroyed premises. During their methodical search among tons of burnt debris inside the structure, firefighters discovered the remains of an adult male, bringing the overall patient count to four, with a total of two deceased and two remaining hospitalized.
No other injuries were reported.
Scientific testing of materials inside the building of fire origin yielded positive results for hemp, and it appears that the operation inside involved the extraction from hemp, not dissimilar to that used in the Butane Honey Oil extraction process.
Though the business was a legal enterprise, the operation inside appeared to be illegal, as it did not adhere to established permitting processes and safety requirements.
Pursuant to protocol, the fire's cause remains the focus of a joint active investigation by the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force (L.A. Impact).
A positive identification of the dead men, as well as the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
© Photo by Mike Meadows
LAFD Incident 101821-0791
Connect with us: LAFD.ORG | News | Facebook | Instagram | Reddit | Twitter: @LAFD @LAFDtalk
CANOGA PARK- The Los Angeles Fire Department battled a Major Emergency Structure Fire in the west San Fernando Valley on Monday, October 18, 2021.
The fire at 8423 Canoga Avenue in Canoga Park, was first noted at 12:18 PM by an LAFD Paramedic Ambulance crew returning from a nearby emergency. Within moments of their reporting the fire, flames were through the roof of the 125' x 125' one-story industrial building that also housed an adjoining but unrelated business at 8425 Canoga Avenue.
As that first-arriving LAFD Paramedic crew circled the structure to gain situational awareness and guide fellow responders, they encountered the first of three adult male civilians with severe burn injuries outside the burning building. Two proved to be in critical condition and the other in serious condition. All three were taken to area hospitals. Sadly, one of the critically injured men died later while undergoing hospital care.
The rapid spread of intense flames and multiple explosions heard within the building guided first-arriving firefighters to quickly commence defensive operations, applying multiple large diameter hose streams from the exterior, including two from atop extended aerial ladders, to prevent flames from extending beyond the well involved structure.
With the exception of a forty square-foot section of the roof at 8427 Canoga Avenue destroyed by surface fire, the tactics proved successful in holding the blaze to the pair of unrelated businesses under one roof at 8423 and 8425 Canoga Avenue.
It took 150 Los Angeles Firefighter just 75 minutes to extinguish the flames.
Firefighters remained active through the night extinguishing hotspots and minimizing hazards at the structurally compromised building with the help of LAFD's robotic firefighting vehicle and heavy equipment.
At daylight Tuesday, LAFD crews resumed a systematic search within the largely destroyed premises. During their methodical search among tons of burnt debris inside the structure, firefighters discovered the remains of an adult male, bringing the overall patient count to four, with a total of two deceased and two remaining hospitalized.
No other injuries were reported.
Scientific testing of materials inside the building of fire origin yielded positive results for hemp, and it appears that the operation inside involved the extraction from hemp, not dissimilar to that used in the Butane Honey Oil extraction process.
Though the business was a legal enterprise, the operation inside appeared to be illegal, as it did not adhere to established permitting processes and safety requirements.
Pursuant to protocol, the fire's cause remains the focus of a joint active investigation by the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force (L.A. Impact).
A positive identification of the dead men, as well as the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
© Photo by Mike Meadows
LAFD Incident 101821-0791
Connect with us: LAFD.ORG | News | Facebook | Instagram | Reddit | Twitter: @LAFD @LAFDtalk
I’m methodical uploading my photos to Flickr. I prefer to upload them in chronological order, no filters - but they do go through Lightroom to crop and adjust lighting.
I need more photos now then
CANOGA PARK- The Los Angeles Fire Department battled a Major Emergency Structure Fire in the west San Fernando Valley on Monday, October 18, 2021.
The fire at 8423 Canoga Avenue in Canoga Park, was first noted at 12:18 PM by an LAFD Paramedic Ambulance crew returning from a nearby emergency. Within moments of their reporting the fire, flames were through the roof of the 125' x 125' one-story industrial building that also housed an adjoining but unrelated business at 8425 Canoga Avenue.
As that first-arriving LAFD Paramedic crew circled the structure to gain situational awareness and guide fellow responders, they encountered the first of three adult male civilians with severe burn injuries outside the burning building. Two proved to be in critical condition and the other in serious condition. All three were taken to area hospitals. Sadly, one of the critically injured men died later while undergoing hospital care.
The rapid spread of intense flames and multiple explosions heard within the building guided first-arriving firefighters to quickly commence defensive operations, applying multiple large diameter hose streams from the exterior, including two from atop extended aerial ladders, to prevent flames from extending beyond the well involved structure.
With the exception of a forty square-foot section of the roof at 8427 Canoga Avenue destroyed by surface fire, the tactics proved successful in holding the blaze to the pair of unrelated businesses under one roof at 8423 and 8425 Canoga Avenue.
It took 150 Los Angeles Firefighter just 75 minutes to extinguish the flames.
Firefighters remained active through the night extinguishing hotspots and minimizing hazards at the structurally compromised building with the help of LAFD's robotic firefighting vehicle and heavy equipment.
At daylight Tuesday, LAFD crews resumed a systematic search within the largely destroyed premises. During their methodical search among tons of burnt debris inside the structure, firefighters discovered the remains of an adult male, bringing the overall patient count to four, with a total of two deceased and two remaining hospitalized.
No other injuries were reported.
Scientific testing of materials inside the building of fire origin yielded positive results for hemp, and it appears that the operation inside involved the extraction from hemp, not dissimilar to that used in the Butane Honey Oil extraction process.
Though the business was a legal enterprise, the operation inside appeared to be illegal, as it did not adhere to established permitting processes and safety requirements.
Pursuant to protocol, the fire's cause remains the focus of a joint active investigation by the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force (L.A. Impact).
A positive identification of the dead men, as well as the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
© Photo by Brandon Taylor
LAFD Incident 101821-0791
Connect with us: LAFD.ORG | News | Facebook | Instagram | Reddit | Twitter: @LAFD @LAFDtalk
Christmas and Boxing Day were very cold this year. We awoke on Boxing Day to fresh snow, frost, and -20°C.
Just before Christmas I acquired a Lee Filters Little Stopper neutral density filter. The Little Stopper cuts out approximately 6 stops of light. I was eager to try it out so I packed up my gear; bundled up in warm wool, fleece and down; put on my studded boots; and tromped down to the river as soon as I could get away.
The sun was already lighting the mist on the water when I started shooting. The main river channel is actually mostly dammed by ice now so the main flow has moved into the north channel around the island near my home. The channel is high and rising. As I worked, chunks of ice drifted steadily past, occasionally grinding against the shore ice. Mist hung above the water and created wonderful hoar frost coatings on the nearby vegetation.
I worked for about 2 1/2 hours in the sun. I had to be very methodical with the camera gear: no breathing on anything (condensation) and no touching anything metal with bare hands (pretty quick frost bite). I also had to be careful about not sliding down the steep embankment into the water, or worse, dropping some gear down there.
I was nice and warm the whole time, but when I headed back home, with my face away from the sun, I got a little frost nip on my nose.
When the sun had risen high enough in the sky so that it was no longer backlighting the mist I decided to make a composition with the sun in the frame. I shot this without any filtration. Three frames (-2, 0, +2) were merged in Lightroom. Stopping down to f/22 resulted in the radiating starburst.
My FIRST real villain for the League of Lego Heroes group, Con-Man Cod! His true name is Paul Locke, and this suave bad-guy operates exclusively from dingy bars on the wharf and beachfront, dealing in all manner of criminal activity with any villain that can locate his base (and earn the trust of his highly-suspicious self).
Con-Man Cod is palpably up to no good, from his full-face breathing mask covering an undoubtedly scarred face, down to his cybernetic peg-leg. He always wears a pinstripe suit, fishing gloves, and wields a harpoon gun unnaturally well as his primary defense. It has been noted that he also keeps specialized grenades on his person that expel polluted seawater toxins in aerosol form.
Above all his many unlawful hobbies, Cod is infamous for tracking super-powered individuals that 1. have not adopted costumed identities yet, and 2. have unstable personalities or financial trouble (This has lead to the rumor that Cod himself has a "meta-seeking" power, or is perhaps psychically empathic). He will then induct them into his secret mob as another one of his goons. Reports from heroes who have confronted him and lived to tell the tale say some of his henchmen had low-level abilities like calculating situations noticeable seconds before they happen, or having unbreakable grip in their hands, but this could all be methodical planning and trickery on Cod's behalf, hoping to spread paranoia about his legacy.
Factoid: I named all of Cod's henchmen as a joke, based on the weapons they're holding; From left to right, Billy, Stühl, Cruikshank, Poole, Jimmy, and Lincoln.
Another factoid: I know it's unlikely, but I secretly hope some of my LoLH entries will be noticed and nominated for the League of Heroes Awards 2017. Best of luck to everyone!
WESTLAKE - It took nearly 150 Los Angeles Firefighters nearly two and a half hours to extinguish a major emergency fire in a vacant 2 story office building west of downtown Los Angeles Monday evening.
The Los Angeles Fire Department was summoned at 7:01 PM on June 13, 2016 to a structure fire at 2411 West 8th Street in the Westlake neighborhood not far from MacArthur Park. LAFD responders arrived quickly to find intense fire on the upper floor of a long vacant 14,351 square-foot two story office building, the site of previous blazes.
Firefighters used ground ladders to assist several imperiled persons at windows of the burning structure, with LAFD responders entering the building to performing the rescue of three others.
While extending hoselines to aggressively battle the flames within, LAFD crews sadly discovered and retrieved a dead man from the inferno, before the failing structure forced then to switch to defensive exterior operations twenty minutes into the firefight.
A total of 147 LAFD personnel under the command of Battalion Chief Jaime Moore, confined the blaze to the heavily damaged building of fire origin - which had no functional fire sprinklers, extinguishing the bulk of flame in just 2 hours and 22 minutes.
As a result of witnesses statements, Los Angeles Police Department Officers later detained and arrested an adult male suspected of starting the fire. He and one of the persons earlier rescued by firefighters, were taken to an area hospital by ambulance for evaluation of non-life threatening injuries.
With the flames extinguished well past darkness, firefighters remained at the structurally unsound premises to douse hotspots, prevent public harm and prepare for a further search at daybreak.
Early Tuesday, investigation teams from the LAFD Arson/Counter-Terrorism Section methodically processed the large and still-smoldering site to determine the fire's cause and origin, as highly-trained Human Remains Detection Dog and Handler teams performed a relentless search of the collapsed structure for deceased victims.
With the canines' help, firefighters discovered the remains of four adult victims, two men and two women, amid the rubble on the second floor of the building. Their discovery, combined with the male victim found deceased by firefighters battling the blaze, brought the death tally to five, all of whom appeared to be transients.
No firefighters sustained injury in the firefight, investigation or recovery operations.
A positive identification of the dead persons, to include the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
Photo Use Permitted via Creative Commons - Credit: LAFD Photo | Christopher Wan
LAFD Incident: 061316-1267
Connect with us: LAFD.ORG | News | Facebook | Instagram | Reddit | Twitter: @LAFD @LAFDtalk
CANOGA PARK- The Los Angeles Fire Department battled a Major Emergency Structure Fire in the west San Fernando Valley on Monday, October 18, 2021.
The fire at 8423 Canoga Avenue in Canoga Park, was first noted at 12:18 PM by an LAFD Paramedic Ambulance crew returning from a nearby emergency. Within moments of their reporting the fire, flames were through the roof of the 125' x 125' one-story industrial building that also housed an adjoining but unrelated business at 8425 Canoga Avenue.
As that first-arriving LAFD Paramedic crew circled the structure to gain situational awareness and guide fellow responders, they encountered the first of three adult male civilians with severe burn injuries outside the burning building. Two proved to be in critical condition and the other in serious condition. All three were taken to area hospitals. Sadly, one of the critically injured men died later while undergoing hospital care.
The rapid spread of intense flames and multiple explosions heard within the building guided first-arriving firefighters to quickly commence defensive operations, applying multiple large diameter hose streams from the exterior, including two from atop extended aerial ladders, to prevent flames from extending beyond the well involved structure.
With the exception of a forty square-foot section of the roof at 8427 Canoga Avenue destroyed by surface fire, the tactics proved successful in holding the blaze to the pair of unrelated businesses under one roof at 8423 and 8425 Canoga Avenue.
It took 150 Los Angeles Firefighter just 75 minutes to extinguish the flames.
Firefighters remained active through the night extinguishing hotspots and minimizing hazards at the structurally compromised building with the help of LAFD's robotic firefighting vehicle and heavy equipment.
At daylight Tuesday, LAFD crews resumed a systematic search within the largely destroyed premises. During their methodical search among tons of burnt debris inside the structure, firefighters discovered the remains of an adult male, bringing the overall patient count to four, with a total of two deceased and two remaining hospitalized.
No other injuries were reported.
Scientific testing of materials inside the building of fire origin yielded positive results for hemp, and it appears that the operation inside involved the extraction from hemp, not dissimilar to that used in the Butane Honey Oil extraction process.
Though the business was a legal enterprise, the operation inside appeared to be illegal, as it did not adhere to established permitting processes and safety requirements.
Pursuant to protocol, the fire's cause remains the focus of a joint active investigation by the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force (L.A. Impact).
A positive identification of the dead men, as well as the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
© Photo by Mike Meadows
LAFD Incident 101821-0791
Connect with us: LAFD.ORG | News | Facebook | Instagram | Reddit | Twitter: @LAFD @LAFDtalk
And so it begins...the pre-holiday cleaning of the family room--over many weeks--and the slow, methodical unwrapping of the Christmas goodies. These wonderful house-shaped tins were given to me by my friend Judi and are the perfect size for a little bumpout--a battery operated string of lights on ultra thin wire is wrapped around the vintage bottle brush trees. Excellent graphics on these tins.
Arborists working way up in a big old tree, removing Christmas lights. I joined this group on a cold morning at Longwood, ...they weren't bothered by the cold or height, occasionally breaking into song and keeping up a regular conversation, along with occasionally yelling "Lights", as strings of nicely bundled lights were tossed down. There was another on the ground, throwing the lights into a bin. Occasionally things, such as a thermos of coffee, would go up by one of the numerous lines hanging down. They worked quickly but methodically. You learn to trust your knots and your buddies, I was told. There are many trees with lights on the grounds, some even larger. Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, PA
As a result of a journey to Italy, Henri Edmond Cross (Douai, May 20, 1856 - Saint Clair, May 16, 1910) produced a number of such scenes of Perugia and Assisi. Pointillism (the technique used to produce this work) is a method of painting in which the colour is applied in small dots of paint, the artist breaking complex tones up into pure colours which are then combined by the eye at a distance. Here, the chance nature of Impressionist compositions was replaced by a precisely enclosed construction, and Impressionist spontaneity by the scrupulously methodical application of identical brushstrokes to the canvas, creating the effect of a decorative coloured mosaic.
[Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92 cm]
gandalfsgallery.blogspot.com/2012/02/henri-edmond-cross-c...
New Jersey USA 12-05-2019
Scientific classification
Domain:Eukaryota
Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Aves
Order:Pelecaniformes
Family:Ardeidae
Genus:Egretta
Species:E. caerulea
Binomial name
Egretta caerulea
Songs and Calls
Usually silent; squawks when alarmed. Various croaks and screams at nesting colonies.
Family
Herons, Egrets, Bitterns
Habitat
Marshes, swamps, rice fields, ponds, shores. In North America most numerous on fresh waters inland, around river swamps and marshy lakes. Also feeds in wet meadows and even dry fields. Less commonly feeds in salt water, although it may favour such habitat in the Caribbean. Nests in trees or in dense low thickets near water.
Despite its different last name, the Little Blue Heron is probably a close relative of the Snowy Egret. It looks much like a Snowy when it is young, but molts to a dark slate-blue plumage as an adult. Generally wary and hard to approach. Nests in colonies, sometimes of this species alone; in large mixed heronries, Little Blues tend to nest along the edges. Some of its largest colonies are in the lower Mississippi Valley, where it often nests in association with Cattle Egrets.
Feeding Behaviour
Usually slow and methodical in its foraging, walking very slowly in shallows or standing still waiting for prey to approach. May feed in shallow water or on shore, also in grassy fields.
Eggs
3-5, sometimes 1-6. Pale blue-green. Incubation is by both sexes, 20-23 days. Young: Both parents feed young, by regurgitation. Young may climb out of nest onto nearby branches after 2-3 weeks, are capable of short flights at 4 weeks, become independent at 6-7 weeks.
Young
Both parents feed young, by regurgitation. Young may climb out of nest onto nearby branches after 2-3 weeks, are capable of short flights at 4 weeks, become independent at 6-7 weeks.
Diet
Mainly fish and crustaceans. Diet quite variable. Eats mostly small fish (including larger ones than those favored by similar-sized Snowy Egret) and crustaceans, including crabs and crayfish. Away from water eats many grasshoppers and other insects. Other food items include tadpoles, frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, spiders.
Nesting
Breeds in colonies. Male establishes small territory within colony and displays there, driving away other males. Displays by male include neck-stretching and bill-snapping; pairs in courtship may nibble at each other's plumage, and cross and intertwine necks. Nest: Site is in a tree or shrub, usually 3-15' above ground or water, sometimes up to 40' high. Nest (built by both sexes) is a platform of sticks, varying from flimsy to substantial, with depression in the centre.
Peter I commonly known as Peter the Great, was Tsar of all Russia from 1682, and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. From this year, Peter was an absolute monarch who remained the ultimate authority. His methods were often harsh and autocratic.
Most of Peter's reign was consumed by long wars against the Ottoman and Swedish Empires. Despite initial difficulties, the wars were ultimately successful and led to expansion to the Sea of Azov and the Baltic Sea, thus laying the groundwork for the Imperial Russian Navy. His victory in the Great Northern War ended Sweden's era as a great power and its domination of the Baltic region while elevating Russia's standing to the extent it came to be acknowledged as an empire. Peter led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on radical Enlightenment.
In 1700, he introduced the Gregorian calendar but the Russian Orthodox Church was particularly resistant to this change; they wanted to maintain its distinct identity and avoid appearing influenced by Catholic practices.[citation needed] In 1703, he introduced the first Russian newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, and ordered the civil script, a reform of Russian orthography largely designed by himself. He founded the city of Saint Petersburg on the shore of the Neva as a "window to the West" in May 1703. In 1712 Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where it remained – with only a brief interruption – until 1918. He promoted higher education and industrialization in the Russian Empire.
Peter had a great interest in plants, animals and minerals, in malformed creatures or exceptions to the law of nature for his cabinet of curiosities. He encouraged research of deformities, all along trying to debunk the superstitious fear of monsters. The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Saint Petersburg State University were founded in 1724, a year before his death.
Peter is primarily credited with the modernization of the country, transforming it into a major European power. His administrative reforms, creating a Governing Senate in 1711, the Collegium in 1717 and the Table of Ranks in 1722 had a lasting impact on Russia, and many institutions of the Russian government trace their origins to his reign.
Early life
Peter was named after the apostle. He grew up at Izmaylovo Estate and was educated from an early age by several tutors commissioned by his father, Tsar Alexis of Russia, most notably Nikita Zotov, Patrick Gordon, and Paul Menesius. On 29 January 1676, Alexis died, leaving the sovereignty to Peter's elder half-brother, the weak and sickly Feodor III of Russia. Throughout this period, the government was largely run by Artamon Matveev, an enlightened friend of Alexis, the political head of the Naryshkin family and one of Peter's greatest childhood benefactors.
This position changed when Feodor died in 1682. As Feodor did not leave any children, a dispute arose between the Miloslavsky family (Maria Miloslavskaya was the first wife of Alexis I) and Naryshkin family (Natalya Naryshkina was his second) over who should inherit the throne. He jointly ruled with his elder half-brother, Ivan V, until 1696. Ivan, was next in line but was chronically ill and of infirm mind. Consequently, the Boyar Duma (a council of Russian nobles) chose the 10-year-old Peter to become Tsar, with his mother as regent.
This arrangement was brought before the people of Moscow, as ancient tradition demanded, and was ratified. Sophia, one of Alexis' daughters from his first marriage, led a rebellion of the Streltsy (Russia's elite military corps) in April–May 1682. In the subsequent conflict, some of Peter's relatives and friends were murdered, including Artamon Matveyev, and Peter witnessed some of these acts of political violence.
The Streltsy made it possible for Sophia, the Miloslavskys (the clan of Ivan) and their allies to insist that Peter and Ivan be proclaimed joint Tsars, with Ivan being acclaimed as the senior. Sophia then acted as regent during the minority of the sovereigns and exercised all power. For seven years, she ruled as an autocrat. A large hole was cut in the back of the dual-seated throne used by Ivan and Peter. Sophia would sit behind the throne and listen as Peter conversed with nobles, while feeding him information and giving him responses to questions and problems. He lived at Preobrazhenskoye. This throne can be seen in the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow.
At the age of 16, Peter discovered an English boat on the estate, had it restored and learned to sail. He received a sextant, but did not know how to use the instrument. Therefore, he began a search for a foreign expert in the German Quarter. Peter befriended two Dutch carpenters, Frans Timmerman and Karsten Brandt, and several other foreigners in Russian service. Peter studied arithmetic, geometry, and military sciences. He was not interested in a musical education but seems to have liked fireworks and drumming.
Peter was not particularly concerned that others ruled in his name. He engaged in such pastimes as shipbuilding and sailing, as well as mock battles with his toy army. Peter's mother sought to force him to adopt a more conventional approach and arranged his marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina in 1689. The marriage was a failure, and ten years later Peter forced his wife to become a nun and thus freed himself from the union.
By the summer of 1689, Peter, planned to take power from his half-sister Sophia, whose position had been weakened by two unsuccessful Crimean campaigns against the Crimean Khanate in an attempt to stop devastating Crimean Tatar raids into Russia's southern lands. When she learned of his designs, Sophia conspired with some leaders of the Streltsy, who continually aroused disorder and dissent. Peter, warned by others from the Streltsy, escaped in the middle of the night to the impenetrable monastery of Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra; there he slowly gathered adherents who perceived he would win the power struggle. Sophia was eventually overthrown, with Peter I and Ivan V continuing to act as co-tsars. Peter forced Sophia to enter a convent, where she gave up her name and her position as a member of the royal family.
Still, Peter could not acquire actual control over Russian affairs. Power was instead exercised by his mother, Natalya Naryshkina. It was only when Natalya died in 1694 that Peter, then aged 22, became an independent sovereign. Formally, Ivan V was a co-ruler with Peter, though being ineffective. Peter became the sole ruler when Ivan died in 1696 without male offspring, two years later.
Peter grew to be extremely tall, especially for the time period, reportedly standing 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m). Peter had noticeable facial tics, and he may have suffered from petit mal seizures, a form of epilepsy. Meanwhile, he was a frequent guest in German quarter, where he met Anna and Willem Mons.
Ideology of Peter's reign
As a young man, Peter I adopted the Protestant model of existence in a pragmatic world of competition and personal success, which largely shaped the philosophy of his reformism. He perceived the Russian people as rude, unintelligent, stubborn in their sluggishness, a child, a lazy student. He highly appreciated the state's role in the life of society, saw it as an ideal instrument for achieving high goals, saw it as a universal institution for transforming people, with the help of violence and fear, into educated, conscious, law-abiding and useful to the whole society subjects.
He introduced into the concept of the autocrat's power the notion of the monarch's duties. He considered it necessary to take care of his subjects, to protect them from enemies, to work for their benefit. Above all, he put the interests of Russia. He saw his mission in turning it into a power similar to Western countries, and subordinated his own life and the lives of his subjects to the realization of this idea. Gradually penetrated the idea that the task should be solved with the help of reforms, which will be carried out at the autocrat's will, who creates good and punishes evil. He considered the morality of a statesman separately from the morality of a private person and believed that the sovereign in the name of state interests can go to murder, violence, forgery and deceit.
He went through the naval service, starting from the lowest ranks: bombardier (1695), captain (1696), colonel (1706), schout-bij-nacht (1709), vice-admiral (1714), admiral (1721). By hard daily work (according to the figurative expression of Peter the Great himself, he was simultaneously "forced to hold a sword and a quill in one right hand") and courageous behavior he demonstrated to his subjects his personal positive example, showed how to act, fully devoting himself to the fulfillment of duty and service to the fatherland.
Reign
Peter implemented sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing Russia. Heavily influenced by his advisors from Western Europe, Peter reorganized the Russian army along modern lines and dreamed of making Russia a maritime power. He faced much opposition to these policies at home but brutally suppressed rebellions against his authority, including by the Streltsy, Bashkirs, Astrakhan, and the greatest civil uprising of his reign, the Bulavin Rebellion.
Peter implemented social modernization in an absolute manner by introducing French and western dress to his court and requiring courtiers, state officials, and the military to shave their beards and adopt modern clothing styles. One means of achieving this end was the introduction of taxes for long beards and robes in September 1698.
