It was neat watching this photographer work. He didn't seem to mind me walking beside him and observing him in action.

 

He had a quick but methodical approach to framing shots of individuals or small groups within the larger Sensoji crowd. I was a little surprised by how many shots he was taking. He would walk a couple steps while hunting for interesting people in the crowd > pause > frame > shoot > wind > drop his camera to the level you are seeing in this picture and then repeat this process at a 1 shot per 5 - 15 secs interval. I suppose the rate seemed particularly quick considering he was shooting film but I suppose when you are shooting with a leica, the cost of film isn't your top concern.

 

On a separate but related note, I have never seen so many leica's in my life. Both as stock for sale in the multitude of fabulous Tokyo camera shops and as jewels hanging from the necks of tourists and locals alike. Luxury is odd.

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to having a wall calendar include the pages after the month of the incident, constructing openable windows, and wearing out-of-date clothing to obtain realistically worn fabric.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.

Ejection seat from the supersonic SR-71. The seat is of the variant designated C-2, which was used in the very early A-12 and SR-71 Blackbirds and is the only SR-71 ejection seat in private hands worldwide. First, a bit of history about this fantastic aircraft. The SR-71 is part of the family of aircraft known as the “Blackbirds,” which are stealth aircraft that were designed and produced by Lockheed’s Skunk Works and include the A-12 used by the CIA (13 made), the YF-12 interceptor used by the USAF (3 made), the M-21 used to launch a reconnaissance drone (2 made) and the SR-71, the USAF long range reconnaissance aircraft (32 made). In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had protested overflights by subsonic American U-2 spy planes. In response, Lockheed's Skunk Works had developed the A-12 spy plane for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; and in 1960 was awarded a contract to build 12 of these aircraft. The single seat A-12 featured a stealth design to minimize its radar cross-section, and was supersonic to overcome the weakness of the U-2’s vulnerability to surface to air missile attack. At the same time that Skunk Works was developing the A-12, the USAF was seeking a replacement for the F-106 Delta Dart. Skunk Works' Kelly Johnson proposed to the USAF a version of the A-12 called the AF-12. The USAF ordered three AF-12s in mid-1960 and these aircraft were the seventh through ninth A-12’s made. The Air Force version was longer and heavier than the CIA version of the A-12. Its fuselage was lengthened for additional fuel capacity to increase range and the cockpit was modified to add a second crew member to operate the fire control radar. The aircraft's nose was modified to accommodate the Hughes AN/ASG-18 fire-control radar originally developed for the XF-108; this modification changed the aircraft's aerodynamics enough to require ventral fins to be mounted under the fuselage and engine nacelles to maintain stability. Finally, four bays previously used to house the A-12's reconnaissance equipment were converted to carry Hughes AIM-47 Falcon (GAR-9) missiles and one bay was used for fire control equipment. The new USAF A-12 was designated the YF-12A interceptor, the first of which flew on August 7, 1963. After testing the three AF-12’s and realizing the potential of the A-12 design, in December 1962 the Air Force ordered a long-range strategic reconnaissance version of the A-12, which was designated the R-12 by Lockheed. Capable of flying at speeds over Mach 3.2 with a ceiling at 85,000 feet (and it still holds the record since 1976 as the fastest airplane ever built), it could evade missile attack by simply accelerating. Like the YF-12, the R-12’s fuselage was lengthened beyond the original A-12 configuration for additional fuel capacity to increase range, its cockpit included a second seat and the chines were reshaped. The aircraft’s reconnaissance equipment included signals intelligence sensors, a side-looking radar and a photo camera. Facing political pressure and claims that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union in the research and development of new weapons systems, then-president Lyndon Johnson decided to publicly announce the YF-12A (which had served as cover for the still-secret A-12) and the Air Force reconnaissance model R-12. Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay preferred the designation “SR (Strategic Reconnaissance”) for the new USAF aircraft and wanted the R-12 to be named SR-71. He lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to change the aircraft’s name to SR-71 and he was successful. This public announcement of the formerly secret program and the change to the aircraft’s designation came as a shock to Skunk Works and to Air Force personnel involved in the program. But the change to the aircraft’s designation was perceived as an order from the Commander-in-Chief; and accordingly, Skunk Works began reprinting over 29,000 blueprints for aircraft, retitled as "SR-71". Costing $33 million each, the first SR-71 entered service in 1966. Made primarily from titanium acquired from the USSR (Lockheed used subterfuge to prevent the Soviet government from knowing what the titanium was to be used for), the aircraft were painted a dark blue (almost black) to increase the transference of heat from the interior of the aircraft (the plane’s fuel was a heat sink for avionics cooling) and as camouflage against the night sky. The SR-71 was unofficially named the Blackbird, after BLACK SHIELD, the name for the A-12 missions in Vietnam and Southeast Asia based out of Okinawa Japan; and was also called the Habu by its crews, referring to an Okinawan species of pit viper. In 1968 the Blackbird program was cancelled and on February 5, 1968 Lockheed was ordered to destroy all the tooling for the A-12, YF-12, and SR-71 aircraft. But the SR-71 continued in service until 1990, by which time the Blackbird family of aircraft had completed 17,300 total sorties flown, 53,490 total flight hours and 11,675 hours of flight time at Mach 3. The SR-71 flew for 17 straight years (1972-1989) without a loss of plane or crew. Twelve of the 32 aircraft that were built were destroyed in accidents, though none were lost to enemy action. The aircraft was officially retired in 1990, but the lack of other resources to accomplish the reconnaissance needed by the US military prompted the Congress in 1994 to approve funds to bring three of these aircraft back out of retirement. They served the USAF until 1999 when the aircraft was finally retired for the last time. Although an aircraft manufacturer is responsible for ejection seat development as part of designing and building aircraft under government contracts, it is often sub-contracted to other companies that were more experienced in the industry. In the case of the SR-71, Lockheed turned to Stanley Aviation Corp. for the development of the ejection seat. Stanley had previously developed the B seat for the F 104 and the C-1 seat. Visually, the C-2 was very similar to the C-1, with a few notable differences. The foot rests were changed to remove the sides, and hinged to the bottom front edge of the seat bucket. Another quickly identifiable visual difference is the shape of the ejection pull handle, which was triangular on the C-1 where the C-2 used a 'D' shape (flat side down). This was done to give better grip from the pilot's hands and it would reduce the tendency to pull to one side if only one hand was used to initiate ejection. The automatic lap belt was also changed to a newer model. The parachute (BA-18 and -22) system of the C-2 included a lanyard activated timer mechanism to give some time for the seat to be clear prior to parachute deployment. The headrest was beefed up a little and a canopy breaker was attached to it. These features allowed for the foot retracts to work more reliably, the handle to be grabbed easier, and if the canopy failed to jettison, to eject through the glass. The other major change was of course to the XM10 rocket catapult for upward ejection. The C-2 style seat was ultimately replaced in 1967 / 1968 with the later SR-1 variant, which was designated the “RQ201”. Some of the noticeable differences between the SR-1 and the C-2 variants include the omission of the leg guards and arm restraint nets on the SR-1 which were used on the C-2, the secondary ejection handle has been relocated to the left side for the SR-1, the double-d ring is replaced with a single loop d-ring on the SR-1 and the seat bucket and headrest are shaped differently.