In his process to westernize Russia, he wanted members of his family to marry other European royalty. In the past, his ancestors had been snubbed at the idea, but now, it was proving fruitful. He negotiated with Frederick William, Duke of Courland to marry his niece, Anna Ivanovna. He used the wedding in order to launch his new capital, St Petersburg, where he had already ordered building projects of westernized palaces and buildings. Peter hired Italian and German architects to design it.
As part of his reforms, Peter started an industrialization effort that was slow but eventually successful. Russian manufacturing and main exports were based on the mining and lumber industries. For example, by the end of the century Russia came to export more iron than any other country in the world.
To improve his nation's position on the seas, Peter sought more maritime outlets. His only outlet at the time was the White Sea at Arkhangelsk. The Baltic Sea was at the time controlled by Sweden in the north, while the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea were controlled by the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire respectively in the south.
Peter attempted to acquire control of the Black Sea, which would require expelling the Tatars from the surrounding areas. As part of an agreement with Poland that ceded Kiev to Russia, Peter was forced to wage war against the Crimean Khan and against the Khan's overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. Peter's primary objective became the capture of the Ottoman fortress of Azov, near the Don River. In the summer of 1695 Peter organized the Azov campaigns to take the fortress, but his attempts ended in failure.
Peter returned to Moscow in November 1695 and began building a large navy in Voronezh. He launched about thirty ships against the Ottomans in 1696, capturing Azov in July of that year.
Grand Embassy
Peter knew that Russia could not face the Ottoman Empire alone. In 1697, he traveled "incognito" to Western Europe on an 18-month journey with a large Russian delegation–the so-called "Grand Embassy". He used a fake name, allowing him to escape social and diplomatic events, but since he was far taller than most others, he could not fool anyone. One goal was to seek the aid of European monarchs, but Peter's hopes were dashed. France was a traditional ally of the Ottoman Sultan, and Austria was eager to maintain peace in the east while conducting its own wars in the west. Peter, furthermore, had chosen an inopportune moment: the Europeans at the time were more concerned about the War of the Spanish Succession over who would succeed the childless King Charles II of Spain than about fighting the Ottoman Sultan.
In Königsberg, the Tsar was apprenticed for two months to an artillery engineer. In July he met Sophia of Hanover at Coppenbrügge castle. She described him: "The tsar is a tall, handsome man, with an attractive face. He has a lively mind is very witty. Only, someone so well endowed by nature could be a little better mannered." Peter rented a ship in Emmerich am Rhein and sailed to Zaandam, where he arrived on 18 August 1697. He studied saw-mills, manufacturing and shipbuilding but left after a week. Through the mediation of Nicolaas Witsen, an expert on Russia, the Tsar was given the opportunity to gain practical experience in shipyard, belonging to the Dutch East India Company, for a period of four months, under the supervision of Gerrit Claesz Pool. The diligent and capable Tsar assisted in the construction of an East Indiaman ship Peter and Paul specially laid down for him. During his stay the Tsar engaged many skilled workers such as builders of locks, fortresses, shipwrights, and seamen—including Cornelis Cruys, a vice-admiral who became, under Franz Lefort, the Tsar's advisor in maritime affairs. Peter later put his knowledge of shipbuilding to use in helping build Russia's navy.
Peter felt that the ship's carpenters in Holland worked too much by eye and lacked accurate construction drawings. On 11 January 1698 (Old Style) Peter arrived at Victoria Embankment with four chamberlains, three interpreters, two clock makers, a cook, a priest, six trumpeters, 70 soldiers from the Preobrazhensky regiment, four dwarfs and a monkey. Peter stayed at 21 Norfolk Street, Strand and met with King William III and Gilbert Burnet, attended a session of the Royal Society, received a doctorate from Oxford University, trained a telescope on Venus at the Greenwich Observatory, and saw a Fleet Review by Royal Navy at Deptford. He studied the English techniques of city-building he would later use to great effect at Saint Petersburg. At the end of April 1698 he left after learning to make watches, carpenting coffins and posing for Sir Godfrey Kneller.
The Embassy next went to Leipzig, Dresden, Prague and Vienna. Peter spoke with Augustus II the Strong and Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor.[18] Peter's visit was cut short, when he was forced to rush home by a rebellion of the Streltsy. The rebellion was easily crushed before Peter returned home; of the Tsar's troops, only one was killed. Peter nevertheless acted ruthlessly towards the mutineers. Over one thousand two hundred of the rebels were tortured and executed, and Peter ordered that their bodies be publicly exhibited as a warning to future conspirators. The Streltsy were disbanded, some of the rebels were deported to Siberia, and the individual they sought to put on the Throne — Peter's half-sister Sophia — was forced to become a nun.
Peter's visits to the West impressed upon him the notion that European customs were in several respects superior to Russian traditions. He commanded all of his courtiers and officials to wear European clothing and cut off their long beards, causing his Boyars, who were very fond of their beards, great upset. Boyars who sought to retain their beards were required to pay an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles. Peter also sought to end arranged marriages, which were the norm among the Russian nobility, because he thought such a practice was barbaric and led to domestic violence, since the partners usually resented each other.
In 1698, Peter I instituted a beard tax to modernize Russian society. In the same year Peter sent a delegation to Malta, under boyar Boris Sheremetev, to observe the training and abilities of the Knights of Malta and their fleet. Sheremetev investigated the possibility of future joint ventures with the Knights, including action against the Turks and the possibility of a future Russian naval base. On 12 September 1698, Peter officially founded the first Russian Navy base, Taganrog on the Sea of Azov.
In 1699, Peter changed the date of the celebration of the new year from 1 September to 1 January. Traditionally, the years were reckoned from the purported creation of the World, but after Peter's reforms, they were to be counted from the birth of Christ. Thus, in the year 7207 of the old Russian calendar, Peter proclaimed that the Julian Calendar was in effect and the year was 1700. On the death of Lefort in 1699, Menshikov succeeded him as Peter's prime favourite and confidant. In 1701, the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation was founded; for fifteen years, not only naval officers, but also surveyors, engineers, and gunners were educated there.
Great Northern War
First Winter Palace
Peter made a temporary peace with the Ottoman Empire that allowed him to keep the captured fort of Azov, and turned his attention to Russian maritime supremacy. He sought to acquire control of the Baltic Sea, which had been taken by the Swedish Empire a half-century earlier. Peter declared war on Sweden, which was at the time led by the young King Charles XII. Sweden was also opposed by Denmark–Norway, Saxony, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Preobrazhensky regiment took part in all major battles of the Great Northern War.
Russia was ill-prepared to fight the Swedes, and their first attempt at seizing the Baltic coast ended in disaster at the Battle of Narva in 1700. In the conflict, the forces of Charles XII, rather than employ a slow methodical siege, attacked immediately using a blinding snowstorm to their advantage. After the battle, Charles XII decided to concentrate his forces against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which gave Peter time to reorganize the Russian army. He invited Nicolaas Bidloo to organize a military hospital. In 1701, Peter the Great signed a decree on the opening of Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation.
While the Poles fought the Swedes, Peter founded the city of Saint Petersburg on 29 June 1703, in Ingermanland (a province of the Swedish Empire that he had captured). It was named after his patron saint Saint Peter. He forbade the building of stone edifices outside Saint Petersburg, which he intended to become Russia's capital, so that all stonemasons could participate in the construction of the new city. Peter moved the capital to St. Petersburg in 1703. While the city was being built along the Neva he lived in a modest three-room log cabin (with a study but without a fire-place) which had to make room for the first version of the Winter palace. The first buildings which appeared were the Peter and Paul Fortress, a shipyard at the Admiralty and Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Following several defeats, Polish King Augustus II the Strong abdicated in 1706. Swedish king Charles XII turned his attention to Russia, invading it in 1708. After crossing into Russia, Charles defeated Peter at Golovchin in July. In the Battle of Lesnaya, Charles suffered his first loss after Peter crushed a group of Swedish reinforcements marching from Riga. Deprived of this aid, Charles was forced to abandon his proposed march on Moscow.
Charles XII refused to retreat to Poland or back to Sweden and instead invaded Ukraine. Peter withdrew his army southward, employing scorched earth, destroying along the way anything that could assist the Swedes. Deprived of local supplies, the Swedish army was forced to halt its advance in the winter of 1708–1709. In the summer of 1709, they resumed their efforts to capture Russian-ruled Ukraine, culminating in the Battle of Poltava on 27 June. The battle was a decisive defeat for the Swedish forces, ending Charles' campaign in Ukraine and forcing him south to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Russia had defeated what was considered to be one of the world's best militaries, and the victory overturned the view that Russia was militarily incompetent. In Poland, Augustus II was restored as King.
Peter, overestimating the support he would receive from his Balkan allies, attacked the Ottoman Empire, initiating the Russo-Turkish War of 1710. Peter's campaign in the Ottoman Empire was disastrous, and in the ensuing Treaty of the Pruth, Peter was forced to return the Black Sea ports he had seized in 1697. In return, the Sultan expelled Charles XII.
The Ottomans called him Mad Peter (Turkish: deli Petro), for his willingness to sacrifice large numbers of his troops in wartime. Peter I loved all sorts of rarities and curiosities. In 1704 Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a child with Ethiopian origin, was presented to him; in 1716 Peter took him to Paris.
In 1711, Peter established by decree a new state body known as the Governing Senate. Normally, the Boyar duma would have exercised power during his absence. Peter, however, mistrusted the boyars; he instead abolished the Duma and created a Senate of ten members. The Senate was founded as the highest state institution to supervise all judicial, financial and administrative affairs. Originally established only for the time of the monarch's absence, the Senate became a permanent body after his return. A special high official, the Ober-Procurator, served as the link between the ruler and the senate and acted, in Peter own words, as "the sovereign's eye". Without his signature no Senate decision could go into effect; the Senate became one of the most important institutions of Imperial Russia.
1712, Peter I issued a decree establishing an Engineering School in Moscow, which was supposed to recruit up to 150 students, and two-thirds of them were to consist of nobles.[31] Therefore, on 28 February 1714, he issued a decree calling for compulsory education, which dictated that all Russian 10- to 15-year-old children of the nobility, government clerks, and lesser-ranked officials must learn basic mathematics and geometry, and should be tested on the subjects at the end of their studies.
Peter's northern armies took the Swedish province of Livonia (the northern half of modern Latvia, and the southern half of modern Estonia), driving the Swedes out of Finland. In 1714 the Russian fleet won the Battle of Gangut. Most of Finland was occupied by the Russians.
In 1716, the Tsar visited Riga, and Danzig in January, Stettin, and obtained the assistance of the Electorate of Hanover and the Kingdom of Prussia fighting a war against Sweden at Wismar. He was forced to leave Mecklenburg. In Altona he met with Danish diplomats. He went on to Bad Pyrmont in May/June, because of an illness he stayed at this spa. He arrived in Amsterdam in December, where he bought some interesting collections: those of Frederik Ruysch, Levinus Vincent and Albertus Seba and paintings by Maria Sibylla Merian for his Kunstkamera. He visited a silk manufacture and a paper-mill, and learned to create paper and to spin silk. He visited Herman Boerhaave and Carel de Moor in Leiden and ordered two mercury thermometers from Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and instruments from Musschenbroek. In April 1717 he continued his travel from Flushing to Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands and Dunkirk, Calais, Paris, where he obtained many books and proposed a marriage between his daughter and King Louis XV. Saint-Simon described him as "tall, well-formed and slim…with a look both bewildered and fierce." Via Reims, and Spa Peter travelled on to Maastricht, at that time one of the most important fortresses in Europe, where he was received by Daniël van Dopff, the commander of the fortress. He went back to Amsterdam and visited the Hortus Botanicus and left the city early September.
The Tsar's navy was powerful enough that the Russians could penetrate Sweden. Still, Charles XII refused to yield, and not until his death in battle in 1718 did peace become feasible. After the battle near Åland, Sweden made peace with all powers but Russia by 1720. In 1721, the Treaty of Nystad ended the Great Northern War. Russia acquired Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, and a substantial portion of Karelia. In turn, Russia paid two million Riksdaler and surrendered most of Finland. The Tsar retained some Finnish lands close to Saint Petersburg, which he had made his capital in 1712. Between 1713 and 1728, and from 1732 to 1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia.
Title
Following his victory in the Great Northern War, he adopted the title of emperor in 1721.
By the grace of God, the most excellent and great sovereign emperor Pyotr Alekseevich the ruler of all the Russias: of Moscow, of Kiev, of Vladimir, of Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan and Tsar of Siberia, sovereign of Pskov, great prince of Smolensk, of Tver, of Yugorsk, of Perm, of Vyatka, of Bulgaria and others, sovereign and great prince of the Novgorod Lower lands, of Chernigov, of Ryazan, of Rostov, of Yaroslavl, of Belozersk, of Udora, of Kondia and the sovereign of all the northern lands, and the sovereign of the Iverian lands, of the Kartlian and Georgian Kings, of the Kabardin lands, of the Circassian and Mountain princes and many other states and lands western and eastern here and there and the successor and sovereign and ruler.
Later years
In 1717, Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky led the first Russian military expedition into Central Asia against the Khanate of Khiva. The expedition ended in complete disaster when the entire expeditionary force was slaughtered.
In 1718, Peter investigated why the formerly Swedish province of Livonia was so orderly. He discovered that the Swedes spent as much administering Livonia (300 times smaller than his empire) as he spent on the entire Russian bureaucracy. He was forced to dismantle the province's government.
To the end of 1717, the preparatory phase of administrative reform in Russia was completed. After 1718, Peter established colleges in place of the old central agencies of government, including foreign affairs, war, navy, expense, income, justice, and inspection. Later others were added, to regulate mining and industry. Each college consisted of a president, a vice-president, a number of councilors and assessors, and a procurator. Some foreigners were included in various colleges but not as president. Peter did not have enough loyal, talented or educated persons to put in full charge of the various departments. Peter preferred to rely on groups of individuals who would keep check on one another. Decisions depended on the majority vote.
Peter's last years were marked by further reform in Russia. On 22 October 1721, soon after peace was made with Sweden, he was officially proclaimed Emperor of All Russia. Some proposed that he take the title Emperor of the East, but he refused. Gavrila Golovkin, the State Chancellor, was the first to add "the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russias" to Peter's traditional title Tsar following a speech by the archbishop of Pskov in 1721. Peter's imperial title was recognized by Augustus II of Poland, Frederick William I of Prussia, and Frederick I of Sweden, but not by the other European monarchs. In the minds of many, the word emperor connoted superiority or pre-eminence over kings. Several rulers feared that Peter would claim authority over them, just as the Holy Roman Emperor had claimed suzerainty over all Christian nations.
In 1722, Peter created a new order of precedence known as the Table of Ranks. Formerly, precedence had been determined by birth. To deprive the Boyars of their high positions, Peter directed that precedence should be determined by merit and service to the Emperor. The Table of Ranks continued to remain in effect until the Russian monarchy was overthrown in 1917.
The once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was in deep decline. Taking advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War of 1722–1723, otherwise known as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great", which drastically increased Russian influence for the first time in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region, and prevented the Ottoman Empire from making territorial gains in the region. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over territory to Russia, comprising Derbent, Shirvan, Gilan, Mazandaran, Baku, and Astrabad. Within twelve years all the territories were ceded back to Persia, now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht, the Treaty of Ganja, and as the result of a Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire, which was the common enemy of both.
Peter introduced new taxes to fund improvements in Saint Petersburg. He abolished the land tax and household tax and replaced them with a poll tax. The taxes on land and on households were payable only by individuals who owned property or maintained families. The new head taxes were payable by serfs and paupers. In 1725 the construction of Peterhof, a palace near Saint Petersburg, was completed. Peterhof (Dutch for "Peter's Court") was a grand residence, becoming known as the "Russian Versailles".
In the winter of 1723, Peter, whose overall health was never robust, began having problems with his urinary tract and bladder. In the summer of 1724, a team of doctors performed surgery releasing upwards of four pounds of blocked urine. Peter remained bedridden until late autumn. In the first week of October, restless and certain he was cured, Peter began a lengthy inspection tour of various projects. According to legend, in November, at Lakhta along the Gulf of Finland to inspect some ironworks, Peter saw a group of soldiers drowning near shore and, wading out into near-waist deep water, came to their rescue.
This icy water rescue is said to have exacerbated Peter's bladder problems and caused his death. The story, however, has been viewed with skepticism by some historians, pointing out that the German chronicler Jacob von Staehlin is the only source for the story, and it seems unlikely that no one else would have documented such an act of heroism. This, plus the interval of time between these actions and Peter's death seems to preclude any direct link.
In early January 1725, Peter was struck once again with uremia. Legend has it that before lapsing into unconsciousness Peter asked for a paper and pen and scrawled an unfinished note that read: "Leave all to ..." and then, exhausted by the effort, asked for his daughter Anna to be summoned.
Peter died between four and five in the morning 8 February 1725. An autopsy revealed his bladder to be infected with gangrene. He was fifty-two years, seven months old when he died, having reigned forty-two years. He is interred in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
After the death of Peter I, there were immediately students who came to the Military College with a request to "leave science" under the pretext of "unconsciousness and incomprehensibility."
Religion
Peter did not believe in miracles and founded The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters, an organization that mocked the Orthodox and Catholic Church when he was eighteen. In January 1695, Peter refused to partake in a traditional Russian Orthodox ceremony of the Epiphany Ceremony, and would often schedule events for The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters to directly conflict with the Church. He often used the nickname Pakhom Mikhailov (Russian: Пахом Михайлов) among the ministers of religion who made up his relatively close circle of long-term drinking companions. He drank less than the others, deliberately getting the others drunk in order to listen to their drunken conversations.
Peter was brought up in the Russian Orthodox faith, but he had low regard for the Church hierarchy, which he kept under tight governmental control. The traditional leader of the Church was the Patriarch of Moscow. In 1700, when the office fell vacant, Peter refused to name a replacement, allowing the patriarch's coadjutor (or deputy) to discharge the duties of the office. Peter could not tolerate the patriarch exercising power superior to the tsar, as indeed had happened in the case of Philaret (1619–1633) and Nikon (1652–66). In 1716 he invited Theophan Prokopovich to come to the capital. In 1718 he ordered to translate the "Introduction to European History" (a work by Samuel Pufendorf); the Ecclesiastical Regulations of 1721 are based on it. The Church reform of Peter the Great therefore abolished the patriarchate, replacing it with a Holy Synod that was under the control of a Procurator, and the tsar appointed all bishops.
In 1721, Peter followed the advice of Prokopovich in designing the Holy Synod as a council of ten clergymen. For leadership in the Church, Peter turned increasingly to Ukrainians, who were more open to reform, but were not well loved by the Russian clergy. Peter implemented a law that stipulated that no Russian man could join a monastery before the age of fifty. He felt that too many able Russian men were being wasted on clerical work when they could be joining his new and improved army.
A clerical career was not a route chosen by upper-class society. Most parish priests were sons of priests and were very poorly educated and paid. The monks in the monasteries had a slightly higher status; they were not allowed to marry. Politically, the Church was impotent.
Marriages and family
Peter the Great had two wives, with whom he had fifteen children, three of whom survived to adulthood. Peter's mother selected his first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, with the advice of other nobles in 1689. This was consistent with previous Romanov tradition by choosing a daughter of a minor noble. This was done to prevent fighting between the stronger noble houses and to bring fresh blood into the family. He also had a mistress from Westphalia, Anna Mons.
Upon his return from his European tour in 1698, Peter sought to end his unhappy marriage. He divorced the Tsaritsa and forced her to join a convent. She had borne him three children, although only one, Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia, had survived past his childhood.
Menshikov introduced him to Marta Helena Skowrońska, a Polish-Lithuanian peasant, and took her as a mistress some time between 1702 and 1704. Marta converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and was given the name Catherine. Though no record exists, Catherine and Peter married secretly between 23 Oct and 1 December 1707 in St. Petersburg. Peter valued Catherine and married officially, at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 19 February 1712.
His eldest child and heir, Alexei, was suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the Emperor. Alexei was tried and confessed under torture during questioning conducted by a secular court (count Tolstoy). He was convicted and sentenced to be executed. The sentence could only be carried out with Peter's signed authorization, and Alexei died in prison, as Peter hesitated before making the decision. Alexei's death most likely resulted from injuries suffered during his torture. Alexei's mother Eudoxia was punished. She was dragged from her home, tried on false charges of adultery, publicly flogged, and confined in monasteries while being forbidden to be talked to.
In 1724, Peter had his second wife, Catherine, crowned as Empress, although he remained Russia's actual ruler.
Issue
By his two wives, he had fifteen children: three by Eudoxia and twelve by Catherine. These included four sons named Pavel and three sons named Peter, all of whom died in infancy. Only three of his children survived to adulthood. He also had three grandchildren: Tsar Peter II and Grand Duchess Natalia by Alexei and Tsar Peter III by Anna.
Mistresses and illegitimate children
Princess Maria Dmitrievna Cantemirovna of Moldavia (1700–1754), daughter of Dimitrie Cantemir
Unnamed son (1722 - 1723?) – different sources say that the baby was stillborn or died before he was one year old.
Lady Mary Hamilton, Catherine I's lady in waiting of Scottish descent.
Miscarriage (1715)
Unnamed child (1717 - 1718?)
Legacy
Peter's legacy has always been a major concern of Russian intellectuals. Riasanovsky points to a "paradoxical dichotomy" in the black and white images such as God/Antichrist, educator/ignoramus, architect of Russia's greatness/destroyer of national culture, father of his country/scourge of the common man. Voltaire's 1759 biography gave 18th-century Russians a man of the Enlightenment, while Alexander Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman" poem of 1833 gave a powerful romantic image of a creator-god. Slavophiles in mid-19th century deplored Peter's westernization of Russia.
Western writers and political analysts recounted "The Testimony" or secret will of Peter the Great. It supposedly revealed his grand evil plot for Russia to control the world via conquest of Constantinople, Afghanistan and India. It was a forgery made in Paris at Napoleon's command when he started his invasion of Russia in 1812. Nevertheless, it is still quoted in foreign policy circles.
The Communists executed the last Romanovs, and their historians such as Mikhail Pokrovsky presented strongly negative views of the entire dynasty. Stalin however admired how Peter strengthened the state, and wartime, diplomacy, industry, higher education, and government administration. Stalin wrote in 1928, "when Peter the Great, who had to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly built works in factories for supplying the army and strengthening the country's defenses, this was an original attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness." As a result, Soviet historiography emphasizes both the positive achievement and the negative factor of oppressing the common people.
After the fall of Communism in 1991, scholars and the general public in Russia and the West gave fresh attention to Peter and his role in Russian history. His reign is now seen as the decisive formative event in the Russian imperial past. Many new ideas have merged, such as whether he strengthened the autocratic state or whether the tsarist regime was not statist enough given its small bureaucracy. Modernization models have become contested ground.
He initiated a wide range of economic, social, political, administrative, educational and military reforms which ended the dominance of traditionalism and religion in Russia and initiated its westernization. His efforts included secularization of education, organization of administration for effective governance, enhanced use of technology, establishing an industrial economy, modernization of the army and establishment of a strong navy.
Historian Y. Vodarsky said in 1993 that Peter, "did not lead the country on the path of accelerated economic, political and social development, did not force it to 'achieve a leap' through several stages.... On the contrary, these actions to the greatest degree put a brake on Russia's progress and created conditions for holding it back for one and a half centuries!" The autocratic powers that Stalin admired appeared as a liability to Evgeny Anisimov, who complained that Peter was, "the creator of the administrative command system and the true ancestor of Stalin."
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, "He did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the Western countries, but he achieved considerable progress in development of the national economy and trade, education, science and culture, and foreign policy. Russia became a great power, without whose concurrence no important European problem could thenceforth be settled. His internal reforms achieved progress to an extent that no earlier innovator could have envisaged."
While the cultural turn in historiography has downplayed diplomatic, economic and constitutional issues, new cultural roles have been found for Peter, for example in architecture and dress. James Cracraft argues:
The Petrine revolution in Russia—subsuming in this phrase the many military, naval, governmental, educational, architectural, linguistic, and other internal reforms enacted by Peter's regime to promote Russia's rise as a major European power—was essentially a cultural revolution, one that profoundly impacted both the basic constitution of the Russian Empire and, perforce, its subsequent development.
In popular culture
Peter has been featured in many histories, novels, plays, films, monuments and paintings. They include the poems The Bronze Horseman, Poltava and the unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great, all by Alexander Pushkin. The former dealt with The Bronze Horseman, an equestrian statue raised in Peter's honour. Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote a biographical historical novel about him, named Peter I, in the 1930s.
The 1922 German silent film Peter the Great directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki and starring Emil Jannings as Peter
In 1929 A.N. Tolstoy's play was true to the party line, depicting Peter as a tyrant who "suppressed everyone and everything as if he had been possessed by demons, sowed fear, and put both his son and his country on the rack."
The 1937–1938 Soviet film Peter the Great
The 1976 film How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor, starring Aleksey Petrenko as Peter, and Vladimir Vysotsky as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, shows Peter's attempt to build the Baltic Fleet.
Peter was played by Jan Niklas and Maximilian Schell in the 1986 NBC miniseries Peter the Great.
The 2007 film The Sovereign's Servant depicts the unsavoury brutal side of Peter during the campaign.
A character based on Peter plays a major role in The Age of Unreason, a series of four alternate history novels written by American science fiction and fantasy author Gregory Keyes.
Peter is one of many supporting characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle – mainly featuring in the third novel, The System of the World.
Peter was portrayed on BBC Radio 4 by Isaac Rouse as a boy, Will Howard as a young adult and Elliot Cowan as an adult in the radio plays Peter the Great: The Gamblers and Peter the Great: The Queen of Spades, written by Mike Walker and which were the last two plays in the first series of Tsar. The plays were broadcast on 25 September and 2 October 2016.
A verse in the "Engineers' Drinking Song" references Peter the Great:
There was a man named Peter the Great who was a Russian Tzar;
When remodeling his the castle put the throne behind the bar;
He lined the walls with vodka, rum, and 40 kinds of beers;
And advanced the Russian culture by 120 years!
Peter was played by Jason Isaacs in the 2020 'antihistory' Hulu series The Great.
Peter is featured as the leader of the Russian civilization in the computer game Sid Meier's Civilization VI.
Peter was played by Ivan Kolesnikov in the 2022 Russian historical documentary film Peter I: The Last Tsar and the First Emperor.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of nineteen (twenty were originally constructed) intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science. Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.
The dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1:12) scale. She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. The dioramas show tawdry and, in many cases, disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." Students were instructed to study the scenes methodically—Glessner Lee suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
WESTLAKE - It took nearly 150 Los Angeles Firefighters nearly two and a half hours to extinguish a major emergency fire in a vacant 2 story office building west of downtown Los Angeles Monday evening.
The Los Angeles Fire Department was summoned at 7:01 PM on June 13, 2016 to a structure fire at 2411 West 8th Street in the Westlake neighborhood not far from MacArthur Park. LAFD responders arrived quickly to find intense fire on the upper floor of a long vacant 14,351 square-foot two story office building, the site of previous blazes.
Firefighters used ground ladders to assist several imperiled persons at windows of the burning structure, with LAFD responders entering the building to performing the rescue of three others.
While extending hoselines to aggressively battle the flames within, LAFD crews sadly discovered and retrieved a dead man from the inferno, before the failing structure forced then to switch to defensive exterior operations twenty minutes into the firefight.
A total of 147 LAFD personnel under the command of Battalion Chief Jaime Moore, confined the blaze to the heavily damaged building of fire origin - which had no functional fire sprinklers, extinguishing the bulk of flame in just 2 hours and 22 minutes.
As a result of witnesses statements, Los Angeles Police Department Officers later detained and arrested an adult male suspected of starting the fire. He and one of the persons earlier rescued by firefighters, were taken to an area hospital by ambulance for evaluation of non-life threatening injuries.
With the flames extinguished well past darkness, firefighters remained at the structurally unsound premises to douse hotspots, prevent public harm and prepare for a further search at daybreak.
Early Tuesday, investigation teams from the LAFD Arson/Counter-Terrorism Section methodically processed the large and still-smoldering site to determine the fire's cause and origin, as highly-trained Human Remains Detection Dog and Handler teams performed a relentless search of the collapsed structure for deceased victims.
With the canines' help, firefighters discovered the remains of four adult victims, two men and two women, amid the rubble on the second floor of the building. Their discovery, combined with the male victim found deceased by firefighters battling the blaze, brought the death tally to five, all of whom appeared to be transients.
No firefighters sustained injury in the firefight, investigation or recovery operations.
A positive identification of the dead persons, to include the cause, time and manner of their death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner.
Photo Use Permitted via Creative Commons - Credit: LAFD Photo | Christopher Wan
LAFD Incident: 061316-1267
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eid stood in the hard Kazakh light at Baikonur with the kind of calm that doesn’t announce itself. No performance to it. Just presence. The suit techs moved with practiced rhythm around him, hands checking seals, cables, pressure. The Soyuz waited out on the steppe, white and improbable, pointed at a sky that has seen a thousand departures. TMA-13M would carry him into a long arc of work and isolation, but in that moment it felt simple. A man, a machine, a trajectory already written in physics.
Reid Wiseman came to this through a path that favors discipline over spectacle. He grew up in Maryland, studied systems engineering, then flew with the U.S. Navy as a test pilot, the kind of work where curiosity is paired with restraint. In 2009, NASA selected him as part of a new class of astronauts, and he moved into the long apprenticeship that spaceflight still demands. Years of training in simulators, in water tanks, in classrooms that try to compress the complexity of orbit into something the body can remember.
Expedition 40 and 41 were his first real test. Once on the International Space Station, the days stretch and compress at the same time. Sixteen sunrises. Maintenance that never quite ends. Moments of stillness where Earth rolls beneath you in silence. Reid worked methodically. Spacewalks with Barry Wilmore, hands in bulky gloves, working outside the station where every movement is deliberate. Inside, he became known for something else too. He noticed things. He photographed the thin blue line of atmosphere, the geometry of cities at night, the soft gradients of storms. He wrote in short bursts that felt immediate and unfiltered. A human voice in a place that can easily become abstract.
Back on Earth, he moved into leadership, eventually serving as Chief of the Astronaut Office. That role is less visible but no less critical. It means shaping how crews train, how missions are approached, how risk is understood and carried forward. It means translating between engineers, flight directors, and the people who will actually ride the rocket. Reid did that with a kind of steadiness that people trust.
Now the work points outward again. Artemis II. The first crewed mission in this new chapter of lunar exploration. Reid will command the flight, leading a crew that will leave low Earth orbit, loop around the Moon, and come home. It is a mission that sits between eras. Not quite Apollo, not yet the sustained presence that Artemis promises, but a bridge that has to hold. The systems are new. The distances are old and unforgiving. There is no margin for theater.
When I photographed him at Baikonur, there was already a sense of that future in him, even if none of us named it yet. The same composure. The same attention to detail. You get the feeling that he understands the weight of what comes next, but doesn’t carry it as burden. More like alignment. The work in front of him, the people beside him, the trajectory ahead.
Spaceflight has a way of turning individuals into symbols, but standing there with Reid, it felt more grounded than that. He is not trying to be the face of anything. He is trying to do the job well, with clarity, with care for the crew, and with respect for the thin line between success and failure that every launch rides.
Artemis will push humans farther from Earth than anyone has gone in half a century. Reid will be at the front of that return. Not as a figure of myth, but as a pilot, a commander, a person who has spent years preparing to sit atop a rocket and trust both the machine and the team behind it.
I made this portrait as part of my New Heroes project, which is about spending time with the people shaping our future and trying to see them clearly, as they are.
American Flag on top and below a Donate Life Flag, that also says Donation Saves Lives. In the background is the Charles Neville Building portion of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. I've been there many times. I took this through my hospital room window on a rainy day. I was in the hospital for 8 days and I am in the process of writing up a little true story about it.
FALL OCCURRED IN THE SPRING
That’s right; fall occurred in the spring. Not the kind of fall like a beautiful autumn, but the kind of fall like Humpty Dumpty. The “splat” type of fall, which must have been painful for him. It was surely painful for me.
Let me digress a bit. I already have severe arthritis in both of my knees. I was very close to having the Orthopedic Physician’s Assistant refer me to the Orthopedist for knee replacements. The assistant had already seen me for seven to nine visits or so, and a series of Orthovisk® shots, which did not help me. I understand they are a great help to some people, but I wasn‘t one of them. He told me something I was completely unaware of. He said my teeth were bad, which is true. I have upper dentures and only one real tooth in my mouth. The bottom teeth except the one I just mentioned are all rotted away. They didn’t rot completely away; there are still parts of them in and below the gum line. He said they would all have to be surgically extracted before I could have knee replacements done. I asked him, “What do my teeth have to do with my knees?” He said infection can easily set in the rotten teeth and go to the knee or cause problems with my heart, major problems like death. Thus the reader can understand how I arrived at the title for my photo set about my hospital stay…The Knee Bone’s Connected to the Jaw Bone, Huh?
I have been walking around with very painful knees for quite awhile now, and I cannot afford the $1,600 to $2,000 to have my teeth surgically extracted. I already paid a dentist $180 for an appointment and a Panaray® X-Ray, over a year ago, just thinking it would be nice to finally get some lower dentures too. He split town, taking or disposing of his equipment and his files and x-rays. That $180 is long gone for me. I cannot recover the old x-ray. Even if I did recover it, some new dentist would probably say it was out of date.
Medicare, which I am on, will pay for the two knee replacements, but here is the rub. They will not pay for dental. I have been in a surgical limbo with all the free pain I can stand.
That is the background information probably needed for this little story to be understood. There will be some OMG moments and some laughter. If it were a TV show, they would probably advertise, “You’ll Laugh; You’ll Cry; You’ll Sell Your Chickens; You’ll Call Your Congressman, and You’ll No Doubt Charge Your Cell Phone!”
That brings us to Thursday the 15th of March, 2012. My daughter called to see if I could and would watch Rose all day Friday the 16th , as she had forgotten that she had signed up to be chaperone for her daughter, Anna Leigh’s, school field trip. It was going to be quite a bit out of town, the other direction from where I live. It was to be a special day. I wanted to be their hero; so I said sure. Some of you have seen Rose, the Hungarian Vizsla puppy among my photos. Rose is beautiful and young, and strong, and undisciplined and should probably be named Wild Rose. I love her, but she is a major handful. I had already watched her for 8 days while they went on a trip out of state, got one day off and then volunteered to do Friday the 16th.
Rose isn’t housebroken yet; so I took her out several times to encourage her to go outside. I was alone as far as other humans, and my daughter and granddaughter were about 60 miles away, on a school bus and then museum field trip. I live about 60 miles the other way from their home. It had been raining off and on and the ground and grass and driveway and mud were all pretty wet. My other trips outside with Rose that morning had been fine. I only had a thin shirt on, no extra shirt or jacket. I did not think I would be out in the yard very long.
Rose pulled on the leash too exuberantly, as she does often (she is five and a half months old, and has had puppy obedience training, but is in dire need of more of it). I slipped on a muddy and grassy slope. My right leg went out in front of me, and I fell on my rear end. My left leg folded underneath my thigh and toward my rear, and my weight, which is a lot, crunched it. It was bent backward way further than a knee is supposed to bend. I screamed bloody murder. I was afraid to even try to get up, as I thought I had probably torn a ligament or two.
Rose thought it was play time and was all over me. There was not a thing in sight that would give me any leverage to hold me up or to help me get up. I sat and I pondered what to do. My daughter and Anna Leigh would not be home for nearly 6 more hours. I thought, well I’ll just call 911 (the emergency number where we live). Wrong! No cell phone with me. It was inside their house, being charged up; ironically so it would be ready when I needed it.
I tried yelling for help. Nothing! A neighbor about a half an acre away, was mowing, and every time the mower cut off, I tried screaming for help. He must have had headphones on or something. Cars would drive by way down the driveway, and I would yell, but no one had their windows down on that day. Did you now that when you have upper dentures and no lower ones, and you yell really hard, that it blows the upper dentures right out of your mouth? Just thought I would throw that little trivia in. I didn’t know until that day. I knew I couldn’t make it back in the house. There were too many upward slopes and an exposed aggregate patio and a few stairs. The front of the house was even worse, as it had more stairs. I looked down the driveway and saw a vehicle which had some metal protrusions, on the order of spare tire holder or something like that. I decided to try to scoot on my rear down to that metal thing. I thought perhaps it would give me leverage to get up. Rose thought that it was great fun to romp on and around me.
I thought the four chickens would be afraid to come around Rose. No, they are not very intelligent. They came right up to me and Rose and started pecking on me. I had never been pecked on my chickens before, and there I was on the ground with no help and Rose alternating between tried to attack the chickens and trying to play with me. Rose’s playfulness sort of resembles an attack, anyway. I scooted faster, much faster.
There was a light rain, but it was getting a little heavier. There was also a dusting of snow mixed with the rain. I was wondering how long it would take to get Exposure. I was wondering about Shock also. Can a person who has Exposure or Shock know that they have it? Ominous looking clouds were blowing quickly toward me. It was 1:30 P. M. when I fell. I didn’t have my phone, but I had my watch.
I scooted methodically toward the vehicle closest to me. I think it was about 100 feet. I got to it, and thought if worse came to worse with the weather, I could roll under the back of it. I did not relish thought of spiders, but thought it might be better to risk them than the weather. I saw some wide strapping tape on the spare tire, which was loose. I didn’t want to risk hoisting myself up on the spare and its frame, as it was quite loose. But I took the tape and wrapped it around the metal thing that was separate from the spare tire things, and made it softer for my arm to lean on. I tried to prop myself up. No use; I fell back down. Not enough leverage. I put Rose’s leash handle on the trailer hitch. I didn’t want to just let her run free and maybe get hit by a car.
I tried again to get up and made it to both knees. It hurt so badly I went back down again. I noticed the license plate on the vehicle renewed on the ninth month of 2011. That said 911. I thought, “Oh yeah right, you inanimate license plate. Go ahead and taunt me! You know I can’t call 911.” I got a chuckle out of my own joke, and gave myself a figurative pat on the back for being resourceful about trying to get up.
I tried again. I got on both knees but the right one was in gravel that really hurt. Then I thought which knee should I put forward and which one should I try to rise on. I tried one, and it didn’t seem as if it would work so I tried the other way. That wasn’t the right way either. Finally I tried the first way again. I told myself on the count of three I would stand up, even if it hurt excruciatingly, I would scream but I would still get up. False start! Down again! I tried again and got up. I was standing!
Now was the problem of how to go anywhere, not knowing if my left knee would buckle at any time. I thought I had to try. I spotted my own truck further down the driveway, and decided to try to make it to it. I walked between two vehicles very carefully and slowly and got to my truck. I unlocked it with the remote key which I had in my pocket. After 11 years of driving it, the seat is pretty well conformed to me; so I didn’t have to bend my knees to sit down in it. I just leaned into the seat and put my relatively good right leg in. It was painful to bend my left knee to get it in the truck, but I did. Rose was still tied to a trailer hitch further back in the yard, but she was safe.
I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 P. M. It took me two hours to stand up and to get to some degree of safety and warmth. I could drive, as my truck is automatic. I drove down the road to a house that Anna had pointed out was where a schoolmate lived. I thought I could ask them to go in my daughter’s house and get my cell phone for me. There was a very large barking dog in the driveway, and no sign of humans, and the mother of the schoolmate has never even met me. I decided to go back to Jennifer’s home.
I found a cane in my truck that a charity, a different one than the one later in my story, had given me a few months ago. It is not a very sturdy one, but better than nothing. I did not use it on a regular basis. I used the hook end of it to fetch a large stick lying near the driveway (larger than a normal hiking stick). I pulled it to me, and stood back up out of the truck and used the big stick and the cane and balanced against two vehicles, and decided to try to get back in the house. I did. I got in the recliner and pulled a blanket up over me and slept until they got home.
After they got home, we all decided to go to the nearest Emergency room. It was a Friday night by then, and no normal doctor’s hours. We went to one closest to them, but it was still about 27 miles or so. They checked me out and did an x-ray. I told the Physician’s assistant nurse type lady about my knee history. She was fun and nice and caring and a little bit of a comedienne. She said that my left knee was really “ratty” looking on the x-ray. I laughed, because I’m sure it was. I have just never, in all my doctor visits ever had a nurse refer to one of my body parts as “ratty”. I suspect it is not a medical term. They said I sprained my knee, and gave me some medical records to take up to the emergency room (or my doctor) closer to where I live, seventeen miles from my home, the other direction from Jen & Anna. I wanted to be closer to the doctors and hospital that I know. I was given a prescription similar to Vicodin. Someone kindly pointed out that Walgreen’s was visible about a block away and their drive-thru was open. At that point I was still getting around by hobbling and by leaning on Jennifer. So I sat in a chair and she and Anna and Rose drove over to Walgreen’s . It seems as if it took a long time for them get the prescription filled.
While I was sitting there waiting, a employee came out to the lobby with clipboard in hand and asked if I were the lady with an injured knee. I replied that I was. She said, OK, come with me and we’ll have you see a triage. I thought it odd that I had already been seen and now they wanted to start all over again. I told her I had already been seen and x-rayed and all. It turned out there was another lady in the waiting room with an injured knee. It probably would have blown the Physician’s Assistant’s mind if I had played dumb and gone through everything again, and then told her when she looked shocked, “I’m coming through again; and this time don’t call my knee “ratty! Funny to imagine, but not a good idea.
Finally, my daughter and granddaughter returned to the hospital waiting room. Jennifer had forgotten her checkbook. So back they went and then it turned out, Jennifer couldn’t sign for my prescription, and she didn‘t have my insurance information. Thus, we all drove back over there. I was in line ahead of Jen‘s car. I told the pharmacist that my window did not go down well on the driver’s side, and I could not reach the pills in the drawer. So I would give him paperwork and cards he needed, but to please leave the pills themselves in the slide-out drawer. I said my daughter was right behind me and her window worked; and she would pick them up with my permission. Finally she got the pain pills in the drawer, but when we got out of Walgreen’s I flagged her down to stop and be sure to give me the pills to have with me before we forgot. Jennifer got them and handed them over to me. We laughed about how, at that time of night, it looked for the entire world like some sort of illegal drug deal.
We tried to go out for dinner, and the restaurant we chose put the closed sign in their front window as we were approaching. That always makes one feel so welcome, not!
Saturday, I rested, and then Sunday they took me to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. I had called my normal doctor, and he was out of the country (probably on some Doctors without Borders type thing). He does many good will type things. The doctor filling in for him; said to go to the Emergency Room. So I did, and they did an MRI, and I had torn the meniscus in my left knee. I ended up in the hospital for 8 days. No surgery was done to repair anything, because of the dental situation. But I got a walker, and some really nice nurses and physical therapy. I saw all kinds of doctors, and Home Health care people, and Senior and Disabled specialists. They must have taken my blood pressure 100 times, it seems. They always seem surprised that it is very good.
Anna Leigh, who is seven years old, threw a coin in the Hospital Fountain and made good wishes for me. She is such a sweetie. My daughter helped to clean up my place so when I went home the walker would fit through the rooms. I don’t know what I do without them. The first few days out of the hospital, I taught Anna how to play Monopoly, and she and Jennifer and I also did puzzles. There were some quality family moments. I one point I was eating a chip or cracker of some kind and trying to place a puzzle piece. I got absentminded and stuck the puzzle piece in my mouth. I realized what I had done because the food tasted like cardboard. I took it out of my mouth. Anna about went into hysterics over it. I was laughing too.
Anna’s Daddy called Jen about that time, and wanted to know what the laughter was all about. Anna wrote a note to show her Mom so her Mom could tell her Dad what happened. She spelled it phonetically, as she is only in first grade. I think she does really well, but Jen and I cracked up over how much Anna was laughing and over what she wrote. She wrote, “My grandmuther ate a pussel pees.” It looked substantially nastier than it was.
At first a physical therapist helped me with the walker and with some small steps. After a few days, I could roam around the hallways on my own with the walker. At that point I took my camera. As I was practicing with my walker I took a number of pictures. I tried very hard to only shoot artsy type things and nothing about any patients or doctors that would invade their privacy. I had a bulletin board in my room just about me. I wrote “Exemplary Patient Award” on the comments. I wanted to see if it would make the nurses laugh. I thought it was funny to give myself an award. I enjoy making people laugh. I was curious if they would erase it, but it was still there when I was discharged.
I graduated from the walker to a cane yesterday. A home health therapist came to see how I was doing, and brought me a very artsy cane. I like it. It suits me, and it is brand new. There is a charity in my area called Love, Inc. I don’t know if it is just local or nationwide. Anyway, they gave him the cane to bring to me. Really super! Of course, I need to take a photo of it, and add it to this set. I’ll probably do that in the daylight.
I am still in surgical limbo, but a charity is going to come out and install grab bars on my shower, and another charity will build up my recliner (which I sleep in) with a platform so it will be easier to get in and out of. It is suggested that I donate enough to cover the cost of the supplies but not the labor. I will probably make a donation, but I haven’t decided how much yet. I’m going to call my Congressman to see if something can be done about covering some dental procedures. Probably not, but I feel I have to try. Not just for me, but for a multitude of people.
I’ll close with a quote, although I don’t know who said it, “Be True to your Teeth and they will Never be False to You.” and “That is the Tooth, the whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth.”
The cardboard boxes in this photograph are meticulously rendered trompe-l'oeil replicas created through a methodical process of printing, sculpting, and painting. Primarily from the 1960's and 1970's, this work from Steve Wolfe's personal collection not only shaped his own artistic sensibilities but also those of a generation. By carefully refabricating these influences, Wolfe created an intimate self-portrait that points to histories of shared cultural experience as sell as a rapidly changing world where commonplace objects soon become artifacts of a bygone era.
Viewed and photographed on display at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.
Gandhara is the name given to an ancient region or province invaded in 326 B.C. by Alexander the Great, who took Charsadda (ancient Puskalavati) near present-day Peshawar (ancient Purusapura) and then marched eastward across the Indus into the Punjab as far as the Beas river (ancient Vipasa). Gandhara constituted the undulating plains, irrigated by the Kabul River from the Khyber Pass area, the contemporary boundary between Pakistan and Afganistan, down to the Indus River and southward towards the Murree hills and Taxila (ancient Taksasila), near Pakistan"s present capital, Islamabad. Its art, however, during the first centuries of the Christian era, had adopted a substantially larger area, together with the upper stretches of the Kabul River, the valley of Kabul itself, and ancient Kapisa, as well as Swat and Buner towards the north.
A great deal of Gandhara sculptures has survived dating from the first to probably as late as the sixth or even the seventh century but in a remarkably homogeneous style. Most of the arts were almost always in a blue-gray mica schist, though sometimes in a green phyllite or in stucco, or very rarely in terracotta. Because of the appeal of its Western classical aesthetic for the British rulers of India, schooled to admire all things Greek and Roman, a great deal found its way into private hands or the shelter of museums.
Gandhara sculpture primarily comprised Buddhist monastic establishments. These monasteries provided a never-ending gallery for sculptured reliefs of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas. The Gandhara stupas were comparatively magnified and more intricate, but the most remarkable feature, which distinguished the Gandhara stupas from the pervious styles were hugely tiered umbrellas at its peak, almost soaring over the total structure. The abundance of Gandharan sculpture was an art, which originated with foreign artisans.
In the excavation among the varied miscellany of small bronze figures, though not often like Alexandrian imports, four or five Buddhist bronzes are very late in date. These further illustrate the aura of the Gandhara art. Relics of mural paintings though have been discovered, yet the only substantial body of painting, in Bamiyan, is moderately late, and much of it belongs to an Iranian or central Asian rather than an Indian context. Non-narrative themes and architectural ornament were omnipresent at that time. Mythical figures and animals such as atlantes, tritons, dragons, and sea serpents derive from the same source, although there is the occasional high-backed, stylized creature associated with the Central Asian animal style. Moldings and cornices are decorated mostly with acanthus, laurel, and vine, though sometimes with motifs of Indian, and occasionally ultimately western Asian, origin: stepped merlons, lion heads, vedikas, and lotus petals. It is worth noting that architectural elements such as pillars, gable ends, and domes as represented in the reliefs tend to follow the Indian forms
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Gandhara became roughly a Holy Land of Buddhism and excluding a handful of Hindu images, sculpture took the form either of Buddhist sect objects, Buddha and Bodhisattvas, or of architectural embellishment for Buddhist monasteries. The more metaphorical kinds are demonstrated by small votive stupas, and bases teeming with stucco images and figurines that have lasted at Jaulian and Mora Moradu, outpost monasteries in the hills around Taxila. Hadda, near the present town of Jalalabad, has created some groups in stucco of an almost rococo while more latest works of art in baked clay, with strong Hellenistic influence, have been revealed there, in what sums up as tiny chapels. It is not known exactly why stucco, an imported Alexandrian modus operandi, was used. It is true that grey schist is not found near Taxila, however other stones are available, and in opposition to the ease of operating with stucco, predominantly the artistic effects which can be achieved, must be set with its impermanence- fresh deposits frequently had to be applied. Excluding possibly at Taxila, its use emerges to have been a late expansion.
Architectural fundamentals of the Gandhara art, like pillars, gable ends and domes as showcased in the reliefs, were inclined to follow Indian outlines, but the pilaster with capital of Corinthian type, abounds and in one-palace scene Persepolitan columns go along with Roman coffered ceilings. The so-called Shrine of the Double-Headed Eagle at Sirkap, in actuality a stupa pedestal, well demonstrates this enlightening eclecticism- the double-headed bird on top of the chaitya arch is an insignia of Scythian origin, which appears as a Byzantine motif and materialises much later in South India as the ga1J.qa-bheru1J.qa in addition to atop European armorial bearings.