 

Methodical examination of part numbers on this seat by the consignor of this item, coupled with his extensive research and communication with experts and pilots of the SR-71, have identified this seat as belonging to an SR-71. This identification is supported by part numbers on various components beginning with A prefix (parts used on all variants of the Blackbird family except D-21) and 4A (denotes parts used on SR-71A and SR-71B) and Q (denotes parts used in the cockpit and life support systems for the aircraft). . In addition, some of the parts bear the unique aircraft inspection stamp used by Lockheed ADP and some are dated 1965 / 1966. Examples of the part numbers found on this seat can be seen in photos accompanying this lot, as follows: Photo 175-7: Part number 4AQ345 RING MOUNT INSTALLATION - MANUAL CUTTER plate found behind Manual Spur release handle on right side of head rest Photo175_8: Part numbers AQ149-11B Support, Headrest, Ejection Seat with Lockheed ADP Inspection Stamp, AQ338 EXTENSION TUBE, "D" RING, EJECTOR SEAT, AQ301-3 A "D" Ring Bracket Cover Assembly Serial Number and AQ149-8 Support, Headrest, Ejection Seat with Lockheed ADP Inspection Stamp Photo 175_9: parts stamped with Lockheed Skunkworks inspection stamps denoting “Functional Test” and dated 1965 and 1966 respectively. This seat is in overall very good condition and does not bear evidence of having been ejected. This is an incredibly rare aviation artifact in museum quality condition.

  

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.”

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There is another photo site that has a group called Sad Carts. Certainly this one is sad. IMG_3183

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TO MY VALUED VIEWERS: THIS IS JUST AN EXPERIMENT PUTTING THIS STORY WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPH. THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER!