In Gandhara art the descriptive friezes were all but invariably Buddhist, and hence Indian in substance- one depicted a horse on wheels nearing a doorway, which might have represented the Trojan horse affair, but this is under scan. The Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, familiar from the previous Greek-based coinage of the region, appeared once or twice as standing figurines, presumably because as a pair, they tallied an Indian mithuna couple. There were also female statuettes, corresponding to city goddesses. Though figures from Butkara, near Saidan Sharif in Swat, were noticeably more Indian in physical type, and Indian motifs were in abundance there. Sculpture was, in the main, Hellenistic or Roman, and the art of Gandhara was indeed "the easternmost appearance of the art of the Roman Empire, especially in its late and provincial manifestations". Furthermore, naturalistic portrait heads, one of the high-points of Roman sculpture, were all but missing in Gandhara, in spite of the episodic separated head, probably that of a donor, with a discernible feeling of uniqueness. Some constitutions and poses matched those from western Asia and the Roman world; like the manner in which a figure in a recurrently instanced scene from the Dipankara jataka had prostrated himself before the future Buddha, is reverberated in the pose of the defeated before the defeater on a Trojanic frieze on the Arch of Constantine and in later illustrations of the admiration of the divinised emperor. One singular recurrently occurring muscular male figure, hand on sword, witnessed in three-quarters view from the backside, has been adopted from western classical sculpture. On occasions standing figures, even the Buddha, deceived the elusive stylistic actions of the Roman sculptor, seeking to express majestas. The drapery was fundamentally Western- the folds and volume of dangling garments were carved with realness and gusto- but it was mainly the persistent endeavours at illusionism, though frequently obscured by unrefined carving, which earmarked the Gandhara sculpture as based on a western classical visual impact.
The distinguishing Gandhara sculpture, of which hundreds if not thousands of instances have outlived, is the standing or seated Buddha. This flawlessly reproduces the necessary nature of Gandhara art, in which a religious and an artistic constituent, drawn from widely varied cultures have been bonded. The iconography is purely Indian. The seated Buddha is mostly cross-legged in the established Indian manner. However, forthcoming generations, habituated to think of the Buddha as a monk, and unable to picture him ever possessing long hair or donning a turban, came to deduce the chigon as a "cranial protuberance", singular to Buddha. But Buddha is never depicted with a shaved head, as are the Sangha, the monks; his short hair is clothed either in waves or in taut curls over his whole head. The extended ears are merely due to the downward thrust of the heavy ear-rings worn by a prince or magnate; the distortion of the ear-lobes is especially visible in Buddha, who, in Gandhara, never wore ear-rings or ornaments of any kind. As Foucher puts it, the Gandhara Buddha is at a time a monk without shaving and a prince stripped off jewellery.
The western classical factor rests in the style, in the handling of the robe, and in the physiognomy of Buddha. The cloak, which covers all but the appendages (though the right shoulder is often bared), is dealt like in Greek and Roman sculptures; the heavy folds are given a plastic flair of their own, and only in poorer or later works do they deteriorate into indented lines, fairly a return to standard Indian practice. The "western" treatment has caused Buddha"s garment to be misidentified for a toga; but a toga is semicircular, while, Buddha wore a basic, rectangular piece of cloth, i.e., the samghiifi, a monk"s upper garment. The head gradually swerves towards a hieratic stylisation, but at its best, it is naturalistic and almost positively based on the Greek Apollo, undoubtedly in Hellenistic or Roman copies.
Gandhara art also had developed at least two species of image, i.e. not part of the frieze, in which Buddha is the fundamental figure of an event in his life, distinguished by accompanying figures and a detailed mise-en-scene. Perhaps the most remarkable amongst these is the Visit to the Indrasala Cave, of which the supreme example is dated in the year 89, almost unquestionably of the Kanishka period. Indra and his harpist are depicted on their visit in it. The small statuettes of the visitors emerge below, an elephant describing Indra. The more general among these detailed images, of which approximately 30 instances are known, is presumably related with the Great Miracle of Sravasti. In one such example, one of the adjoining Bodhisattvas is distinguished as Avalokiteshwara by the tiny seated Buddha in his headgear. Other features of these images include the unreal species of tree above Buddha, the spiky lotus upon which he sits, and the effortlessly identifiable figurines of Indra and Brahma on both sides.
Another important aspect of the Gandhara art was the coins of the Graeco-Bactrians. The coins of the Graeco-Bactrians - on the Greek metrological standard, equals the finest Attic examples and of the Indo-Greek kings, which have until lately served as the only instances of Greek art found in the subcontinent. The legendary silver double decadrachmas of Amyntas, possibly a remembrance issue, are the biggest "Greek" coins ever minted, the largest cast in gold, is the exceptional decadrachma of the same king in the Bibliotheque Nationale, with the Dioscuri on the inverse. Otherwise, there was scanty evidence until recently of Greek or Hellenistic influences in Gandhara. A manifestation of Greek metropolitan planning is furnished by the rectilinear layouts of two cities of the 1st centuries B.C./A.D.--Sirkap at Taxila and Shaikhan Pheri at Charsadda. Remains of the temple at Jandial, also at Taxila and presumably dating back to 1st century B.C., also includes Greek characteristics- remarkably the huge base mouldings and the Ionic capitals of the colossal portico and antechamber columns. In contrast, the columns or pilasters on the immeasurable Gandhara friezes (when they are not in a Indian style), are consistently coronated by Indo-Corinthian capitals, the local version of the Corinthian capital- a certain sign of a comparatively later date.
The notable Begram hoard confirms articulately to the number and multiplicity of origin of the foreign artefacts imported into Gandhara. This further illustrates the foreign influence in the Gandhara art. Parallel hoards have been found in peninsular India, especially in Kolhapur in Maharashtra, but the imported wares are sternly from the Roman world. At Begram the ancient Kapisa, near Kabul, there are bronzes, possibly of Alexandrian manufacture, in close proximity with emblemata (plaster discs, certainly meant as moulds for local silversmiths), bearing reliefs in the purest classical vein, Chinese lacquers and Roman glass. The hoard was possibly sealed in mid-3rd century, when some of the subjects may have been approximately 200 years old "antiques", frequently themselves replicates of classical Greek objects. The plentiful ivories, consisting in the central of chest and throne facings, engraved in a number of varied relief techniques, were credibly developed somewhere between Mathura and coastal Andhra. Some are of unrivalled beauty. Even though a few secluded instances of early Indian ivory carving have outlived, including the legendary mirror handle from Pompeii, the Begram ivories are the only substantial collection known until moderately in present times of what must always have been a widespread craft. Other sites, particularly Taxila, have generated great many instances of such imports, some from India, some, like the appealing tiny bronze figure of Harpocrates, undoubtedly from Alexandria. Further cultural influences are authenticated by the Scytho Sarmatian jewellery, with its characteristic high-backed carnivores, and by a statue of St. Peter. But all this should not cloud the all-important truth that the immediately identifiable Gandhara style was the prevailing form of artistic manifestation throughout the expanse for several centuries, and the magnitude of its influence on the art of central Asia and China and as far as Japan, allows no doubt about its integrity and vitality.
In the Gandhara art early Buddhist iconography drew heavily on traditional sources, incorporating Hindu gods and goddesses into a Buddhist pantheon and adapting old folk tales to Buddhist religious purposes. Kubera and Harm are probably the best-known examples of this process.
Five dated idols from Gandhara art though exist, however the hitch remains that the era is never distinguished. The dates are in figures under 100 or else in 300s. Moreover one of the higher numbers are debatable, besides, the image upon which it is engraved is not in the conventional Andhra style. The two low-number-dated idols are the most sophisticated and the least injured. Their pattern is classical Gandhara. The most undemanding rendition of their dates relates them to Kanishka and 78 A.D. is assumed as the commencement of his era. They both fall in the second half of the 2nd century A.D. and equally later, if a later date is necessitated for the beginning of Kanishka`s time. This calculation nearly parallels numismatics and archaeological evidences. The application of other eras, like the Vikrama (base date- 58 B.C.) and the Saka (base date- 78 A.D.), would place them much later. The badly battered figurines portray standing Buddhas, without a head of its own, but both on original figured plinths. They come to view as depicting the classical Gandhara style; decision regarding where to place these two dated Buddhas, both standing, must remain knotty till more evidence comes out as to how late the classical Gandhara panache had continued.
Methodical study of the Gandhara art, and specifically about its origins and expansion, is befuddled with numerous problems, not at least of which is the inordinately complex history and culture of the province. It is one of the great ethnical crossroads of the world simultaneously being in the path of all the intrusions of India for over three millennia. Bussagli has rightly remarked, `More than any other Indian region, Gandhara was a participant in the political and cultural events that concerned the rest of the Asian continent`.
However, Systematic study of the art of Gandhara, and particularly of its origins and development, is bedeviled by many problems, not the least of which is the extraordinarily complex history and culture of the region.
In spite of the labours of many scholars over the past hundred and fifty years, the answers to some of the most important questions, such as the number of centuries spanned by the art of Gandhara, still await, fresh archaeological, inscriptional, or numismatic evidence.
(Al-Thukair's guests) From right to left: Maurice Richard, Cartier's sales assistant, Yusuf Kanoo, Jacques Cartier, host Mugbil Al-Thukair, and an unknown guest at Al Thukair's house in Manama, according to Jacques Cartier's travel diary, this luncheon occurred before Cartier and his assistants, accompanied by their host Al-Thukair and his trusted younger friend Kanoo, who acted as an interpreter, paid a courtesy visit to the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) on Muharraq Island, the country's capital at the time, on Thursday afternoon, the 16th of March 1912.
(In this luncheon, Cartier and his companions experienced traditional Arabian hospitality, typified by the customary dish of pot-roasted whole lamb known as ''Quzi'' stuffed with several well-cooked chickens, which in turn are stuffed with hard-boiled peeled eggs, blanched almonds, cashews, raisins, and black peppercorns, as the slow-roasted lamb marinated both inside and out with seasonings such as turmeric and cumin, served on top of a bed of saffron and cardamom rice infused with rose water and garnished with tender cooked dried chickpeas, golden raisins, blanched almonds and cashews, along with a variety of classic Bahraini dishes, including lamb and chicken stews, chickpea flour dumplings filled with lamb mince and dried prawns cooked in a savoury light tamarind sauce, and egg-battered flat round-shaped fried lean lamb Kofta seasoned with fine herbs and spices, among other mouthwatering delicacies)
The two long excerpts below are firsthand accounts of Jacques Cartier's visit to the Gulf in March of 1912 obtained from two separate letters written during his second extended Gulf exploratory pearl-purchasing trip, with Bahrain being the focal point taken from a series of declassified British archival personal letters written by the Anglo-Irish Dublin-born Oxford-educated multilingual, multidiscipline journalist, linguist, political analyst, writer, editor and translator, Emily Overend Lorimer (1881-1949) to her parents, Thomas George Overend and Hannah Kingsbury the letters describe the lives of Emily and her husband, David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer (1876-1962) (referred to by the pet name 'Lock' in the said letters) when the couple were living in Bahrain from October 1911 until November 1912 during her civil servant husband's tenure as a British Political Agent, there is also mention of Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952), the well-funded American missionary and religious scholar who arrived in Bahrain in December 1892 as a tireless young missionary imbued with evangelistic zeal, and almost immediately after arriving, he and his equally zealous small team of missionaries established a small clinic, dispensary, English school and Christian bookshop in a modest rented building by the sea in Manama, eventually leading to the opening of the first fully-fledged modern hospital in Bahrain, the American Mission Hospital, and the first English school in the country on the 26th of January 1903; both were built on two separate nearby plots of land purchased from the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) and pearl merchant Abdulaziz Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1876-1953) in Manama, the former commercial capital and the bustling current political and commercial capital within a decade of his arrival in the tiny archipelago British protectorate regardless of the ulterior missionary motives behind their creation these institutions have played significant roles in improving the lives of Bahrainis to the present in particular in the pre-oil era nevertheless, it is worth noting that neither the hospital nor the school was intended to be philanthropic enterprises from the outset and this has remained the case ever since; in any case the Lorimer mentioned above should not be confused with his elder brother, civil servant John Gordon Lorimer (1870-1914) the esteemed diplomat and historian who compiled the declassified seminal encyclopaedic work "The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia" as his younger brother, the noted linguist, was also a colonial officer since the Scottish Lorimer family was renowned for producing numerous high-calibre civil servants who primarily served as colonial military officers and administrators, a clear testament to the dedication of this family to the British imperial enterprise and colonial service however, readers of these letters should be cognisant of the casual racist undertones and sentiments of their author and those of the other Western individuals involved in the amusing, gossipy, nonchalant and witty anecdotes that Emily Lorimer recounts, whether tacitly or explicitly including Jacques Cartier, the young inquisitive self-assured French bourgeoisie jeweller with the keen anthropological eye the centrepiece of the excerpts; her reserved colonial officer husband David Lorimer, and Dr Samuel Zwemer, the Protestant theologian and missionary from the then-racially segregated United States of America who was closely collaborating with British colonial authorities in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf and Egypt on his so-called holy mission to proselytise the wayward Muslims by preaching the true gospel of Jesus Christ to them in every way possible, preferably through the printed word, ultimately leading to the abandonment of their errant notion of monotheism and the embracing of the doctrine of the Trinity, manifested in Jesus Christ, the son of God as their only saviour and redeemer and her parents the recipients of these detailed letters, a clear reflection of the prevalent attitudes in Europe and the West on the whole towards non-white peoples of the Orient, Africa and other parts of the world who were predominantly living under the yoke of European colonialism at the time when such attitudes were considered culturally normal and widely accepted among ordinary Westerners let alone among the colonial officer class, such as the Lorimers who intrinsically espoused European colonial ideology in its purest form, an ideology theorised and promoted by some of the most brilliant minds in modern Western thought, among them two of the greatest German philosophers Kant and Hegel, the French orientalist and Aryan racial theorist Renan, and the eminent French aristocratic imperialist politician and nationalist liberal thinker Tocqueville, who advocated for the cultural assimilation of the Algerian people through invasive and passive social engineering in a manner more brutal than typical of French colonialism, resulting in the death of well over a million Algerians from the start of the military invasion in 1830 throughout the subsequent long genocidal pacification of the sprawling spans of the Algerian terrain and until the turn of the twentieth century Algeria became legally part of France when it was officially annexed by the French National Assembly (Parliament) in 1848 with France thereafter seeing Algeria as a natural southern Mediterranean extension of itself, paving the way for over one and a half million French and European colonists to settle and cultivate the confiscated large swathes of Algeria's fertile arable plains alongside its long coastline until the end of the occupation; thereupon hundreds of thousands of settlers fled the country in droves in the aftermath of the hard-won independence of Algeria in 1962 after one hundred and thirty-two years of settler colonial occupation following an eight-year bloody guerrilla war of independence starting in 1954 after nine years of uneasy abeyance as a result of the Sétif and Guelma punitive massacres these began shortly after the announcement of the end of World War Two on the 8th of May 1945 when tens of thousands of Algerians took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations celebrating the end of the war and calling for independence from France in the cities of Sétif and Guelma as Algeria was one of the major battlefields of the North African allies' campaign and instead of allowing demonstrators to proceed peacefully they were mown down in a hail of bullets when French police and colonial forces opened fire indiscriminately killing thousands, together with savage reprisals meted out against native villages by French and European settlers in the Algerian countryside so by the end of the bloody crackdown between fifty and seventy thousand natives lost their lives according to independent sources creating an irreconcilable rift between the Algerian people and colonial France, it was evident to the French and other worn-out European colonial powers that their days as colonial powers were numbered in the post-World War Two new bipolar world order where the real victors of the war, the United States of America and the Soviet Union were keen on liquidating European obsolete classical colonialism for their own ambitions of world dominance however, the French ferocity in dealing with the demonstrations illustrates the sacrosanct uniqueness of French Algeria in the collective French consciousness by juxtaposing the insignificance of Algerian lives to the inviolable French whose entire existence as people was to be in service of their French masters, sending a clear message to all concerned parties internally and externally of France's unwillingness to give up Algeria at any cost as an indivisible part of the French nation, setting it apart from any other colony in the French Colonial Empire, expressing the French unwavering resolve after the humiliating four-year German occupation of France during the war, in addition to being a stark rebel deterrent for the infantilised wayward natives who should be content with the status quo realities of French colonial rule, these massacres were a preliminary exercise for future French transgressions in the Algerian War of Independence, in which the so-called civilised French committed untold atrocities including routinely bombing villages with chemical weapons, summary execution of combatants and civilians alike and the systematic application of torture as collective punishment for Algerians who resisted, whereby Algerian people were frequently portrayed patronisingly in official French documents as ungrateful, indolent, capricious, childlike and barbaric Muslims unwilling to adopt the civilising methods imparted to them by their highly civilised French colonisers, these degrading stereotypes, tropes and clichés were consistently invoked in French orientalist discourse alongside the prevailing European orientalist narratives of the time and were repeatedly echoed in both civilian and official reports throughout the colonial period despite contradictory accounts from the two opposing sides of the unequal armed struggle, Algerian death toll estimates of the conflict plausibly indicate more than one and a half million Algerians perished on the altar of freedom considering the French bloody track record since their first landing on Algerian shores in 1830 while the just Algerian armed independence struggle was officially branded as a terrorist insurrection against France by the French state and media but also by the vast majority of French people at the time whose prosperity had long relied on the extracted natural riches of their colonial Empire particularly after industrialisation in the mid-nineteenth century and on as with other European imperial powers, conspicuously Britain, the largest Empire in history and last but not least, the reactionary to a fault white supremacist French diplomat, writer, scholar, anthropologist and aristocratic royalist Gobineau whose writings on Aryan racial supremacy became an inspirational beacon for his contemporary American white supremacist counterparts, to mention a few, and also prominent nineteenth-century English polymaths, biologist Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and polymath philosopher Herbert Spencer as the trio utilised and co-opted the cutting-edge scientific revolution in natural biology, the Malthusian theory of population, attributed to influential English economist Thomas Malthus, and the groundbreaking evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, paired with the pseudo-science of scientific racism falsely informed via the prevalence of human comparative Craniometry measurements embraced and disseminated by several Western thinkers and scientists to various extents, giving rise to the development and circulation of the coined term "Social Darwinism" in Britain in the 1870s and soon spread throughout Europe and the rest of the Western world including the United States to rationalise the frantic unyielding concurrent European colonial rush and in many cases the enslavement and genocide of tens of millions of native populations in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia at the peak of European global colonial expansion, one of the best examples of this colonial rapacity is the "Opium Wars" when Britain finally succeeded in tipping the long-contentious issue of the trade imbalance with China in its favour through devious and unethical state-sponsored trafficking of industrially processed mass-produced Indian-grown opium to China via the stupendous opium factories and warehouses of the piracy-rooted origins of the far-reaching long colonial arm of the British East India Company, with dire repercussions for tens of millions of Chinese, resulting in two uneven wars in which the pre-industrial self-isolated and proud old China was humiliatingly routed by the modern technologically advanced industrial Britain in the first from 1839 to 1842 and later by the combined might of Europe's two major maritime powers, Britain and France, in the second from 1856 to 1860 leaving an indelible mark on the Chinese collective psyche to the present, concurrently, a malevolent uniquely British Ménage à Trois of Social Darwinism, Malthusian economics and free market dynamics was formulating in the minds of the British ruling class, gradually becoming part and parcel of their worldview, demonstrating the profound influence of these ideas on broad sectors of the public schooled Oxbridge-educated British ruling elite back then, where they were regarded as widely held axioms and what a better place to put these ideas into practice than the heavily populated British India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century during a series of famines that hit India claiming the lives of nearly thirty million people as a result of natural environmental and manmade causes, the latter are mostly attributed to the self-serving highly specialised cash crop agricultural policies of the British Raj government as these cash crops, namely sugarcane, cotton, rice, wheat, indigo and jute, were mainly intended for export to Britain and its global Empire, North America and the rest of the world, putting an end to thousands of years of indigenous agricultural diversity in India, to the detriment of ordinary Indians, especially amid one of the worst purposefully concealed famines in Indian history, the devastating Great Indian Famine between 1876 and 1878 coinciding with the start of the tenure of the ruthless Social Darwinian poet and diplomat Lord Lytton (1831-1891), who served as Viceroy (the Governor-General of India) from 1876 to 1880 and whose insensate handling of the famine could not be more revealing than in his unapologetic statements of complete disregard and dismissal of calls to alleviate the suffering of millions of starving Indians, exhibiting a glaringly shocking colonial sense of entitlement, is a quintessentially imperialist byproduct of Britain's fully developed industrial revolution's overwhelming free market capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, meaning that for Lytton any form of intervention would be an attempt to derail the natural order of things through the basic evolutionary mechanisms of natural selection by displaying irrational sympathies towards expendable, racially inferior, overbreeding peasants, of course from a Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic economic perspective, however in a sardonic twist of fate while millions of Indians were dying of starvation, Viceroy Lytton and British Raj state officials were up to their ears in overseeing the undertaking of the colossal "Delhi Durbar" (lit. "Court of Delhi") possibly one of the largest formal banqueting celebratory parties in recorded history where over sixty thousand Indian guests from the highest echelons of the British Raj society were served the best foods and beverages the British Empire had to offer in an extraordinary feat of refined catering beginning on the 1st of January 1877 and lasting for a whole week, this lavish pomp and circumstance celebration was organised to proclaim Queen Victoria as Empress of India and as a stunning tribute to British imperial power in India, the centrepiece of the British Empire, nearly twenty years after quashing the great Indian rebellion of 1857 and less than three years after the dissolution of the odious East India Company in 1874 where Lord Lytton as Viceroy (representative of the British sovereign) seated on his lofty throne basking superciliously in an air of impervious imperial confidence, presided over the event receiving homage from Indian princes and maharajahs representing the Princely states of India on behalf of the Queen as the newly crowned absent overseas Empress of India, succeeding the majestic centuries-old Indian Mughal Emperors, underscoring the status of Britain as the undisputed world power in the second half of the nineteenth century arguably Lord Lytton's actions, or more accurately, inactions, may have contributed to the deaths of about ten million Indians in less than two years, given that these terrible events were a small part of the global European colonial expansion which intensified in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued sporadically in force until the early part of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the First World War and the division of the near-eastern legacy of the vanquished Ottoman Turkish Empire in the secret 1916 infamous Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, with the consent of the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy in exchange for a share of the Anatolian spoils, especially for the Russians who were yearning for a sea outlet on the Mediterranean since the reign of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) but were thwarted by the ignominious defeat of their pre-industrial feudal Russian Empire in the Crimean War (1853-56) at the hands of the technologically and socially advanced industrial powers of Britain and France, thereby finally resolving the "Eastern question" of the feeble Ottoman Empire, the "Sick Man of Europe" once and for all, however, the Russian popular revolution in March 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik coup in October of the same year altered the primarily Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement by reneging on the British and French allies' promises to Tsarist Russia, refusing to grant the new revolutionary hostile communist regime in Russia the previously agreed-upon Anatolian access to the Mediterranean anyhow, the Anatolian section of this secret agreement did not see the light of day due to the valiant efforts of the Turkish national military commander and World War One military hero and statesman, the father of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) (it should be noted that Mustafa Kemal was conferred with the revered surname "Atatürk" or "Father of the Turks" by the Turkish parliament in 1934 for his monumental role in foiling the Western allies' insidious plans for the Turkish people), leading the remnants of the Ottoman imperial army to victory over the Western allies, despite the fact that Western colonial expansion reached its zenith with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the industrial West's incessant need for raw materials has continued unabated in varying forms from subtle to insidious to outwardly aggressive as evidenced by Western efforts to undermine any attempts at economic independence by some of the postcolonial non-corrupt patriotic regimes in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world by fomenting societal unrest and political instability through covert subversive operations fronted by local actors, prolonged debilitating economic sanctions and a series of staged mostly bloody military coups in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, such as Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, and Chile in 1973, to name a few, and in some cases direct military interventions, as the Suez crisis of 1956, and the more recent unprovoked catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, this Western gluttony for natural resources was the impetus for the surge of Western colonialism in the second half of the eighteenth century to fuel the burgeoning under way industrial revolution in Europe, principally in Britain the first modern industrial capitalist economy in the world, followed gradually but surely in industrialisation in subsequent decades by the other continental European nations of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Austria and even backward Russia, not to mention the newly formed nations of Germany and Italy, among others, succeeded by the resources-rich robust United States of America on the other side of the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century progressing in a more potent force throughout the ever-changing socioeconomic landscape of the early unregulated labour market, characterised by the harsh, exploitative living and working conditions of unfettered industrial capitalism, as child labour was a common and abhorrent practice in all major Western industrial nations, where children as young as three were employed in low-paying, often dangerous jobs, this situation was exacerbated by the severe societal implications of increasing technological advancements in mechanisation within industrial workplaces from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, setting the stage for the gradual implementation of the foundational great ideas of the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke and its more concrete and practical successor thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment decidedly Voltaire, Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and Kant immensely influencing the highly learned Founding Fathers of the United States of America, chiefly Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison as the first three were members of the Committee of Five that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July 1776 leading to the independence of the united principal thirteen colonies from Britain on the 3rd of September 1783 after seven years of a ferocious revolutionary war of independence against the might of the British Empire, meanwhile moulding a distinct American Protestant Anglo-Saxon English-speaking white identity in its wake, excluding Native Americans entirely from the white mainstay of the nascent republic who would be displaced from their expansive lands in the Midwest of the United States of America more aggressively than before and, to a great extent, exterminated in their millions in the following century seen as nothing more than an obstacle to the divinely ordained "Manifest Destiny" of the English-speaking Old Testament Protestant-steeped racially indoctrinated gun-toting Pacific westward-expanding white American settlers on their long horse-hauled rickety waggon trains, epitomised by the telling 1869 saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" driving the vast majority of natives to the brink of extinction as a people where they would end up on the out-of-sight fringes of America, in a few designated secluded economically deprived reservation pockets akin to those of endangered species and, to a lesser degree, the forcefully converted to Christianity emancipated African slaves who were both pagan and Muslim in their West African homeland prior to being sold into chattel slavery in the Americas, enduring a suffering beyond measure from the moment of bondage in Africa to the abominable conditions of the high mortality slave trade flagrant middle Atlantic passage journeys of unimaginable cruelty on the special purpose slave ships where human beings of all genders and ages were shackled and stacked as inanimate goods without the ability to move or relieve themselves as the dead were disposed of at sea with the survivors embarking on a lifelong of servitude and for almost a century of limited emancipation after the end of the American Civil War under Jim Crow enforced racial segregation laws whereas whites frequently used various intimidation methods of terror to instil fear in the hearts of African Americans most commonly through the extrajudicial killing of grisly mob lynchings (public hangings) spectacles intentionally staged for large crowds of spectators including children where souvenir mementos of the victims were taken as well as photographs, sometimes professionally taken and collected as postcards as these macabre tactics were meant as a form of subjugation and deterrence to prevent former slaves and their African American descendants from demanding equal rights, with the American Anglo-Saxon whites as previously stated, regarding themselves as "God's chosen people" with the sole right to populate the promised land of the entire North American continent passed down to them from the first devout Calvinist Protestant Puritan English settlers in the New England colonies during the Jacobean and Caroline eras of the sixteenth century as divinely sanctioned "Manifest Destiny", not dissimilar to how the Biblical Israelites viewed Canaan in the Old Testament until the end of racial segregation in 1964 and the granting of voting rights the following year, despite this the majority of African Americans remain a disenfranchised racial minority to this day, with the spectre of law enforcement brutality looming over their heads, replacing the preceding common old tactics of mob violence by white terror supremacist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan to maintain white racial and economic hegemony for as long as possible while those momentous events of the American Revolution were taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, the French monarchy under the ineffective and weak Louis XVI and his equally inept unfairly demonised consort Queen Marie Antoinette, was rushing to exact revenge on the British by supporting the American revolutionary government in full strength militarily and financially, in its republican democratic struggle to achieve independence from France's imperial adversary Britain, even though it was in diametric opposition to the French absolutist monarchy political doctrine as it was part of the traditional age-long protracted Anglo-French animosity and world dominance rivalry particularly after the Seven Years' War which the French decisively lost to the British, resulting in France ceding most of its North American colonies to Britain, making Britain the unequalled world naval superpower for the better part of the next two centuries, putting insurmountable pressure on the already exhausted French economy owing to the crushing defeat of the Seven Years' War over a quarter century earlier, contestably the first war on a global scale, financially bankrupting France in the process, compounded by the chronic wealth inequality of the French absolutist monarchy's mediaeval feudal three-estate system, helmed by the aloof and typically unsympathetic uncompromising aristocratic nobility who lived self-absorbed decadent and parasitic idle lives in their rural opulent châteaux, a far cry from the mostly impoverished lives of the peasants working on their extensive lands, causing widespread discontent among the toiling peasants who comprised the vast majority of the rapidly growing French population along with the expanding self-made energetic urban dwelling bourgeoisie classes who were trying to carve out a niche for themselves in eighteenth-century France whose salon culture was one of the primary sources for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas among the young educated bourgeoisie and reformist elements within the old aristocracy as those salons were originally incepted by the aristocracy to fulfil their cultural recreational needs before being taken over by the rising bourgeoisie as a clear expression of the acute awareness of their self-important new socioeconomic position in society in contrast to the landed aristocracy who traditionally acquired their inherited wealth and titles through royal favour and patronage of considerable land grants for their allegiance via rendering a sundry of services to the sovereign as was the case in the rest of Europe including military services in some instances dating back to mediaeval times interestingly the tremendous success of the American Revolution's principles of republican democracy across the Atlantic which the French monarchy unwittingly supported sowed the seeds of revolution among notable French figures from the bourgeoisie and aristocracy alike who cooperated with their American revolutionary counterparts indirectly through being assigned as part of the French military assistance to the American revolution leading to its triumph in 1783 in the restive five years preceding the official outbreak of the French Revolution on the 5th of May 1789 as attested by the participation of two giant revolutionary figures from both sides of the Atlantic, the scholarly Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America and its third president and the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocratic military commander and highly respected revolutionary in the formulation of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" on the 26th of August 1789 followed by a number of key historic milestones most significantly the abolition of slavery in the French colonies on the 4th of February 1794 and also in the adoption of secularism principles of separation of state and church and the dissolution of feudalism inspired by the Age of Reason ideas of Voltaire, Locke and Rousseau as opposed to the symbiotic association reactionary French Catholic Church's, theological doctrine advocating the legitimacy of the divine right of Kings, contradicting Locke's and Rousseau's social contract theory and Montesquieu's conclusive theory of the separation of powers in government which was enthusiastically applied as the pivotal foundation of the revolutionary founding fathers of the United States of America's fledgling democracy and was conducive to democratic proliferation in the West at large and the unfolding of abolitionism in the early nineteenth century and inevitably the rest of the world as well as the emergence of the great progressive socialist ideas of utopian socialism represented by its most prominent proponents Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Fourier (1772-1837) and Owen (1771-1858) and the more comprehensive, highly developed and practically applicable socialist theories of their successors Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his close friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and yet despite all of this as centuries of European colonialism, enslavement and genocide of non-white peoples since the Christian devout Columbus and his brutal conquistador holy warrior successors enslaved and exterminated Central and South American Indigenous peoples ostensibly in the name of Christianity, those conquistadors and the state's official Spanish Catholic clergy for the most part dehumanised and treated Indigenous natives as nonhuman animal-like beasts of burden or at best heathen primitive savages as their French and British successors would in the following centuries in North America intertwined with the generational condensed accumulation of distinctly Franco-Germanic European racist thought in the West significantly reinforced the falsely vindicated rampant white racial supremacy hypothesis mainly during the scramble for Africa and the mass exploitation of the natural resources of the hitherto unexplored interior of the immense continent following the ill-boding Berlin conference of 1884-1885 to officially partition Africa between Western powers, initiating grotesquely unheard-of levels of atrocities of senseless cruelty in the Congo River basin by Leopold II (r. 1865-1909) of Belgium's ruthless voracious greed in plundering the untapped abundant natural riches of his massive central African privately owned dominion by giving it the ridiculously ironic euphemistic name "The Congo Free State" under the spurious ruse of bringing Western civilisation and modernity to the allegedly primitive savages of the African hinterlands through Christian missionary work and the purported stamping out of local indigenous African slavery controlled by local leaders and chieftains in collaboration with Arab slave traders from the East African coast, Leopold was given free rein with the implicit approval of the major Western powers at the said conference who benefited the most from this scandalous arrangement where Leopold II transformed it into the largest privately held slave colony in modern history complete with its own private murderous mercenary army "Force Publique" (Public Force) with Leopold remaining its legally designated sole owner from 1885 to 1908 a year before his death when he finally considered loosening his tenacious grip on his African fiefdom in the face of mounting international pressure, owing to the undeniable harrowing photographic evidence of the ongoing Congolese genocide victims' charred human remains and the mutilated living survivors with dismembered mangled limbs including those of children, brought to the fore in numerous press reports and various other official reports, specially the decisive official Casement British report of 1904 which was instrumental in Leopold II's relinquishing of the Congo, paradoxically becoming a veritably shameful embarrassment to other European colonial powers particularly Britain, this tragic chapter of Congolese colonial history was even immortalised in literature in the lauded semi-autobiographical novella "Heart of Darkness" by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, hailed ever since as an early anticolonial modernist masterpiece, all the while when these reports began to surface, the population of the Congo was declining at an alarming rate from approximately twenty million prior to Leopold II's Congo blithe appropriation to around eight million by the time of his death at which point he was understandably the richest man in the world as a consequence of all of this, it was becoming increasingly obvious by democratic Western standards at the turn of the twentieth century that it was untenable for a monarch of a constitutional parliamentary European monarchy to retain an overseas bloodstained, immensely lucrative private colony of such vast expanse that he had never visited for much longer, so he reluctantly transferred its ownership to the Belgian government, to become known henceforth as the Belgian Congo until it gained independence in 1960 aside from the arrival on the African scene of a slew of staunchly imperialist adventurous fortune-seeking explorers, such as Leopold II of Belgium's African agent, the Welsh-American Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) who claimed the huge Congo basin region as private property for the Belgian king, the wily Italian-French Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) the French colonialist founder of the city of Brazzaville (named after its colonialist founder) the capital of the French Congo (Republic of the Congo) and the controversial Oxford-educated British-born South African politician Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) the maverick imperialist and industrious businessman who was involved through his British South Africa Company in founding the southern African territory of Rhodesia which bore his name (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) and also founded the internationally famous De Beers Diamond Consortium in South Africa in 1888 the largest diamond company in the world until the early twenty-first century and to some arguably the architect of the notorious institutionalised system of racism "Apartheid" a modern reinvention of slavery in South Africa, underpinning existing forms of racial segregation since the late eighteenth century in the country, one of several milder variances in other European-controlled parts of the world after the abolition of colour-based slavery in the West but his most enduring legacy is the reputable Oxford Rhodes postgraduate scholarship as many Rhodes Scholars have gone on to become heads of state, heads of government, or distinguished in their respective fields, moreover as for the Germans who were among the newcomers along with the Belgians and Italians on the global imperial stage, though similar in cruelty, under the direct orders of the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918) the German Empire committed appalling atrocities in Africa, in line with its other Western counterparts around the globe, specifically the 1904-1908 "Herero and Namaqua genocide" the first ethnic genocide in the twentieth century intended as a form of collective punishment and ethnic extermination for the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South West Africa (present-day Republic of Namibia) for their insurgency against German settler-colonial rule which subjected them to intolerable relentless pressure for nearly two decades since the Germans first set foot in Namibia in 1884 to wrest control of their arable agricultural lands, pastoral grounds and water resources, coupled with an egregiously colonially-imposed and racially biased legal and judicial system, leaving them with little choice but to rise up against their German colonial overlords as part of their newly carved large overseas Empire in Africa following the earlier alluded to Berlin conference of 1884 under the astute tutelage of master statesman Imperial German "Iron Chancellor" Otto Von Bismarck, the armed uprising represented a golden opportunity for the Germans to implement "Lebensraum" or "living space" to create a living space for the superior German people to thrive and prosper to the detriment of lesser races, an inspired distortion of Darwin's survival of the fittest theory, coined and popularised by the German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) who introduced concepts contributing to Lebensraum and Social Darwinism, Ratzel's theories would become an integral component of Nazi ideology in the two decades following his death, in particular with regard to the predominantly Slavic-populated Eastern Europe as German South West Africa became a testing ground for all of these various forms of racist theories, a mishmash of Lebensraum, scientific racism, eugenics and ableism, was emerging principally engendered by Darwin's seminal game-changing theory of evolution as this theory became the gift that keeps on giving to all Western European colonial powers including Tsarist Eurasian Imperial Russia, with ramifications reaching to the present in some Western academic circles in a quest to subtly justify white racial hegemony over other races as part of the German imperial authorities' attempt to permanently resolve the vexing issue of a racially inferior African population therefore following the inevitable conclusion of the grossly asymmetrical conflict, influenced by breakthroughs in biology, notably Darwin's evolutionary theory and the apathetic determinism of its evil spawn "Social Darwinism" as previously referred to, German imperial colonial authorities saw it as an invaluable platform for German doctors and scientists to test hitherto untested pseudo-scientific racial theories on living human beings for the first time where deadly medical experiments on expendable resistance prisoner fighters and their families were carried out in the Shark Island concentration camp, the first death camp of its kind in the world by a select team of doctors under the direct supervision of the celebrated professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) a future ardent member of the Nazi Party (acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' Party) and one of the main influencers of Hitler on Germanic racial superiority, a concept clearly manifested in Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle) with a special focus on Fischer's role in studying the mixed-race offspring "Basters" (a derogatory Dutch term for mixed-race Afrikaners) of early German and Boer (Dutch) settlers, highlighting the risks of miscegenation with perceived inferior races and pushing for the sterilisation of their progeny to avert the transmission of undesirable traits to future generations as these proposals regarding the prohibition of interracial unions, euthanasia of the handicapped and mentally ill and sterilisation of racial inferiors would form the basis of the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 as would the deliberate starvation to death of the non-combatant civilian population including children in the arid Namib coastal desert by denying them access to drinking water on the direct orders of extermination by General von Trotha, on top of working many others to death as forced labour, encompassing men, women and children as young as six in public works projects such as railway construction and so on, the fortunate few thousand survivors were offered up as slaves to German settlers on the confiscated lands of the enslaved themselves as this horrific and until the early twenty-first century remained deliberately obscured, premeditated genocide in Africa served as a rough draft precursor to the colossal Nazi atrocities of death camps monstrosities a quarter-century later, conducted by Fischer's and his African team colleagues' apt students, such as the exonerated of war crimes due to a lack of evidence Otmar Freiherr von (Baron of) Verschuer (1896-1969) the human biologist and eminent geneticist and the Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster until his retirement in 1965 and the close mentor to the fiendish young Nazi ideologue physician Dr Josef Mengele (1911-1979) who was given the appellation "Angel of Death" by his victims as the unrepentant Mengele was one of a handful of senior Nazi war criminals who managed to evade justice for the remainder of their lives, similar yet far less publicised ethnic cleansing atrocities were committed by both the Kingdom of Italy at the onset of the Italian colonial invasion of Libya in October 1911 and Mussolini's subsequent brutal Fascist settler colonialism in Libya where nearly all of the Libyan urban population of the five major urban centres and their livestock were forcibly displaced to sixteen massive death camps in the Libyan desert to be starved to death in just one of these documented genocidal operations from 1929 to 1934 almost seventy thousand Libyans perished as these camps served as another source of inspiration and a prelude for the German Nazis' dreadful concentration camps, in addition to Germany's own previously mentioned African imperial experience, many in the West still tentatively perceive Italian fascism as moderately less dogmatic in comparison to the horrors of German Nazism, most likely owing to the fact that the majority of Italian Fascist victims were North African Arabs and Ethiopians fortunately for the Libyans these genocidal operations ended in 1943 with the Axis's North African defeat in World War Two, ending thirty-two years of Italian settler colonial occupation during which the Libyan population was reduced from around one and a half million prior to 1911 to less than half in 1943 as it was quite plausible for the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini to endure with the undeclared acquiescence and cooperation of the American-led capitalist liberal democratic West had Italy remained neutral as Franco's Spain, with fascism acting as a necessary evil bulwark against Soviet communism by staving off the powerful Italian left, analogous to that of Spain, from democratically gaining power through tyranny and oppression under the pretext of the ensuing Cold War, while Mussolini's genocidal demographic displacement plans for Libya would have come to fruition, turning the desert nation into a southern Mediterranean extension of Italy, with at least fifteen million Italian settlers displacing the decimated Indigenous population as referred to earlier, over four centuries of European overseas colonialism, racial slavery and genocide in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa, aided by apologetic reasoning, apathetic pragmatic rational thought, scientific racism pseudo-science and eugenics and in earlier cases Christian religious justifications, as Western imperialist powers employed these justifications on multiple occasions to lend meaning to their largely insatiable imperialist projects and in other instances to assuage their gnawing consciences, forging the catalyst that paved the way for the emergence of the German Nazi Aryan racist ideology in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War One and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles by the racially suffused polemics of the rowdy charismatic but insubstantial Austrian corporal demagogue Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and his cohorts, a multifaceted fascist totalitarian ideology affecting the lives of everyone living under its scourge, resulting in the unleashing of atrocities of unparalleled proportions, reflecting the unique vile extremism of this spartan-like militaristic ableist racial hierarchical ideology by perfecting the callous technology of mass murder embodied in the state-of-the-art, highly methodical and extremely efficient Nazi concentration and death camp killing machine apparatus of the gruesome gas chamber and crematorium ovens, along with the mostly lethal medical human experiments on prisoners of all ages and genders, in tandem with extermination by starvation, the Nazis were able to massacre more than twenty million people, roughly six million of whom were European Jews, in what became known as "The Jewish Holocaust" or the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" a crime exemplifying the centuries-long deep-seated anti-Semitism in Europe and across the Christian West in general from the time of Constantine the Great (r. 306-337) the first Christian Roman Emperor, until Emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) made Christianity the only official religion of the Empire in the year 380 AD onwards, to the mediaeval period when Jewish people in Christian Europe were viewed with suspicion as interloping enemies of Jesus Christ these sentiments reached their highest point during the Crusades where entire Jewish communities were wiped out and their properties and valuables looted and confiscated in England, France and Germany and also as fair game easy targets in the Balkans for the self-proclaimed holy Christian warriors on their way to the Levant and the Biblical Holy Land in the east before facing the Saracen (Muslim) enemy, though Jews suffered the most in both England and France under the tacit orders of Richard I (r. 1189-1199) known as Richard the Lionheart of England and his cousin Philip II (r. 1180-1223) of France, both Kings were motivated by expediency rather than religious zealotry in dealing with their respective mounting fiscal crises, specifically the French monarch who targeted defenceless French Jews for their material wealth under the guise of religion by rallying unruly mobs of his Christian subjects as in England against their fellow Jewish neighbours who were designated as a non-citizen restricted special status community using Christian traditional anti-Jewish polemic tropes (such as Blood Libel) and despite these tragic events, the English Jewish community continued to exist and prosper, albeit in smaller numbers, for another century until another unscrupulous warrior Crusader king, Edward I, byname Edward Longshanks (r. 1272-1307) came along in the final stages of the Crusades and issued an edict of expulsion on the 18th of July 1290 expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England and sequestering all of their property, the plight of English Jews could not have been more aptly symbolised than by its tragic conclusion wherein a chartered ship laden with valuables belonging to wealthy Jews was craftily seized by its English captain at the behest of the King, leaving the Jewish passengers stranded at low tide at the mouth of the River Thames estuary to drown once high tide arrived, it would take almost four centuries for Jews to be allowed back into England under Cromwell's fanatical Puritan Old Testament-inspired ascetic commonwealth dictatorship in 1657 and two centuries after their expulsion from England another tragedy awaited them when the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, Granada, fell to the Catholic Castilians in 1492 both Muslims and Jews became the target of merciless terror under the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 by the devoutly Catholic joint sovereigns of their respective kingdoms, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile whose marriage union in 1469 resulted in the birth of the last major political and territorial union in the Iberian Peninsula since Visigothic Spain in 1479 and in their quest to establish a socially and religiously homogeneous national identity in the newly united Catholic Spanish Kingdom after the removal of the last tolerant Andalusian multicultural multi-ethnic Arab Muslim polity hurdle represented by the culturally vibrant centre of learning of the Kingdom of Granada, effectively ending nearly eight centuries of "Dhimmi" (people of the covenant or the book) Islamic jurisdiction where Christians, Jews and other minorities lived in relative harmonious peace with very little friction under Muslim jurisprudence protection by unleashing an unmatched systematic wave of persecution by the Inquisition court as hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Jewish Spaniards were forced to convert to Catholicism over the next two centuries and an equal number fled for their lives to North Africa and Ottoman-held territories, with some Jews opting to flee to the more tolerant progressive protestant Dutch Republic after it declared independence from the Spanish Empire in 1581 and last but not least the recurring pogroms (massacres in Russian) of Jews in the Russian Empire from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, stemmed from about sixteen centuries of virulent anti-Semitism in Christian Europe's collective consciousness, engendering this inveterate hatred for Jews to reveal itself in myriads of ways throughout all Nazi-occupied Europe where most of those occupied European countries witnessed some level of complicity with the Nazis in facilitating and perpetrating the Holocaust, a heinous genocide of nearly six million Jews by some local officials and ordinary citizens who acted on their own accord without being enticed by materialistic reward or subjected to duress, as in the case of Vichy Fascist France under Marshal Petain, Romania under Antonescu's military dictatorship, and Hungary, accompanied by more than fourteen million other victims who were largely overlooked, forgotten and unaccounted for until recently, relegated to a mere collateral footnote in history, such victims consisted of an amalgamation of disparate peoples, many of whom the Nazis considered racial inferiors, including Romani people (Roma and Sinti Gypsy travellers), Slavs, mixed-race Germans or those with severe physical disabilities, chronic mental illnesses, carriers of hereditary diseases and anyone else who defied Nazi ideology namely, political opponents, intellectuals and others, regardless of racial background, or was deemed incompatible with the Nazis' exceedingly narrow and dull uniform exclusionary vision of the world, a brutal conflagration of villainy on an unprecedented industrial scale, utilising all of Germany's advanced technological, and industrial capabilities to its nefarious goals beginning soon after the ominous Nazi party with its feared paramilitary divisions the SA and SS, hijacked power to which it was elected in free democratic elections in the midst of the global hard-hitting economic throes of the Great Depression in 1933, transforming Germany into a despotic one-party state dictatorship led by the self-proclaimed Führer (Leader) Adolf Hitler with a personality-worshipping cult dedicated to him as an infallible leader, lasting until the end of the Second World War and the unlamented downfall of the Third Reich in 1945, it is important to bear in mind that had Nazi Germany won the war the world as we know it today would have been unrecognisable, with meticulously selected fair-haired fair-skinned Germanic European Aryans as the dominant master race, leading inexorably to the steady systematic enslavement and annihilation of all other races on the planet, ironically it took tens of millions of deaths mostly of white Europeans by the Nazis, for scientific racism and eugenics to fade from popular consciousness in the West furthermore the Emily Lorimer letters provide a glimpse into the mindset of some of the highly educated middle-class members of both genders of the rapidly growing socially mobile industrialised British society particularly women, in pre-World War One as some of these well-educated but partially enfranchised restless women became involved to varying degrees in women's emancipation activism initially in the less successful decades-long struggle of the miscellaneous peaceful women's suffrage movements since the first woman suffrage committee saw the light in Manchester in 1865 and later in its more successful radically violent militant famous offshoot the suffragette movement, founded and led in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her shrewd organisationally skilled 23-year-old daughter Christabel as those movements and their numerous splintered groups collectively fought for the inalienable equal right of women to vote in public elections, until it finally bore fruit in the aftermath of the First World War through consecutive acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928 after the enormous sacrifices made by the staunch and courageous suffragist heroines, ranging from being verbally abused, physically roughed up and sexually assaulted by police during demonstrations to imprisonment, hunger strikes and the mounting to torture cruel response of police authorities forcefully feeding female imprisoned hunger strikers and for some even paying with their lives to advance such a noble cause as the iron-willed and highly committed Emily Davison (1872-1913) the first martyr of the movement, though not the conservative intransigent British imperialist ideologue well-off empowered woman, Emily Lorimer who unsurprisingly was adamantly opposed to granting women the vote, deeming such a move as a subversive attempt against the traditional ruling establishment as was her legendary contemporary the solitary, steely, upper-class, conventional gender role-challenging and perhaps the first stalwart heroine of the British Empire in modern times, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) a fierce opponent of British female suffrage and emancipation the multifaceted, remarkably industrious, Oxford-educated, highly empowered, extremely privileged Arabist political and intelligence officer, administrator, and grand and military strategist, to name a few of her many preoccupations and interests, and the de facto ruler of Iraq until her sudden most likely suicide drug-induced death after being informally delegated to her by Iraq's High Commissioner Percy Cox an admirer of her who held her wise judgement in high regard, ruling the country via her formal position as the advisor and mentor to the newly British-appointed Hashemite King of Iraq Faisal I in 1921 who was under her total tutelage wielding immense power and influence through him as the real power behind the throne and thus garnering such status among the Iraqi elite that she was given the Turkic female honorary title "Al-Khatun" (The Queen) strikingly she was the first female to hold such positions within the merit-based male-dominated British administrative system including the army, Bell unexpectedly became a champion of women's rights in Iraq, playing an important role in the enfranchisement of Iraqi women by lending her support to already existing local Iraqi women's emancipation initiatives in accordance with the forcibly imposed British colonial policy of grafting in the colonies once the necessity arose to apply urgent reforms to create needed stability as in Bahrain and also to establish an Indigenous popular power base for Britain among marginalised Iraqi women and liberal-educated Iraqi elites particularly in Baghdad and other urban centres following the partial granting of the vote to British women in 1918 not to mention her significant contribution to the successful execution of the inextricably linked Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration on the ground, against her justified reservations on the latter which would beget unremitting geopolitical changes with disastrous consequences for the peoples of the region until the present day at the 1921 Cairo conference, alongside T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Herbert Samuel, Percy Cox, Field Marshal Allenby, among others along with the aristocratic resolute colonialist Winston Churchill who masterminded, convened and chaired the conference as colonial secretary, other than her above-mentioned anti-suffrage stance, Emily Lorimer was naturally opposed to Arab independence despite her fondness for Arabic literature and language as a British imperialist advocate and the loyal wife of a colonial officer, she firmly believed in the British Empire as a benevolent global force for good, a provider of civilisation and modernity as was the case with other European colonial powers in a world riddled with ignorance and backwardness to say the least as one would expect from a Eurocentric perspective back then, so giving Arabs independence was an unthinkable travesty and even more so to a limited form of Irish self-government, falling short of full independence for the freedom-hungry Irish people who had endured in excess of seven centuries of foreign Anglo-British oppressive feudal exploitation since the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 until independence from Britain in 1922 a relentlessly demeaning and humiliating discriminatory colonial and partially settler multi-layered occupation where the Irish had to bear the brunt of the cultural and socioeconomic changes and upheavals occurring in their English overlords' homeland throughout the long occupation, most notably the so-called "Tudor conquest of Ireland" during the volatile and violent Tudor epoch of Henry VIII's (r. 1509-1547) dramatic religious cataclysms of English reformation and those of his fickle Tudor successors' sixteenth century English monarchs particularly his religiously opposing daughters and equally ruthless half-sisters Mary I (r. 1553-1558) the short reigning devotedly raised Catholic dubbed "Bloody Mary" for her persecution of English Protestants and Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) the strong independent-minded, highly intelligent, multilingual, unwed, long reigning Protestant the founder of the maritime piracy-based English Empire what would become known more than a century later in the early eighteenth century as the British Empire, Cromwell's grim Puritan Anti-Catholic draconian conquest of Catholic Ireland and culminating in the partly British-incurred and exacerbated devastating Great Famine also known as the Irish Potato Famine which occurred from 1845 to 1852 due to the unbridled, industrial liberal-driven free market economics of the British ruling liberal (Whig) party cabinet in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain treated the famine afflicting their colonised Catholic European white Gaelic Irish neighbours no differently than the series of famines that struck their Asian brown Indian counterparts thousands of kilometres away in the early part of the nineteenth century where the British were equally just in being unjust in their indignities towards both colonised peoples, with the only advantage the Irish had was an escape route through the Atlantic since the Biblical-like seven-year Irish famine resulted in over a million fatalities and nearly twice as many emigrating to North America the majority of whom went to the thriving rapidly industrialising United States, forming a large prosperous community in the following century with a small minority heading for the French-speaking Catholic Quebec in Canada and notwithstanding all of this, the Anglo-Irish Emily Overend Lorimer remained an apathetically steadfast British imperialist, viewing the long-proposed meagre Irish self-government (home rule) after centuries of exploitative and occasionally cruel Anglo-British colonisation of Ireland as a superfluous luxury.