 

(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 as 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; 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 up 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 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 this family had to the British imperial enterprise and colonial service however, readers of these letters should be cognisant of the racist casual undertones and sentiments of their author and those of the other major Western individuals involved in the amusing, gossipy, nonchalant and witty anecdotal events that Emily Lorimer is recounting whether tacitly or explicitly including Jacques Cartier, the young inquisitive self-assured French bourgeoisie jeweller with the keen anthropological eye who serves as the centrepiece of the excerpts, her reserved colonial officer husband David Lorimer and the Protestant theologian missionary Dr. Samuel Zwemer from the then racially segregated United States of America who was closely cooperating with British colonial authorities in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf and Egypt on his so-called holy mission to civilise 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 towards embracing the doctrine of the Trinity as manifested in Jesus Christ the son of God as their 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 Western 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 passively abusive 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 and throughout the subsequent long genocidal pacification of the sprawling spans of the Algerian terrain lasting 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 coastal area until the end of the occupation, thereupon hundreds of thousands of settlers fled the country in droves in the wake 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 preliminary exercises for future transgressions in the Algerian war of independence witnessing the so-called civilised French committing untold atrocities, from bombing villages and carrying out summary executions of both combatants and civilians to using systematic torture as collective punishment for Algerians, whom the French had frequently portrayed patronisingly in official documents as ungrateful indolent capricious childlike and barbaric Muslims, inherently monolithic in nature unwilling to adopt the auspicious civilising methods imparted to them by their highly civilised French colonisers, and also regurgitated in numerous French civilian narratives and reports throughout the colonial period further these degrading stereotypes, tropes and cliches were consistently invoked in French orientalist discourse in unison with the prevailing European orientalist discourse of the time 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 soil 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, 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 louche "Opium Wars" when Britain at last succeeded in tipping the long-contentious issue of the trade imbalance with China in its favour by the devious, 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 disastrous 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 between 1839-1842 and later by the combined might of Europe's two major maritime powers, Britain and France, in the second between 1856-1860 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, for Lytton a quintessentially imperialist byproduct of Britain's fully developed industrial revolution overwhelming free market capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century 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 expandable 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 had been 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 Pré-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 of all sorts 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 and exploitative working and living 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 African emancipated 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 middle-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 the rest of Europe then 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, namely 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 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 then 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 as 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 to highlight the risks of interbreeding with perceived inferior races, 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, 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 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 whereby 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 Granada the last Muslim Kingdom in Iberia, fell to the Catholic Castilians in 1492 both Muslims and Jews became the target of merciless terror under the newly established Spanish Inquisition in 1478 by the officially devoutly married Catholic joint sovereigns of their respective kingdoms, Monarchs Ferdinand II King of Aragon and Isabella I Queen Regnant 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, consisting of an amalgamation of disparate peoples, many of whom the Nazis considered racial inferiors as Romani people (Roma Gypsies), Slavs, mixed-race Germans, or those with severe physical disabilities, chronic mental illnesses, carriers of hereditary diseases and anyone else who defied Nazi ideology, for example 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 grafting process policy 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 begetting future geopolitical tumultuous changes with unremitting disastrous consequences for the peoples of the region until the present 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 the then 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 colonialisation 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.

thegoldensieve.com

 

A good thing continues

 

Some six months ago, I posted almost 100 images and a few thoughts I felt were missing from the many existing RX1 reviews. The outpouring of support and interest in that article was very gratifying. When I published, I had used the camera for six full months, enough time to come to a view of its strengths and weaknesses and to produce a small portfolio of good images, but not enough time to see the full picture (pun intended). In the following six months, I have used the camera at least as frequently as in the first six and have produced another small set of good images. It should be noted that my usage of the RX1 in the last six (and especially in the last 3) months has involved less travel and more time with the family and around the house; I will share relatively few of these images but will spend some time sharing my impressions of its functionality for family snapshots as I am sure there is some interest. And let it be said here: one of the primary motivations to purchase the camera was to take more photos with the family, and after one full year I can confidently say: money well spent.

The A7/r game-changer?

 

In the past six months, Sony have announced and released two full-frame, interchangeable lens cameras that clearly take design cues from the RX1: the A7 and the A7r. These cameras are innovative and highly capable and, as such, are in the midst of taking the photography world by storm. I think they are compelling enough cameras that I wonder whether Sony is wasting its energy continuing to develop further A-mount cameras. Sony deserve credit for a bold strategy—many companies would have been content to allow the success of the the RX1 (and RX1R) generate further sales before pushing further into the white space left unexplored by camera makers with less ambition.This is not the place to detail the relative advantages and disadvantages of the RX1 versus the A7/r except to make the following point. I currently use a Nikon D800 and an RX1: were I to sell both and purchase the A7r + 35mm f/2.8 I would in many ways lose nothing by way of imaging capability or lens compatibility but would pocket the surplus $1250-1750. Indeed this loyal Nikon owner thought long and hard about doing so, which speaks to the strategic importance of these cameras for a company trying to make inroads into a highly concentrated market.Ultimately, I opted to hang onto the two cameras I have (although this decision is one that I revisit time and time again) and continue to use them as I have for the past year. Let me give you a quick flavor of why.