17 March 1912.
We had an amusing invasion of three weird-looking Frenchmen the other day.
They came up the Gulf on a tour - possibly prospecting for commercial openings - with only a few days to spare and without making any enquiries about conditions. They chose to travel on an Arab steamer - which must in itself be a strange experience. They were greatly disconcerted to learn that if they went on to Bushier their boat would then be in Quarantine and they would not be allowed to land at other ports - not even to sightsee.
They decided then to stay at Bahrain till their boat should call again on its downward way, so they landed here to look for a hotel!
They had introductions to an Arab merchant here and he is generously giving them quarters - otherwise pretty well unprocurable but we wonder how they will like native houses and native food for 10 days. They then came on to us to ask could not Lock arrange that they should be exempted from Quarantine if they went on; he had to explain that this was not in his power nor in anyone else's that he would, if necessary, have to go into Quarantine himself. On this they thought they would like to go and telegraph home; we had to break it gently to them that there was no Telegraph but that they would enjoy like their betters postal communication once a fortnight. Dr. Zwemer was with us when they called and as soon as they were gone, we had a very hearty laugh over their dismay. We have asked them to dine on Thursday next; they ought by that time to be ready to enjoy European food even if our cooking etc. is not quite up to the best Parisian standards. We are longing to know how they communicate with their host who knows nothing but Arabic while one of them knows a little Hindustani!
28 March 1912.
We had the Frenchmen to dinner one evening; they were very pleasant; M. Cartier the spokesman of the party appears to be the scion of a large firm of jewellers (the name one doubtless ought to know) who have houses in New Bond St., 1 Rue de la Paix and Fifth Avenue, his companion M. Richard was much quieter and more gentlemanly but was scarcely allowed a word in edgeways so it wasn't easy to judge, the third was a Parsi gentleman who was acting as interpreter.
They were all much amused at the contrast between the native lunch they had had, squatting round the orthodox sheep's corpse, and the civilized dinner! As a matter of fact, they did not suffer so much for lack of a hotel as they might have done, for they had their own bedding, etc., and their own cook and they seemed to be enjoying their enforced stay.
Our tennis party on the 19th. Was a great success; it was the first of our At Homes that unquestionably did not at any moment hang fire. When the guests arrived Lock took the only three real players down to a men's four while I gave the others tea; after this, we sat on the veranda watching what for Bahrain was quite decent tennis, then the players had tea and I sent off a set of amateurs to pat ball to each other. The cook had again surpassed himself in cakes and Jafar managed the recurring hot teapots etc. very well.
Since then, we have been playing almost every day; most often Messrs Macpherson and Holst arrive to join us; two afternoons M. Cartier turned up; he must be a pretty useful player, as Archie calls it, when in form and even as it was / on the strange court with a borrowed racket he gave a good account of himself, though I am happy to say that Lock gave him a good beating. Over his whiskey and soda afterwards he was talking about the charms of chess and to my great dismay, Lock offered him a game with me. I was afraid he might be really good and ''stuffy” over my amateur play, so I went very gingerly at it at first; but I soon found that his knowledge of it was not very deep and had the pleasure of giving him a nice mate, which I repeated twice the following evening.
It was good fun to play again though not so much fun as if he had been a less easy victim.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of nineteen (twenty were originally constructed) intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science. Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.
The dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1:12) scale. She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. The dioramas show tawdry and, in many cases, disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." Students were instructed to study the scenes methodically—Glessner Lee suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
I'll be adding a copy of my true story here in a short while. It is with each photo in this set; so no matter which picture you click on you can read the story.
A longer true story than my usual ones is below the row of asterisks.
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FALL OCCURRED IN THE SPRING
That’s right; fall occurred in the spring of 2012. Not the kind of fall like a beautiful autumn, but the kind of fall like Humpty Dumpty. The “splat” type of fall, which must have been painful for him. Mine was surely painful for me.
Let me digress a bit. I already have severe arthritis in both of my knees. I was very close to having the Orthopedic Physician’s Assistant refer me to the Orthopedist for knee replacements. The assistant had already seen me for seven to nine visits or so, and a series of Orthovisc® shots, which did not help me. I understand they are a great help to some people, but I wasn‘t one of them. He told me something I was completely unaware of. He said my teeth were bad, which is true. I have upper dentures and only one real tooth in my mouth. The bottom teeth except the one I just mentioned are all rotted away. They didn’t rot completely away; there are still parts of them in and below the gum line. He said they would all have to be surgically extracted before I could have knee replacements done. I asked him, “What do my teeth have to do with my knees?” He said infection can easily set in the rotten teeth and go to the knee or cause problems with my heart, major problems like death. Thus the reader can understand how I arrived at the title for my photo set about my hospital stay…The Knee Bone’s Connected to the Jaw Bone, Huh?
I have been walking around with very painful knees for quite awhile now, and I cannot afford the $1,600 to $2,000 to have my teeth surgically extracted. I already paid a dentist $180 for an appointment and a Panaray® X-Ray, over a year ago, just thinking it would be nice to finally get some lower dentures too. I never did get them. He split town, taking or disposing of his equipment and his files and x-rays. That $180 is long gone for me. I cannot even recover that old x-ray. Even if I did recover it, some new dentist would probably say it was out of date.
Medicare, which I am on, will pay for the two knee replacements, but here is the rub. They will not pay for dental. I have been in a surgical limbo with all the free pain I can stand.
That is the background information probably needed for this little story to be understood. There will be some OMG moments and some laughter. If it were a TV show, they would probably advertise, “You’ll Laugh; You’ll Cry; You’ll Sell Your Chickens; You’ll Call Your Congressman, and You’ll No Doubt Charge Your Cell Phone!”
That brings us to Thursday the 15th of March, 2012. (Beware the Ides of March). My daughter called to see if I could and would watch Rose all day Friday the 16th , as she had forgotten that she had signed up to be chaperone for her daughter, Anna Leigh’s, school field trip. It was going to be quite a bit out of town, the other direction from where I live. It was to be a special day. I wanted to be their hero; so I said sure. Some of you have seen Rose, the Hungarian Vizsla puppy among my photos. Rose is beautiful and young, and strong, and undisciplined and should probably be named Wild Rose. I love her, but she is a major handful. I had already watched her for 8 days while they went on a trip out of state, got one day off and then volunteered to do Friday the 16th.
Rose isn’t housebroken yet; so I took her out several times to encourage her to go outside. I was alone as far as other humans, and my daughter and granddaughter were about 60 miles away, on a school bus and then museum field trip. I live about 60 miles the other way from their home. It had been raining off and on and the ground and grass and driveway and mud were all pretty wet. My other trips outside with Rose that morning had been fine. I only had a thin shirt on, no extra shirt or jacket. I did not think I would be out in the yard very long.
Rose pulled on the leash too exuberantly, as she does often (she is five and a half months old, and has had puppy obedience training, but is in dire need of more of it). I slipped on a muddy and grassy slope. My right leg went out in front of me, and I fell on my rear end. My left leg folded underneath my thigh and toward my rear, and my weight, which is a lot, crunched it. It was bent backward way further than a knee is supposed to bend. I screamed bloody murder. I was afraid to even try to get up, as I thought I had probably torn a ligament or two.
Rose thought it was play time and was all over me. There was not a thing in sight that would give me any leverage to hold me up or to help me get up. I sat and I pondered what to do. My daughter and Anna Leigh would not be home for nearly 6 more hours. I thought, well I’ll just call 911 (the emergency number where we live). Wrong! No cell phone with me. It was inside their house, being charged up; ironically so it would be ready when I needed it.
I tried yelling for help. Nothing! A neighbor about a half an acre away, was mowing, and every time the mower cut off, I tried screaming for help. He must have had headphones on or something. Cars would drive by on the road way down the driveway, and I would yell, but no one had their windows down on that day. Did you know that when you have upper dentures and no lower ones, and you yell really hard, that it blows the upper dentures right out of your mouth? When I tried to hang onto them to keep them in my mouth, I was unable to cry out very loudly. I just thought I would throw that little trivia in. I didn’t know until that day.
I knew I couldn’t make it back in the house. There were too many upward slopes and an exposed aggregate patio and a few stairs. The front of the house was even worse, as it had more stairs. I looked down the driveway and saw a vehicle which had some metal protrusions, on the order of spare tire holder or something like that. I decided to try to scoot on my rear down to that metal thing. I thought perhaps it would give me leverage to get up. Rose thought that it was great fun to romp on and around me.
I thought the four chickens would be afraid to come around Rose. No, they are not very intelligent. They came right up to me and Rose and started pecking on me. I had never been pecked on my chickens before, and there I was on the ground with no help and Rose alternating between trying to attack the chickens and trying to play with me. Rose’s playfulness sort of resembles an attack, anyway. I scooted faster, much faster.
There was a light rain, but it was getting a little heavier. There was also a dusting of snow mixed with the rain. I was wondering how long it would take to get Exposure. I was wondering about Shock also. Can a person who has Exposure or Shock know that they have it? Ominous looking clouds were blowing quickly toward me. It was 1:30 P. M. when I fell. I didn’t have my phone, but I had my watch.
I scooted methodically toward the vehicle closest to me. I think it was about 100 feet. I got to it, and thought if worse came to worse with the weather, I could roll under the back of it. I did not relish thought of cold dark ground and spiders, but thought it might be better to risk them than the weather. I saw some wide strapping tape on the spare tire, which was loose. I didn’t want to risk hoisting myself up on the spare and its frame, as it was quite loose. But I took the tape and wrapped it around the metal thing that was separate from the spare tire things, and made it softer for my arm to lean on. I tried to prop myself up. No use; I fell back down. Not enough leverage. I put Rose’s leash handle on the trailer hitch. I didn’t want to just let her run free and maybe get hit by a car.
I tried again to get up and made it to both knees. It hurt so badly I went back down again. I noticed the license plate on the vehicle renewed on the ninth month of 2011. That said 911. I thought, “Oh yeah right, you inanimate license plate. Go ahead and taunt me! You know I can’t call 911.” I got a chuckle out of my own joke, and gave myself a figurative pat on the back for being resourceful about trying to get up.
I tried again. I got on both knees but the right one was in gravel that really hurt. Then I thought which knee should I put forward and which one should I try to rise on. I tried one, and it didn’t seem as if it would work so I tried the other way. That wasn’t the right way either. Finally I tried the first way again. I told myself on the count of three I would stand up, even if it hurt excruciatingly, I would scream but I would still get up. False start! Down again! I tried again and got up. I was standing!
Now was the problem of how to go anywhere, not knowing if my left knee would buckle at any time. I thought I had to try. I spotted my own truck further down the driveway, and decided to try to make it to it. I walked between two vehicles very carefully and slowly and got to my truck. I unlocked it with the remote key which I had in my pocket. After 11 years of driving it, the seat is pretty well conformed to me; so I didn’t have to bend my knees to sit down in it. I just leaned into the seat and put my relatively good right leg in. It was painful to bend my left knee to get it in the truck, but I did. Rose was still tied to a trailer hitch further back in the yard, but she was safe.
I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 P. M. It took me two hours to stand up and to get to some degree of safety and warmth. I could drive, as my truck is automatic. I drove down the road to a house that Anna had pointed out was where a schoolmate lived. I thought I could ask them to go in my daughter’s house and get my cell phone for me. There was a very large barking dog in the driveway, and no sign of humans, and the mother of the schoolmate has never even met me. I decided to go back to Jennifer’s home.
I found a cane in my truck that a charity, a different one than the one later in my story, had given me a few months ago. It is not a very sturdy one, but better than nothing. I did not use it on a regular basis. I used the hook end of it to fetch a large stick lying near the driveway (larger than a normal hiking stick). I pulled it to me, and stood back up out of the truck and used the big stick and the cane and balanced against two vehicles, and decided to try to get back in the house. I did. I got in the recliner and pulled a blanket up over me and slept until they got home.
After they got home, we all decided to go to the nearest Emergency room. It was a Friday night by then, and no normal doctor’s hours. We went to one closest to them, but it was still about 27 miles or so. They checked me out and did an x-ray. I told the Physician’s assistant nurse type lady about my knee history. She was fun and nice and caring and a little bit of a comedienne. She said that my left knee was really “ratty” looking on the x-ray. I laughed, because I’m sure it was. I have just never, in all my doctor visits ever had a nurse refer to one of my body parts as “ratty”. I suspect it is not a medical term. They said I sprained my knee, and gave me some medical records to take up to the emergency room (or my doctor) closer to where I live, seventeen miles from my home, the other direction from Jen & Anna. I wanted to be closer to the doctors and hospital that I know. I was given a prescription similar to Vicodin. Someone kindly pointed out that Walgreen’s was visible about a block away and their drive-thru was open. At that point I was still getting around by hobbling and by leaning on Jennifer. So I sat in a chair and she and Anna and Rose drove over to Walgreen’s . It seems as if it took a long time for them get the prescription filled.
While I was sitting there waiting, a employee came out to the lobby with clipboard in hand and asked if I were the lady with an injured knee. I replied that I was. She said, OK, come with me and we’ll have you see a triage. I thought it odd that I had already been seen and now they wanted to start all over again. I told her I had already been seen and x-rayed and all. It turned out there was another lady in the waiting room with an injured knee. It probably would have blown the Physician’s Assistant’s mind if I had played dumb and gone through everything again, and then told her when she looked shocked, “I’m coming through again; and this time don’t call my knee “ratty! Funny to imagine, but not a good idea.
Finally, my daughter and granddaughter returned to the hospital waiting room. Jennifer had forgotten her checkbook. So back they went and then it turned out, Jennifer couldn’t sign for my prescription, and she didn‘t have my insurance information. Thus, we all drove back over there. I was in line ahead of Jen‘s car. I told the pharmacist that my window did not go down well on the driver’s side, and I could not reach the pills in the drawer. So I would give him paperwork and cards he needed, but to please leave the pills themselves in the slide-out drawer. I said my daughter was right behind me and her window worked; and she would pick them up with my permission. Walgreen’s closed at 10 P. M. and it was about 9:57 P. M. Finally she got the pain pills in the drawer, but when we got out of Walgreen’s I flagged her down to stop and be sure to give me the pills to have with me before we forgot. Jennifer got them and handed them over to me. We laughed about how, at that time of night, it looked for the entire world like some sort of illegal drug deal.
We tried to go out for dinner, and the restaurant we chose put the closed sign in their front window as we were approaching. That always makes one feel so welcome, not!
Saturday, I rested, and then Sunday they took me to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. I had called my normal doctor, and he was out of the country (probably on some Doctors without Borders type thing). He participates in many good will efforts. The doctor filling in for him said to go to the Emergency Room. So I did, and they did an MRI, and I had torn the meniscus in my left knee. I ended up in the hospital for 8 days. No surgery was done to repair anything, because of the dental situation. But I got a walker, and some really nice nurses and physical therapy. I saw all kinds of doctors, and Home Health care people, and Senior and Disabled specialists. They must have taken my blood pressure 100 times, it seems. They always seem surprised that it is very good.
Anna Leigh, who is seven years old, threw a coin in the Hospital Fountain and made good wishes for me. She is such a sweetie. My daughter helped to clean up my place so when I went home the walker would fit through the rooms. I don’t know what I do without Jen and Anna. The first few days out of the hospital, I taught Anna how to play Monopoly, and she and Jennifer and I also did puzzles. There were some quality family moments. At one point I was eating a chip or cracker of some kind with my right hand, and trying to place a puzzle piece with my left hand. I got absentminded and stuck the puzzle piece in my mouth. I realized what I had done because the food tasted like cardboard. I took it out of my mouth. Anna about went into hysterics over it. I was laughing too. Anna’s Daddy called Jen about that time, and wanted to know what the laughter was all about. Anna wrote a note to show her Mom so her Mom could tell her Dad what happened. She spelled it phonetically, as she is only in first grade. I think she does really well, but Jen and I cracked up over how much Anna was laughing and over what she wrote. She wrote, “My grandmuther ate a pussel pees.” It looked substantially nastier than it was. Jen and I were cracking up about the note. Anna thought we were still laughing about the event itself, not the note. In any case, we all had some great belly laughs. Since the belly bone is no doubt connected to the brain bone and the knee bone, I think it was very healthy for us.
At first a physical therapist helped me in the hospital with a walker and with some small steps. After a few days, I could roam around the hallways on my own with the walker. At that point I took my camera. As I was practicing with my walker I took a number of pictures. I tried very hard to only shoot artsy type things and nothing about any patients or doctors that would invade their privacy. I had a bulletin board in my room just about me. I wrote “Exemplary Patient Award” on the comments. I wanted to see if it would make the nurses laugh. I thought it was funny to give myself an award. I enjoy making people laugh. I was curious if they would erase it, but it was still there when I was discharged.
I graduated from the walker to a cane yesterday. A home health physical therapist came to see how I was doing, and brought me a very colorful cane. I like it. It suits me, and it is brand new. There is a charity in my area called Love, Inc. I don’t know if it is just local or nationwide. Anyway, they gave him the cane to bring to me. Really super! Of course, I need to take a photo of it, and add it to this set. I’ll probably do that in the daylight.
I am still in surgical limbo, but a charity is going to come out and install grab bars on my shower, and still another charity will build up my recliner (which I sleep in) with a platform so it will be easier to get in and out of. It was suggested that I donate enough to cover the cost of the supplies but not the labor. I will probably make a donation, but I haven’t decided how much yet. I’m going to call my Congressman to see if something can be done about covering some dental procedures. I know him personally. He collects vintage cars, and has at least one Dodge and well over 10 Buicks. When I had a hubcap store, he would drop by and buy hubcaps for some of them. We would chat about politics, and automobiles, and high rent, etc. He probably won‘t be able to help, but I feel I have to try. Not just for me, but for a multitude of people.
I’ll close with a quote, although I don’t know who said it, “Be True to your Teeth and they will Never be False to You.” and “That is the Tooth, the whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth.”
(IMG_1514drapesinhospitalsevtechsresam)
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of nineteen (twenty were originally constructed) intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science. Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.
The dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1:12) scale. She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. The dioramas show tawdry and, in many cases, disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." Students were instructed to study the scenes methodically—Glessner Lee suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
A fox sparrow preens its flight feathers, using its tail feathers as a comb. It methodically ran its tail through each wing feather, one by one, and then did the other wing.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of nineteen (twenty were originally constructed) intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science. Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.
The dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1:12) scale. She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. The dioramas show tawdry and, in many cases, disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." Students were instructed to study the scenes methodically—Glessner Lee suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
There will be a story with this set as soon as I can get it written, and upload these pictures which I took while in the Hospital at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, Oregon.
FALL OCCURRED IN THE SPRING
That’s right; fall occurred in the spring. Not the kind of fall like a beautiful autumn, but the kind of fall like Humpty Dumpty. The “splat” type of fall, which must have been painful for him. It was surely painful for me.
Let me digress a bit. I already have severe arthritis in both of my knees. I was very close to having the Orthopedic Physician’s Assistant refer me to the Orthopedist for knee replacements. The assistant had already seen me for seven to nine visits or so, and a series of Orthovisc® shots, which did not help me. I understand they are a great help to some people, but I wasn‘t one of them. He told me something I was completely unaware of. He said my teeth were bad, which is true. I have upper dentures and only one real tooth in my mouth. The bottom teeth except the one I just mentioned are all rotted away. They didn’t rot completely away; there are still parts of them in and below the gum line. He said they would all have to be surgically extracted before I could have knee replacements done. I asked him, “What do my teeth have to do with my knees?” He said infection can easily set in the rotten teeth and go to the knee or cause problems with my heart, major problems like death. Thus the reader can understand how I arrived at the title for my photo set about my hospital stay…The Knee Bone’s Connected to the Jaw Bone, Huh?
I have been walking around with very painful knees for quite awhile now, and I cannot afford the $1,600 to $2,000 to have my teeth surgically extracted. I already paid a dentist $180 for an appointment and a Panaray® X-Ray, over a year ago, just thinking it would be nice to finally get some lower dentures too. He split town, taking or disposing of his equipment and his files and x-rays. That $180 is long gone for me. I cannot recover the old x-ray. Even if I did recover it, some new dentist would probably say it was out of date.
Medicare, which I am on, will pay for the two knee replacements, but here is the rub. They will not pay for dental. I have been in a surgical limbo with all the free pain I can stand.
That is the background information probably needed for this little story to be understood. There will be some OMG moments and some laughter. If it were a TV show, they would probably advertise, “You’ll Laugh; You’ll Cry; You’ll Sell Your Chickens; You’ll Call Your Congressman, and You’ll No Doubt Charge Your Cell Phone!”
That brings us to Thursday the 15th of March, 2012. My daughter called to see if I could and would watch Rose all day Friday the 16th , as she had forgotten that she had signed up to be chaperone for her daughter, Anna Leigh’s, school field trip. It was going to be quite a bit out of town, the other direction from where I live. It was to be a special day. I wanted to be their hero; so I said sure. Some of you have seen Rose, the Hungarian Vizsla puppy among my photos. Rose is beautiful and young, and strong, and undisciplined and should probably be named Wild Rose. I love her, but she is a major handful. I had already watched her for 8 days while they went on a trip out of state, got one day off and then volunteered to do Friday the 16th.
Rose isn’t housebroken yet; so I took her out several times to encourage her to go outside. I was alone as far as other humans, and my daughter and granddaughter were about 60 miles away, on a school bus and then museum field trip. I live about 60 miles the other way from their home. It had been raining off and on and the ground and grass and driveway and mud were all pretty wet. My other trips outside with Rose that morning had been fine. I only had a thin shirt on, no extra shirt or jacket. I did not think I would be out in the yard very long.
Rose pulled on the leash too exuberantly, as she does often (she is five and a half months old, and has had puppy obedience training, but is in dire need of more of it). I slipped on a muddy and grassy slope. My right leg went out in front of me, and I fell on my rear end. My left leg folded underneath my thigh and toward my rear, and my weight, which is a lot, crunched it. It was bent backward way further than a knee is supposed to bend. I screamed bloody murder. I was afraid to even try to get up, as I thought I had probably torn a ligament or two.
Rose thought it was play time and was all over me. There was not a thing in sight that would give me any leverage to hold me up or to help me get up. I sat and I pondered what to do. My daughter and Anna Leigh would not be home for nearly 6 more hours. I thought, well I’ll just call 911 (the emergency number where we live). Wrong! No cell phone with me. It was inside their house, being charged up; ironically so it would be ready when I needed it.
I tried yelling for help. Nothing! A neighbor about a half an acre away, was mowing, and every time the mower cut off, I tried screaming for help. He must have had headphones on or something. Cars would drive by way down the driveway, and I would yell, but no one had their windows down on that day. Did you now that when you have upper dentures and no lower ones, and you yell really hard, that it blows the upper dentures right out of your mouth? Just thought I would throw that little trivia in. I didn’t know until that day. I knew I couldn’t make it back in the house. There were too many upward slopes and an exposed aggregate patio and a few stairs. The front of the house was even worse, as it had more stairs. I looked down the driveway and saw a vehicle which had some metal protrusions, on the order of spare tire holder or something like that. I decided to try to scoot on my rear down to that metal thing. I thought perhaps it would give me leverage to get up. Rose thought that it was great fun to romp on and around me.
I thought the four chickens would be afraid to come around Rose. No, they are not very intelligent. They came right up to me and Rose and started pecking on me. I had never been pecked on my chickens before, and there I was on the ground with no help and Rose alternating between tried to attack the chickens and trying to play with me. Rose’s playfulness sort of resembles an attack, anyway. I scooted faster, much faster.
There was a light rain, but it was getting a little heavier. There was also a dusting of snow mixed with the rain. I was wondering how long it would take to get Exposure. I was wondering about Shock also. Can a person who has Exposure or Shock know that they have it? Ominous looking clouds were blowing quickly toward me. It was 1:30 P. M. when I fell. I didn’t have my phone, but I had my watch.
I scooted methodically toward the vehicle closest to me. I think it was about 100 feet. I got to it, and thought if worse came to worse with the weather, I could roll under the back of it. I did not relish thought of spiders, but thought it might be better to risk them than the weather. I saw some wide strapping tape on the spare tire, which was loose. I didn’t want to risk hoisting myself up on the spare and its frame, as it was quite loose. But I took the tape and wrapped it around the metal thing that was separate from the spare tire things, and made it softer for my arm to lean on. I tried to prop myself up. No use; I fell back down. Not enough leverage. I put Rose’s leash handle on the trailer hitch. I didn’t want to just let her run free and maybe get hit by a car.
I tried again to get up and made it to both knees. It hurt so badly I went back down again. I noticed the license plate on the vehicle renewed on the ninth month of 2011. That said 911. I thought, “Oh yeah right, you inanimate license plate. Go ahead and taunt me! You know I can’t call 911.” I got a chuckle out of my own joke, and gave myself a figurative pat on the back for being resourceful about trying to get up.
I tried again. I got on both knees but the right one was in gravel that really hurt. Then I thought which knee should I put forward and which one should I try to rise on. I tried one, and it didn’t seem as if it would work so I tried the other way. That wasn’t the right way either. Finally I tried the first way again. I told myself on the count of three I would stand up, even if it hurt excruciatingly, I would scream but I would still get up. False start! Down again! I tried again and got up. I was standing!
Now was the problem of how to go anywhere, not knowing if my left knee would buckle at any time. I thought I had to try. I spotted my own truck further down the driveway, and decided to try to make it to it. I walked between two vehicles very carefully and slowly and got to my truck. I unlocked it with the remote key which I had in my pocket. After 11 years of driving it, the seat is pretty well conformed to me; so I didn’t have to bend my knees to sit down in it. I just leaned into the seat and put my relatively good right leg in. It was painful to bend my left knee to get it in the truck, but I did. Rose was still tied to a trailer hitch further back in the yard, but she was safe.
I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 P. M. It took me two hours to stand up and to get to some degree of safety and warmth. I could drive, as my truck is automatic. I drove down the road to a house that Anna had pointed out was where a schoolmate lived. I thought I could ask them to go in my daughter’s house and get my cell phone for me. There was a very large barking dog in the driveway, and no sign of humans, and the mother of the schoolmate has never even met me. I decided to go back to Jennifer’s home.
I found a cane in my truck that a charity, a different one than the one later in my story, had given me a few months ago. It is not a very sturdy one, but better than nothing. I did not use it on a regular basis. I used the hook end of it to fetch a large stick lying near the driveway (larger than a normal hiking stick). I pulled it to me, and stood back up out of the truck and used the big stick and the cane and balanced against two vehicles, and decided to try to get back in the house. I did. I got in the recliner and pulled a blanket up over me and slept until they got home.
After they got home, we all decided to go to the nearest Emergency room. It was a Friday night by then, and no normal doctor’s hours. We went to one closest to them, but it was still about 27 miles or so. They checked me out and did an x-ray. I told the Physician’s assistant nurse type lady about my knee history. She was fun and nice and caring and a little bit of a comedienne. She said that my left knee was really “ratty” looking on the x-ray. I laughed, because I’m sure it was. I have just never, in all my doctor visits ever had a nurse refer to one of my body parts as “ratty”. I suspect it is not a medical term. They said I sprained my knee, and gave me some medical records to take up to the emergency room (or my doctor) closer to where I live, seventeen miles from my home, the other direction from Jen & Anna. I wanted to be closer to the doctors and hospital that I know. I was given a prescription similar to Vicodin. Someone kindly pointed out that Walgreen’s was visible about a block away and their drive-thru was open. At that point I was still getting around by hobbling and by leaning on Jennifer. So I sat in a chair and she and Anna and Rose drove over to Walgreen’s . It seems as if it took a long time for them get the prescription filled.
While I was sitting there waiting, a employee came out to the lobby with clipboard in hand and asked if I were the lady with an injured knee. I replied that I was. She said, OK, come with me and we’ll have you see a triage. I thought it odd that I had already been seen and now they wanted to start all over again. I told her I had already been seen and x-rayed and all. It turned out there was another lady in the waiting room with an injured knee. It probably would have blown the Physician’s Assistant’s mind if I had played dumb and gone through everything again, and then told her when she looked shocked, “I’m coming through again; and this time don’t call my knee “ratty! Funny to imagine, but not a good idea.
Finally, my daughter and granddaughter returned to the hospital waiting room. Jennifer had forgotten her checkbook. So back they went and then it turned out, Jennifer couldn’t sign for my prescription, and she didn‘t have my insurance information. Thus, we all drove back over there. I was in line ahead of Jen‘s car. I told the pharmacist that my window did not go down well on the driver’s side, and I could not reach the pills in the drawer. So I would give him paperwork and cards he needed, but to please leave the pills themselves in the slide-out drawer. I said my daughter was right behind me and her window worked; and she would pick them up with my permission. Finally she got the pain pills in the drawer, but when we got out of Walgreen’s I flagged her down to stop and be sure to give me the pills to have with me before we forgot. Jennifer got them and handed them over to me. We laughed about how, at that time of night, it looked for the entire world like some sort of illegal drug deal.
We tried to go out for dinner, and the restaurant we chose put the closed sign in their front window as we were approaching. That always makes one feel so welcome, not!
Saturday, I rested, and then Sunday they took me to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. I had called my normal doctor, and he was out of the country (probably on some Doctors without Borders type thing). He does many good will type things. The doctor filling in for him; said to go to the Emergency Room. So I did, and they did an MRI, and I had torn the meniscus in my left knee. I ended up in the hospital for 8 days. No surgery was done to repair anything, because of the dental situation. But I got a walker, and some really nice nurses and physical therapy. I saw all kinds of doctors, and Home Health care people, and Senior and Disabled specialists. They must have taken my blood pressure 100 times, it seems. They always seem surprised that it is very good.
Anna Leigh, who is seven years old, threw a coin in the Hospital Fountain and made good wishes for me. She is such a sweetie. My daughter helped to clean up my place so when I went home the walker would fit through the rooms. I don’t know what I do without them. The first few days out of the hospital, I taught Anna how to play Monopoly, and she and Jennifer and I also did puzzles. There were some quality family moments. I one point I was eating a chip or cracker of some kind and trying to place a puzzle piece. I got absentminded and stuck the puzzle piece in my mouth. I realized what I had done because the food tasted like cardboard. I took it out of my mouth. Anna about went into hysterics over it. I was laughing too.
Anna’s Daddy called Jen about that time, and wanted to know what the laughter was all about. Anna wrote a note to show her Mom so her Mom could tell her Dad what happened. She spelled it phonetically, as she is only in first grade. I think she does really well, but Jen and I cracked up over how much Anna was laughing and over what she wrote. She wrote, “My grandmuther ate a pussel pees.” It looked substantially nastier than it was.
At first a physical therapist helped me with the walker and with some small steps. After a few days, I could roam around the hallways on my own with the walker. At that point I took my camera. As I was practicing with my walker I took a number of pictures. I tried very hard to only shoot artsy type things and nothing about any patients or doctors that would invade their privacy. I had a bulletin board in my room just about me. I wrote “Exemplary Patient Award” on the comments. I wanted to see if it would make the nurses laugh. I thought it was funny to give myself an award. I enjoy making people laugh. I was curious if they would erase it, but it was still there when I was discharged.
I graduated from the walker to a cane yesterday. A home health therapist came to see how I was doing, and brought me a very artsy cane. I like it. It suits me, and it is brand new. There is a charity in my area called Love, Inc. I don’t know if it is just local or nationwide. Anyway, they gave him the cane to bring to me. Really super! Of course, I need to take a photo of it, and add it to this set. I’ll probably do that in the daylight.
I am still in surgical limbo, but a charity is going to come out and install grab bars on my shower, and another charity will build up my recliner (which I sleep in) with a platform so it will be easier to get in and out of. It is suggested that I donate enough to cover the cost of the supplies but not the labor. I will probably make a donation, but I haven’t decided how much yet. I’m going to call my Congressman to see if something can be done about covering some dental procedures. Probably not, but I feel I have to try. Not just for me, but for a multitude of people.
I’ll close with a quote, although I don’t know who said it, “Be True to your Teeth and they will Never be False to You.” and “That is the Tooth, the whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth.”
(1527poseysafetybelthospitalsusesnicresaminit) SNIC means to me, Solarized, but NOT in Camera. This gives a substantially different look than SIC, that I call Solarized in Camera. It was an option Sony Mavica Camera owners could choose. I made up SNIC and SIC to help me differentiate.
As a man who enjoys engaging in transvestism and is fascinated by the challenge of female illusion I am a lover of make up. I have wanted to wear make up, dresses and high heels since I was a young boy and after a lifetime the desire has never left me.
I always enjoy applying makeup to my face and seeing if I can feminise my features to create a convincing portrayal of a woman. This of course requires a fair bit of commitment. If you want to look like a woman then you have to make a few changes, firstly you need neater, tidied up eyebrows, most male brows are untidy and bushy. I'm not suggesting you go thin with your brows, a shape I actually think looks unnatural, but a tidier neat shape is essential.
Next is regular daily use of moisturiser to soften your skin. This should be followed by using the best razor you can buy with good shaving oil, foam or cream and by slow careful very methodical shaving. You also need to ensure you shave against the growth to get as smooth and as hairless an appearance as possible on your beard area. Stray hairs and nose hair should be plucked (ouch!)…yes it does hurt but if you wish to look female…no pain , no gain.
Being male do not delude yourself you can use regular women's foundation. I see this as the soignée biggest failing in many transvestite/ cross-dressers appearances. It is not designed work on male skin with a beard shadow. It may work outside the beard areas of your face but is too light to disguise a beard.
As men we cannot avoid wearing heavier make up than women. I have witnessed many who spend little time on their make up and you can see the fact their face is male all too easily. Make up requires a lot of effort and should not be rushed just because one thinks doing it in ten and twenty minutes will be fine and that's how fast women can do it. We are not women, we are impersonating them and we need to work on the illusion. It takes care.
I have a very dark beard shadow and can grow a beard in about three days so I see myself as an extreme example and I had to learn the right make up technique to disguise this.
I use Dermablend's reddest camouflage which I apply all over my beard area with a latex wedge. This red helps neutralise the blue of my beard shadowAfter leaving it for about five minutes I then use Kryolan panstick foundation all over my face. In order to cover my beard area smoothly I gently dab the foundation on starting from my throat and moving upward. This is a slow process and should be done in order to create a smooth convincing look to your skin and completely cover the beard area. If you just draw it on and spread out you may as well give up as that process is never going to produce a decent look. Slow carefully gradual build up by gently dabbing the foundation on is the way. IT can take between twenty and thirty minutes. If you can't be bothered then be ready to accept you won't get a total covered smooth look.
Eye make up is an area just about every transvestite messes up. For some unknown reason, I am genuinely mystified, many completely circle their eyes in eyeliner…why? That's what teenage girls with no idea about why they are using make up do. Remember make up is all about enhancement and feminising your features. You need to apply make up in a way that does this not detracts from your appearance. If you have huge almond shaped eyes you can do compete outlines, look at gorgeous women like Angelina Jolie, they have the eyes and the features that this will work on. Back in the real world, we men do not have features or eyes that are that feminine. We tend to have smaller eyes than women and our forehead shape is different, women have a higher forehead generally.
The idea should be to open up your eyes and give the illusion of a wider eye, this is a lot more feminine. Also, a lift to the outer eye aids this and looks a lot more feminine and younger. In order to achieve this you need to stop outlining right around your eye. Outlining your eye completely actually makes your eyes look a lot smaller, ruins the balance and looks harder, it detracts not enhances. Some say this is dramatic but only if you have naturally big eyes to start with, it just does not work on most peoples eye shape.
To create the illusion of a bigger looking they you should be careful how you add eyeliner to the lower eye. The most flattering approach is to carefully draw in eyeliner, very gently from the outer corner about one third of a way in and taper it so it becomes thinner. Never go further than your pupil. On the upper eye again taper inward from the outer corner but take the eyeliner at least two thirds of the way across.
The next technique is apply mascara (very carefully) to the upper lashes sweeping outward and upward. Gently apply mascara to your lower lashes but not too thick. Once the upper lashes have dried apply two more coats (waiting in between for each coat to dry) but do not apply any more mascara to your lower lashes.
The overall effect will make your eyes look softer, more feminine and bigger. It takes a bit of practice but it's not that difficult and well worth it if you genuinely desire to look more feminine.
Remember, there should be a reason, a direction to your make up, just putting on is pointless. Many real women have no idea how to wear make up so don't be disillusioned. You should be working toward what will enhance and feminise your features not just using the wrong foundation, drawing eyeliner right around your eyes and just putting on blusher and lipstick. There need to be applied in the right places in order to create the illusion you seek.
You also need to use the right tools, I see lipstick being applied straight from the lipstick…this is never going to work well. LIpstick is best applied by drawing in the shape first with a lip pencil then using a brush to paint in the lipstick and fill the lip area. I would say avoid the obvious lip pencil outline, it is bet to use a lip pencil that matches your lipstick colour and your lips will look a lot more feminine.
In this photo I've employed all the techniques I described as well as a bit of contouring on my blusher to enhance my cheek and more importantly my eyes. I think make up application should focus mainly on the foundation and the eyes and the rest needs to be carefully added. The secret to good make up is making one strong feature rather than too many. I think the eyes or the lips or the ones you should decide on. I have terrible lips, very thin and no shape so I focus on distracting from them by enhancing my eyes with make up. My lipstick is not my natural lip shape, it is created with lipstick to look more shapely and bigger. If you have great lips then you can make these the main focus but only aim for one main focus, everything else is in a supporting but by no means insignificant role.
Helene x
Models Jackobie (Jack) & photographer Jesse Belavidorico
A beacon of radiant light
Shined from across the room
Drawing me to you instantly
A hand reached out
From before the dawn of gargoyles
I took it once again
And forever sealed my fate
Innocence robbed
Premature demise
Recognizing a small frightened tear-stained face
Ready to pick up where we left off millennia ago
Ultimatum on the rocks
Faltered response
Heart sinks that you’ll never have what he has
Promises give false hope
But lead only to lies and torture
Through it all
I plod methodically
Haunted by your grace
Our grasp slips
Held only by a string curled in upon itself
You man up and break the cycle of abuse
You emerge bloody and raw
I turn my back
Until I hear your dying gasp
I reluctantly take your hand again
I follow your lead
I let you set the tone
I build scaffolding for us to grow into
You prove yourself to be true
You let yourself fall
I let my guard down
You are no longer subordinate
You are my equal
No longer resigned to being used
We restore each other’s faith in love
I am older than you
But you are older than me
You loved me for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more
I am your one and only
And you are mine
strobist.com - 1 elinchrom d lite 4 it with 60cm soft box approx 30cm to left of subject, white reflectors below and to right, black flag to mask light on l/h watch, skyport eco trigger.
It all started in Christmas 1979. That was when I was given my first watch. A Casio QS-95. Back in those days digital watches were a relatively new thing. I still remember sitting in church on Christmas day, more oblivious to the church service than usual as I sat there transfixed by the electronic seconds passing by on the display. I fizzed with geeky excitement knowing that a tiny quartz crystal was oscillating away inside it, and those oscillations were being converted into seconds by a little computer. Watching the time roll over to 0:00:00 exactly on the midnight chime of Big Ben on New Year’s Eve 1979 made my 13 year old heart sing. But I have later come to realise that that moment of perfect synchronisation between one time piece and another sowed a seed in me that would come back to taunt me in later life. By the way that first Casio still sits in a drawer to this day. I will never throw it away.
Around 1988 I got my first G Shock, a DW-5600C (with the earlier 691 module) . I bought it so I could use it while kayaking – it’s bomb proof, water proof qualities shone through. At the time I had no idea it had the 691 module but as the condition of WOCD (like regular OCD but centred around watches) takes hold in my advancing years I have established this fact and noted it. Does it make me cool to own an example of the earlier 691 module? I’m guessing probably not. Although the DW-5600C is a fairly humble watch it is impressive in it’s own way. I still have it now. Everything still works. A few years back I gave it to my young son who spotted a small crack in it’s outer plastic casing and proceeded to methodically peel all the plastic off, leaving it’s metal body naked and looking rather tragic. But this has been remedied as I managed to buy a new plastic outer recently, fitted a new battery and got a new strap keeper, so it is pretty much back to it’s 1980s glory.
Some time in the early 1990s a Pulsar chronograph entered my life. I liked it but sadly one day it went mad – all three sub-dials spinning out of control in various directions. It’s inert body still sits in the old watch drawer. I take it out once in a while to look at, and then put it back. Then there was an early Seiko Kinetic model, with a moderate geek rating owing to it’s rotor mechanism that recharges the battery. Until it stopped working that is. It now sits in the drawer with the other dead watches of years gone by.
So up until this point in my watch owning life everything is pretty normal. I can only recall owning four watches over two decades and there are no worrying signs that things are turning weird.
Around 2003 it did start to go wrong. Or at least odd. I decided one day that I wanted to treat myself to a properly posh watch. I wanted to push the boat out. So I bought myself a Breitling Aerospace. This was a jump into the luxury watch sector. It cost around a thousand pounds. It was a good looking watch. It was quartz and had the geekily sexy feature of advancing the minute hand in two increments per minute rather than the continuous movement of gear driven hands. This was most pleasing to the giant nerd within me. But a week or two later my WOCD reared its head and I noticed that on each completed minute the hand was not always exactly aligned with the minute mark on the face. After further analysis I established that the hand lined up perfectly for each minute down the right hand side of the face but not on the left. This was like fingernails being dragged down a black board. I had to take it back to the shop. As I explained the problem to the jeweller he looked at me with a mixture of feelings – disbelief, confusion, loathing? Anyway I was not to be diverted and so the watch was sent off to Switzerland for horologists to re-align my hands. Some weeks later it came back. After collecting it I couldn’t help but scrutinise the hands and found that they now lined up down the left hand side of the face but not the right. Again I went back to the shop. By now I'd decided I didn’t want the stupid watch and wanted my money back. After initial discussion that led nowhere I came out with a phrase that seemed to press some magic problem resolution button. “I think it must be a manufacturing defect”. I was immediately offered a refund. I think the jeweller was just looking for a reason to get rid of me and this sentence gave him a viable route to do so.
So, various things are now falling into place. A bit of an obsession with accuracy, exhaustive attention to detail. Enter the first radio controlled, solar powered, water resistant watch. The Casio Protrek PRW-1300T. It’s 2008. From the outside I probably still appear a relatively normal member of society. Having developed a fixation about hand alignment after the Breitling, the Protrek added absolute accuracy as the latest “must-have”. And solar power. And water resistance. From this point forwards, my requirements of all future watches become incredibly rigid. They must ALL be radio controlled, solar powered, water resistant. And they must all ideally have the extreme toughness of the G Shock line of watches. So if I feel the urge to smash my watch against a wall repeatedly for some unknown reason it’s good to know that it will probably survive. The PRW isn’t a G Shock but we’ll just politely ignore that for now.
I loved and still love the PRW. It’s a great watch. Big, clear face, nifty functions, no hands to fail to align up as it’s digital. What’s not to like? Well nothing. So you would think that’s where the story ends. But no. People who have WOCD are sometimes pushed by an unseen force to keep exploring the world of watches. In some cases people will acquire a particular model of watch in every colour combination that is available and post pictures of their chromatically diverse collection online. I’m not quite at that level of dedication but I can only go a certain amount of time before experiencing an inexplicable urge to acquire another watch. Hence the purchase a short while after the PRW of the Casio WVQ-620DE-1AVER. It was a very short lived encounter as it showed great reluctance to receive the atomic time signal. Back the shop it went.
Over the next few years I bought another three G Shocks in various flavours - a GW9200, a GW9110, and a GW2500B. Between them they have barometers, compasses, tide graphs. All of them are radio controlled and solar powered. One even has hands that align correctly at all point around the face - the only watch I‘ve ever known to be capable of such a feat. Maybe I should insure it for a vast amount of money. I also bought two Junghans pieces. Both were returned due to various failings. And there was also the second failed Casio purchase, the Pro Trek PRW-5000T. Sadly it’s downfall was the old hand misalignment chestnut. Back to the shop it went.
At one point during this sustained period of unnecessary watch procurement I found myself admiring an Oris in a jewellers window. Now this could have been a radical departure for me. I had been a life-long Quartz/Radio Controlled accuracy junkie so what was I doing looking at a collection of cogs and springs? Well, it looked really nice. I could overlook a small loss of accuracy in exchange for a very handsome watch. However, when the shop assistant told me to expect accuracy of around +/-30 secs a day I recoiled in horror. This level of accuracy was just monstrous! I left the shop feeling faint.
So this brings us more or less up to the present. It’s 2014 and I’ve managed to go a while without buying a watch but as always the creeping urge is, er, creeping. After a fair amount of research I decided it was time to acquire a Casio Pro Trek PRW-2500T-7ER. It’s the watch that does pretty much everything. Altimeter, Barometer, Compass? Check. Tide Graph and Moon Phase? Check. Solar and Radio Controlled? Obviously! I had nearly bought one a couple of years earlier but it never quite happened. This time I bought it. It arrived. I didn’t like it. Back to the shop it went.
Now we move onto what is undoubtedly the most absurd, tortured and confused episode in my whole watch owning live. Enter the Casio GPW-1000-1AER. A towering colossus of technology. A watch for a man who has reached a special time in his life. A watch for a man with strong wrists. Needless to say, the urge to buy yet another watch was still furiously pumping around my system. Now this watch is pretty expensive for a Casio. So I thought long and hard about it. I relentlessly scoured the internet for every photo, video and review I could find and eventually took the plunge. It arrived. The grand opening of the box took place. I quite liked it. In some ways I really liked it. It was very big. The watch has GPS capability so it can acquire time and location data anywhere in the world. Pretty cool. It’s also very big. I considered getting all my sleeves enlarged. The hand alignment was not perfect but was “within acceptable tolerances”. One of the sub-dials is really quite small and difficult to read, even though the watch is huge. After a week of indecision I finally tried it on. Oh my god it was huge. It was a bit like strapping a small, metallic rucksack to your wrist. I sent it back.
A little later during a non watch related trip to a jewellers, I spent some time staring through the glass of the counter displays scrutinising the hand alignment of various Citizen Solar/Radio/blah blah blah models. All hopelessly mis-aligned. Another make receives the “NOT GOOD ENOUGH” stamp and is dismissed forthwith.
Then after some further searching, fretting and general obsessing, I order another Casio GPW-1000. Identical to the one I have just returned. I’m obviously now in some choppy and troubling waters. The second watch arrives. I can’t even bring myself to open the box for several hours. Eventually I take the plunge and open it. Even though I try to stop myself I examine hand alignment. It’s perfect. Except for at Twenty past (a bit out), Twenty Five past (a bit more out) and at Ten to (a bit out). I’m sort of ok with that. I have a little mental battle to put this niggle to one side. I am almost successful. I force this internal struggle out of the way (a bit like forcing a reluctant cat into a cat carrier) and move on. The sub-dial is still very small and difficult to read. The watch is still massive. Despite my reservations I decide I will keep it. Then I decide I’m not sure. I look at it again. Do I actually like it’s overall appearance? I begin to think the hands are a weird shape. Finally, feeling like a long distance runner staggering over the finish line, I realise with a moment of clarity that I do not want this watch. Obviously this time around I haven’t even taken the various wrappings off. It is sent back. The relief and sense of closure is huge. Like the watch.
After the briefest of pauses, I have ordered another Casio, one that I have reservations about before even ordering it. Clearly I am straying into an area of my life that would probably benefit from some professional help. This is another Casio that does everything. It’s the GWN-1000B-1BER. It has a huge blue bezel that - prior to ordering - I do not really like. I order it anyway. It arrives. I take it out of the box and it remains out for around 30 seconds. I can instantly tell that the hand alignment is definitely not “within acceptable tolerances”. And the huge blue bezel looks silly. It is sent back.
A brief pause to re-group. Re-consider. Where am I going? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Should I buy a watch with no face markings so I can’t stress about hand alignment?
I start looking into mechanical clocks for some reason. My father in law would be proud of me if he knew, as he has several. Considered buying one. Watched a few on eBay. Eventually lost interest.
This unexplained new interest in mechanical timepieces then leads me to start looking at a mechanical Tissot Chronograph. Why this lunge in a new direction, as in mechanical watches? After some pondering the question I have to conclude that because I have four radio controlled watches, all of which do their job perfectly well, and having tried various other watches of the same type and finding that I don’t like any of them for a variety of reasons, I have exhausted that avenue. For now at least. So if there are no other hyper accurate electronic watches out there that float my boat, and I still find myself driven by the strange urge to acquire another watch, then re-visiting the mechanical watch world is, I guess, the only other way to go, providing you discount sundials, candle clocks, water clocks and so on. All a little impractical as wrist furniture.
In the course of pondering this Tissot I find myself immersed in a whole new world. I’m someone who loves to research things, especially things of a technical nature. And the world of mechanical watches turns out to be a broad and deep pool of information to explore. I come across all sort of new terminology - escapements, complications, hacking and non hacking, tourbillons, double tourbillons, Spron springs, the list goes on.
Anyway, back to the Tissot, a PRC200. It is quite expensive. It reminds me of an old Swiss Chronograph my father had and which held my fascination in my youth. I think I like the Tissot but there’s a tiny nugget of doubt. This watch ping pongs around in my tortured brain for a couple of weeks and then fizzles out.
Then I stumble across the Seiko family of automatic Divers watches. I don’t recall ever looking at them before and yet they seem strangely familiar. Their chunky, functional bodies and quirky hands appeal to me. I’m particularly taken with the “Pepsi Bezel”. I start obsessively researching the history of the various models and different movements. I find several vintage examples on eBay and watch them for a few days. I then realise that descendants of these old models are still available new – if you know where to look. They seem to now occupy a special niche area of the market for some unknown reason. So whilst watching the vintage models on eBay I simultaneously pore over the various versions that are still in production. Somewhere in one of the many reviews I read I see mention of yet another thing I’ve never heard of - a watch winder. That broad and deep pool I mentioned earlier keeps getting deeper.
After some days of fact finding and pondering, the auctions of old examples on eBay are ending and some of them are going for surprisingly high prices, far more than I need pay for a brand new model. So I decide that as I don’t know one old Seiko from another I’m probably better off buying a new one. So finally I order a shiny new Seiko SKX009 with Pepsi Bezel. Bearing in mind the recent trauma of multiple attempts at buying watches and sending them all back due to my numerous pernickety requirements, opening the Seiko box is a delight. I immediately like it’s appearance. The funky circular and triangular minute markers, the arrow shaped minute hand, they all delight. Kind of retro and modern at the same time. The crown at 4 o’clock instead of the usual 3 o’clock also pleases. And what of the non-quartz/radio controlled hyper accuracy? It doesn’t matter. All these years I’d had a fixation about accuracy to within a split second. This watch has given me the clarity of thought to realise that I simply don’t need this level of timekeeping on my wrist. It’s impressive and satisfying if you do have it but it really doesn’t matter if you don’t. And although the Seiko literature quotes something like +/- 30 seconds a day it actually runs at more like +/- 3 seconds a day. And another thing – this watch tells me the time, day and date, and nothing else. It doesn’t have a countdown timer. Or a stopwatch. Or an alarm. Or a barometer. Or a tide graph…. The multitude of functions I’d come to demand of watches are absent. And it doesn’t matter.
This is a watch I have a totally different relationship to. With the bells and whistles Casios I love and appreciate their technical abilities. Functionally they are perfect watches. Totally accurate, very robust, teeming with extra functions. But the Seiko with it’s beating heart of springs and gears has – a personality? I don’t know but it’s a totally different experience to an electronic watch. More Casios may join the collection in the future. And as you can see, another Seiko already has.
One thing that has come out of writing this lengthy blog, which feels like a form of therapy, is that the periods of intense “watchery” do seem to coincide with periods of intense stress in my life. Not caused by the watches – the watches act as a cushion against the stress.
Right, time for a lie down.
Class today I will read from The Poodle Book by Jeff Griffen, hopefully this will enlighten your humans.
The Poodle has been traced back to Roman times through sculpture, carving, moldings, mosaics and paintings, but unfortunately none of these exist now. Of the three different-sized Poodle, the standard is undoubtedly the oldest because it had a purpose, that of being a water retriever. Back in the days when wild game, especially waterfowl, was valued as meat for the table everyone prized a dog that helped to obtain it.
The Poodle was undoubtedly held in high esteem, for it appears in the art and writings of so many countries in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Over and over again we meet the Poodle in Germany, France, Russia, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, England, even the Low Countries of Belgium and Holland. Landseer painted his famous "Laying Down the Law", which is dear to the hearts of all Poodle breeders, for it shows a judicious white Standard Poodle giving a legal lecture to several other breeds of dogs on their transgressions. No other breed can claim to have reached such high favor in so many different places as the Poodle. In fact, most of the other breeds trace their origin back to one specific country, even a tiny area of that country but not the Poodle. He really seems to be ubiquitous, probably helped along by sea captains and circus performers who dealt in dogs on the side, carrying them to and from various ports and cities to sell to wealthy noblemen and merchants.
Undoubtedly the two features, which made the Poodle different from other dogs and accounted for its extraordinary growth, were its coat and intelligence. Its wiry, almost waterproof coat was ideal protection for hunting around marshes and rivers. When someone clipped its hindquarters, supposedly to allow it more mobility in water, leaving a longhaired ruff around the chest and heart for protection and buoyancy, there lay the base for the chic haircuts and grooming procedures we have today. Where looks might have made him merely a fad, his brains and sense of humor endeared him to both royalty and the bourgeois.
First written mention of the Poodle as a breed appeared in northern Germany and western Russia. In 1524, the German writer Gesner describes a dog called a Pudel as a retriever, specifically for waterfowl, in which task, he says; the dog has no superior. In fact the German word Pudel, from whence comes our word Poodle, means to splash in water. A large dog similar to our standard of today, he was usually black or brown, occasionally white, particularly the Russian variety. In Belgium and Holland he was known as Poedel and used for the same purpose.
In France, the large Poodle was first known as the Barbet, the origin of which word is confusing. It may relate to the French word barb, meaning, "Bearded", or to a species of bearded duck known to have existed in France in early times, or to the Barbary Coast (North Africa, specifically Morocco).
The great early German authority on dog breeds, Dr. Fitzinger, listed six varieties of Poodles in his area: Gros Pudel, Mittlere Pudel, Kleine Pudel, Kleine Pinsch, Schnur Pudel and Schaf Pudel. The word Schaf means "curly and the word Schnur means, "corded", a separate breed, which we shall describe in a moment. The Gros Pudel was called Can Barbone by the Italians and Grand Barbet by the French. It was the largest type, equal to our standard Poodle of today, and probably even included our royal standard, the super size that we occasionally see now. The Mittlere Pudel was called the Barbet in France and is currently known there as the Caniche. It is not a miniature but merely a shade smaller than our ordinary standard of today, the word caniche coming from canard, the French word for "duck".
The French claim the Poodle for their own, rejecting all claims that its origin is in Germany or elsewhere. Though the facts tend to dispute them, we in the United States have gone along with them for so long that the breed is unofficially but automatically called a French Poodle here. And one might easily put forth a sound argument in defense of this claim on the grounds that the Poodle is certainly more French than German in manner. He is full of joie de vivre (happiness) and humor, not methodically serious or precise like the other German hunting dogs - the Shorthair, Weimaraner, etc. - which closely parallel the German temperament
The history of the Poodle has been long and noble, one that could continue on through several more books and one of which you can be justly proud. There have been famous war poodles like Moustache, who fought in the Napoleonic wars, was decorated for bravery by Marshall Lannes and died in combat beside his beloved Grenadiers in Spain. There were the white standards, which graced the court of Louis XIV, and when Marie Antoinette was imprisoned, her miniature Poodle visited her faithfully every day outside her prison window until she was guillotined (Marie, not the Poodle).
So you can be sure that, wherever you go and no matter how long you're gone, your Poodle will welcome you back with a bouncing leap of joy, a wagging tail and a bark or two of proper recognition. The French have and old expression that describes him - "fidele comme une caniche"--- "faithful as a Poodle".
Class---please take your copy home for your humans to read. They will be impressed with this knowledge and I guarantee you my fellow STANDARD POODLES the treats and praises will be flowing your way……by the way I have seen some photoshopped photos posted on facebook by a Mary Lou Cole showing Egyptians carvings, etc. of standard poodles…….interesting ….check them out class.
Fabio, Barbie, Rio, Cali, Oliver, CeeJay, Vaughn and Bosley our class dismissed for the day…….
While my father and I spend most of our time working on parts recovery for the Minibus project Graham has been methodically cleaning and painting under the front end of the bus. This is the last area of the bus to get his attention and once complete the complete underside of the bus will have been scraped wire brushed, cleaned and painted, what an effort!
# 9 on my top 1000 list is Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." Despite the complete lack of any evidence whatsoever for my position, I'm absolutely convinced this song is about the Confederate General John Bell Hood. Stephen Vincent Benet characterized Hood as "all lion, none of the fox."
Hood, a Kentuckian and later an adopted Texian, barely graduated from West Point in 1853, having accumulated 196 of the 200 permissible demerits. When the Civil War began, he joined the Confederacy and rapidly became a brigadier general (in 1862). He immediately began quarreling with his superior officers (once being arrested for insubordination).
Hood was apparently a hottie. Mary Chestnut, the famous Confederate diarist, described him as "a beau-ideal of the wild Texans. He is tall, thin, and shy; has blue eyes and light hair; a tawny beard, and a vast amount of it, covering the lower part of his face, the whole appearance that of awkward strength. Some one said that his great reserve of manner he carried only into the society of ladies."
Despite the huge chip on his shoulder, Hood rapidly rose in the Confederate Army, an organization in which aggression was prized over judgment. At Gettysburg, an artillery shell cost him the use of his left arm for the rest of his life. Only two months later, while leading a charge at the Battle of Chickamauga, Hood was severely wounded and his right leg was amputated above the knee.
These grievous wounds didn't prevent John Bell from proposing marriage to a Charleston, South Carolina hottie (she begged off) or from being promoted to commanding general for the Confederate forces defending against Sherman's March through Georgia.
After Sherman methodically destroyed Hood's forces arrayed in defense of Atlanta, the ever-aggressive (though missing an arm and a leg) Hood decided that he would take his army and invade the North!
Strategically, this was insanity, since the federal troops at Nashville and central Tennessee vastly outnumbered Hood's troops.
No matter. Hood attacked the numerically superior Yankees at the battles of Franklin and Nashville -- where his Confederate army was systematically eliminated. His army effectively ceased to exist, losing 23,000 of his original 38,000 soldiers. This was the death blow to the Confederacy, which no longer had any realistic chance of winning the Civil War after Hood let its western army be destroyed.
After the Civil War, the crippled Hood married and had 11 children. He, his wife, and his oldest son died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1879 -- leaving behind 10 orphan children.
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Back to the 21st century, these are the lyrics to Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down."
Well I won't back down, no I won't back down
You could stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down.
Gonna stand my ground, won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down
[Chorus:]
Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I won't back down
Well I know what's right, I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin' me around
But I'll stand my ground and I won't back down
Hey baby there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I won't back down
No, I won't back down
“Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon”. – Nat Wolff.
Bix Beiderbecke & His Gang – At the jazz band ball ♪♫ youtu.be/ihKr81zqxek
Photo taken with mobile pone (Nokia Lumia 930) and edited with PicMonkey.
A storm clears the Friendship and the nearby Pedrick House. This building is the original building that was built in 1770 on the Marblehead side of Salem harbor. The building had many purposes over the years and it's link to Salem was through one of it's owners. William Story bought the building from Pedrick and intended to run his business from there as he was a ship captain and he sailed as Captain of the 1797 version of the Friendship (The link to Salem). The park service managed to get the building transferred to them and Salem's NHS (National Historic site) and then a labor of love began as it was taken apart very methodically and brought to Salem. It was then piece by piece put back together and it sits much as it had in the 1770s through the early 1900s..
In nice early morning light, this Yellowstone Coyote was moving methodically through the sage brush searching for its next meal, when that super sensitive nose or those ears detected something. It froze in this position, but it must have been a false alarm, as it waited for a few seconds and then resumed its search.
Best viewed "Large"
This bird was methodical. It cleared all within reach before putting any energy into changing position.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of nineteen (twenty were originally constructed) intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science. Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.
The dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1:12) scale. She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. The dioramas show tawdry and, in many cases, disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." Students were instructed to study the scenes methodically—Glessner Lee suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
A dramatic moment from 'Kin' by Barely Methodical Troupe which is part of the The Underbelly Circus Hub at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
You can book tickets here: www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/whats-on/kin
I couldn't go to sleep so I tried to photograph a shot that I have been trying to execute for some time now. It's not really anything special (and somewhat cliche), but it's progress nonetheless. I've also been trying be a little more methodical and calculated when balancing ambient with flash exposure with minimal chimping (emphasis on trying)
Strobist:
SB700 into slightly collapsed 43" shoot thru umbrella at camera left triggered by Phottix Strato II's.
* The characters are modified action figures with wax carved faces; all interiors are hand made in my shop, except the uniforms. The civilian outfits are also hand sewn and the hair is real The set was inspired by the eighteen equally intricate designed dollhouse-style interiors made by Frances Glessner Lee, which she titled "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" The set consists of a series of eighteen intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by the greatest and my favorite doll house interior designer Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress with an interest in forensic science.
Her dioramas are detailed representations of death scenes that are composites of actual court cases, created by Glessner Lee on a 1 inch to 1 foot (1 : 12) scale./same as mine/ She attended autopsies to ensure accuracy, and her attention to detail extended to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric. She called them the Nutshell Studies because the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell. Students were instructed to study the scene methodically—she suggested moving the eyes in a clockwise spiral—and draw conclusions from the visual evidence. At conferences hosted by Glessner Lee, prominent crime-scene investigators were given 90 minutes to study each diorama.
The dioramas show tawdry and in many cases disheveled living spaces very different from Glessner Lee's own background. The dead include prostitutes and victims of domestic violence.
Glessner Lee used her inheritance to set up Harvard's department of legal medicine, and donated the Nutshell dioramas in 1945 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966 the department was dissolved and the sets were placed in storage. Presently the dioramas can be viewed by appointment at the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore. A exhibit well worth while to visit for those interested in doll house interiors.Those wishing to view these sets, I strongly suggest making an appointment well before setting out to view them.
Ancient Thonetschlössl, District Museum
Object ID: 32954 Josef Deutsch-Platz 2
Former Capuchin monastery of 1631, 1785 secularized and acquired in 1786 by Giacomo Cagliano. Altgräfin (grandduchess) Elise von Salm the building had rebuilt similar to a castle. In 1889, it was acquired by the Thonet family, 1930/31 by the Savings Bank of the City of Mödling that housed there the since 1904 existing District Museum.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_denkmalgesch%C3%BCtzten_O...
(further information you can get by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
History
Plaque to the founder of the Hyrtl'schen orphanage Joseph Hyrtl and Joseph Schöffel
© IMAREAL / E. Vavra
The Biedermeier-influenced city on the edge of the Vienna Woods is the capital of the district Mödling in the south of Vienna. The town has experienced in its 1100-year history since the first mention very different phases: in the Middle Ages briefly Babenberg residence, for centuries an economically potent wine market, from the 19th Century summer resort and industrial center, since 1875 town, in the 20th Century for almost two decades XXIVth district of Vienna, since 1954 again an independent municipality of Lower Austria and as a school and garden city popular residential area in the vicinity of Vienna.
Mödling has partnerships with cities in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Serbia, Bulgaria and Italy.
The historical tradition of Mödling goes back far beyond the first written mention, how settlement finds from the Neolithic Age, Hallstatt period (eg calendar mountain) and Roman times as well as the great Avar burial ground "at the Golden Staircase" from the 7/8th Century BCE prove. In the year 903 Mödling is first mentioned (Medilihha). The later settlement was probably made in the 11th Century beneath an early castle building on the church mountain (Kirchenberg), where later a Romanesque predecessor of Othmar church was built.
In the late 12th century Mödling was for a few decades the residence of a Babenberg branch line. Henry the Elder, a brother of Duke Leopold V., had since the 1170 century belongings in and around Mödling. He and his son Henry the Younger, calling himself "Duke of Mödling", resided on the castle probably built around 1150 in the Klausen, among whose most famous visitors was Walther von der Vogelweide. With the death of Henry the Younger in 1236 extinguished the Mödlinger line of the Babenberg and the reign became princely domain. The time of the Babenberg commemorates the in late 12th Century built Romanesque ossuary at Othmar church - a circular building with an apse - as well as the denomination "Babenberg".
In the late Middle Ages, Medlich developed into a major wine market (1343 mention of market town) which in the 15th Century as one of the four princely spell markets was also represented in the Parliament - in addition to Gumpoldskirchen, Langenlois and Perchtoldsdorf. For centuries shaped the wine-growing the economy and social structure. The Mödlinger wine was good and helped the market particularly in the 15th and 16th Century to its prosperity. The settlement reached at the end of the Middle Ages that extent, which until the 19th Century should remain essentially unchanged. The center formed the area around the Schrannenplatz with a dense stand of late medieval and early modern town houses that bear evidence of the wealth and self-confidence of the citizens of the market town. From the late medieval Schrannen building, the official residence of the market judge, was created in 1548 the representative Renaissance town hall with loggia.
The elevated lying Othmar church became in the 15th Century by transferring the rights of the church of St. Martin parish church of Mödling. The massive late Gothic church was built in a nearly 70-year construction period from 1454 to 1523 on the walls of six predecessors and able to resist fortified. As Mödling was destroyed in 1529 by the Ottomans, the just completed church lost its roof and remained for over a century till the restoration in 1660/70 a ruin. On the Merian engraving from 1649 the uncovered Othmar church on the left side is clearly visible. As a temporary parish church served the about 1450 built late-Gothic hospital church.
The internal conditions at this time were mainly marked of the clashes of the market with the princely rule Burg Mödling - since 1558 combined with the rule of Liechtenstein - which reached its climax in 1600 under the energetic administrator Georg Wiesing (1593-1611). During the Reformation, the market largely became Protestant. In the course of recatholicization a Capuchin monastery was founded in 1631, which served as a factory after the repeal under Joseph II and was then bought by the Thonet family (so-called Thonet Schlössel, today Bezirksmuseum).
In Türkenjahr 1683 (besiegement of the Turks) took place in the Othmar church a horrific bloodbath, in which hundreds of people who had sought refuge there were killed. The church was destroyed again, but this time built up rapidly with the market judge Wolfgang Ignaz Viechtl in a few years.
End of the 18th Century occurred in Mödling the settlement of industrial enterprises, especially textile mills that took advantage of the cheaper production possibilities and also its proximity to Vienna. Was decisively shaped the character of the place but by the rise to a summer resort, initiated by Prince Johann I of Liechtenstein beginning of the 19th Century, which acquired in 1807 the rule of Liechtenstein-Mödling with the former family ancestral home. He had the area under enormous cost reforested (Schirmföhren/pinus mugo, acacia, etc.) and transformed to a public park in Romantic style with promenade paths, steep paths and artificial constructions (Black tower, amphitheater, Husarentempel). The ruined castles Mödling and Liechtenstein were restored. The former Liechtenstein'sche landscape park is considered a remarkable example of the garden culture in 1800 and is now a popular tourist destination (1974 Natural Preserve Föhrenberge).
Since the Biedermeier Mödling in the summer was an extremely popular artist hangout. Among the most famous artists of the 19th Century who were inspired by the romantic nature here, were Franz Schubert, Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Waldmüller, Ferdinand Raimund and Ludwig van Beethoven, who here worked on one of his major works, the "Missa Solemnis". In the 20th Century settled inter alia Arnold Schönberg, Anton von Webern, Anton Wildgans, Franz Theodor Csokor and Albert Drach temporarily or permanently down. To Beethoven, Schönberg and Wildgans memorials have been established (Beethoven House, Schönberg House, Wildgans archive).
In the second half of the 19th Century Mödling became administrative center (District Court, District administration) and an industrial site and educational location with high schools and colleges (eg educational establishment Francisco-Josephinum). The good traffic situation at the southern railway, the progressive industrialization and the expansion of health facilities (park, Kursalon) led to a rapid expansion of the hitherto for centuries unchanged market. Under mayor Joseph Schöffel (1873-1882), who became famous because of his successful engagement against the deforestation of the Vienna Woods as the "savior of the Vienna Woods", followed the methodical installation of the so-called Schoeffel(before) city - Schöffelvorstadt (New Mödling) east of the Southern Railway and the establishment of workers' settlements. Later followed the exclusive residential areas of the turn of the century with their representative residential buildings. Probably the most important building of the late 19th Century is the Hyrtl'sche orphanage (1886-1889), founded by the Viennese anatomist, Joseph Hyrtl and Joseph Schöffel. The Orphanage church St. Joseph was built on the in 1787 demolished Martin Church.
On 18th November 1875 the emerging market town was raised to the status of a city, two years later the incorporation of Klausen and Vorderbrühl took place. Through the establishment of Great-Vienna under the Nazi regime on 15th October 1938 the young city for 16 years lost its municipal autonomy; 1954 it became again a part of Lower Austria.
Symbol for the characteristic environment of Mödling was the "width pine" on the Anninger whose age goes back to the 16th Century (around 1550). It was a well-known natural landmark and has become the symbol of the city. 1988 died the tree and it had to be removed in 1997 for safety reasons. The remains are now in the Lower Austrian Provincial Museum.
geschichte.landesmuseum.net/index.asp?contenturl=http://g...
They dock workers walking by as Peruvian Pelicans hang out in the background. Photo taken at the port of Paita, Peru.
Though closely related, the Peruvian Pelican is almost twice as large as its northern congener, the Brown Pelican. The species breeds along the Pacific Coast of South America in Peru and Chile. Though still common, with about half a million breeding adults, the population has been negatively affected by strong El Niño fluctuations and changes in food fish populations, particularly anchoveta. Peruvian Pelicans are easily observed from shore as they fly back and forth in nearshore waters by means of soaring interrupted by deep, methodical wingbeats.
Claude Monet (1840-1926) oil on canvas at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Written near the painting: Between 1892 and 1894, Monet turned away from his usual landscape subjects and painted thirty views of Rouen Cathedral with a methodical intensity that was unparalleled in his career. For Monet, the Gothic monument was less important as a religious symbol than as a permanent, richly textured surface on which light and atmosphere could play with infinite and colorful variation.
See this and more of my work at johnkirkland.pixels.com
If you are ever near St. Augustine, Florida, and it is nesting season, you have to check out the bird rookery at the Alligator Farm! This Tricolored Heron was having a great day people watching on the boardwalk.
From www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Tricolored_Heron/overview#
The Tricolored Heron is a sleek and slender heron adorned in blue-gray, lavender, and white. The white stripe down the middle of its sinuous neck and its white belly set it apart from other dark herons. This fairly small heron wades through coastal waters in search of small fish, often running and stopping with quick turns and starts, as if dancing in a ballet. It builds stick nests in trees and shrubs, often in colonies with other wading birds. It’s common in southern saltmarshes and was once known as the Louisiana Heron.
Coastal estuaries are a great place to look for Tricolored Herons year-round. They tend to feed alone or at the edge of groups of other waders, so be sure to look at the lone dark bird in the corner. They also forage more commonly in open water and pools than Snowy Egrets and Little Blue Herons. Their white belly readily separates them from Little Blue Herons and Reddish Egrets, and their active foraging style separates them from the slow and methodical Great Blue Heron.
Cool Facts
Tricolored Herons sometimes follow behind Double-crested Cormorants or Pied-billed Grebes snapping up fish that they stir up.
Angsty teenagers aren't just a human phenomenon. As Tricolored Herons get older they often lunge and snap at their parents when they arrive at the nest with food. To appease the youngsters, parents greet them with bows.
The oldest recorded Tricolored Heron was at least 17 years, 8 months old when it was shot in the Bahamas in 1976. It had been banded in Virginia in 1958.