The RX1 is smaller and more discrete

 

This is a small a point, but my gut reaction to the A7/r was: much smaller than the D800, not as small as the RX1. The EVF atop the A7/r and the larger profile of interchangeable mount lenses means that I would not be able to slip the A7/r into a pocket the way I can the RX1. Further, by virtue of using the EVF and its loud mechanical shutter, the A7/r just isn’t as stealthy as the RX1. Finally, f/2 beats the pants off of f/2.8 at the same or smaller size.At this point, some of you may be saying, “Future Sony releases will allow you to get a body without an EVF and get an f/2 lens that has a slimmer profile, etc, etc.” And that’s just the point: to oversimplify things, the reason I am keeping my RX1 is that Sony currently offers something close to an A7 body without a built-in EVF and with a slimmer profile 35mm f/2.

The D800 has important functional advantages

 

On the other side of the spectrum, the AF speed of the A7/r just isn’t going to match the D800, especially when the former is equipped with a Nikon lens and F-mount adapter. EVFs cannot yet match the experience of looking through the prism and the lens (I expect they will match soon, but aren’t there yet). What’s more, I have made such an investment in Nikon glass that I can’t yet justify purchasing an adapter for a Sony mount or selling them all for Sony’s offerings (many of which aren’t to market yet).Now, all of these are minor points and I think all of them disappear with an A8r, but they add up to something major: I have two cameras very well suited to two different types of shooting, and I ask myself if I gain or lose by getting something in between—something that wasn’t quite a pocket shooter and something that was quite a DSLR? You can imagine, however, that if I were coming to the market without a D800 and an RX1, that my decision would be far different: dollar for dollar, the A7/r would be a no-brainer.During the moments when I consider selling to grab an A7r, I keep coming back to a thought I had a month or so before the RX1 was announced. At that time I was considering something like the NEX cameras with a ZM 21mm f/2.8 and I said in my head, “I wish someone would make a carry-around camera with a full frame sensor and a fixed 35mm f/2.8 or f/2.” Now you understand how attractive the RX1 is to me and what a ridiculously high bar exists for another camera system to reach.

Okay, so what is different from the last review?

 

For one, I had an issue with the camera’s AF motor failing to engage and giving me an E61:00 error. I had to send it out to Sony for repairs (via extended warranty and service plan). I detailed my experience with Sony Service here [insert link] and I write to you as a very satisfied customer. That is to say, I have 3 years left on a 4 year + accidental damage warranty and I feel confident enough in that coverage to say that I will have this beauty in working order for at least another 3 years.For two, I’ve spent significantly less time thinking of this camera as a DSLR replacement and have instead started to develop a very different way of shooting with it. The activation barrier to taking a shot with my D800 is quite high. Beyond having to bring a large camera wherever you go and have it in hand, a proper camera takes two hands and full attention to produce an image. I shoot slowly and methodically and often from a tripod with the D800. In contrast, I can pull the RX1 out, pop off the lens cap, line up and take a shot with one hand (often with a toddler in the other). This fosters a totally different type of photography.

My “be-there” camera

 

The have-everywhere camera that gives DSLR type controls to one-handed shooting lets me pursue images that happen very quickly or images that might not normally meet the standards of “drag-the-DSLR-out-of-the-bag.” Many of those images you’ll see on this post. A full year of shooting and I can say this with great confidence: the RX1 is a terrific mash-up of point-and-shoot and DSLR not just in image quality and features, but primarily in the product it helps me create. To take this thinking a bit further: I find myself even processing images from the RX1 differently than I would from my DSLR. So much so that I have strongly considered starting a tumblr and posting JPEGs directly from the RX1 via my phone or an iPad rather than running the bulk of them through Lightroom, onto Flickr and then on the blog (really this is just a matter of time, stay tuned, and those readers who have experience with tumblr, cloud image storage and editing, etc, etc, please contact me, I want to pick your brain).Put simply, I capture more spontaneous and beautiful “moments” than I might have otherwise. Photography is very much an exercise in “f/8 and be there,” and the RX1 is my go-to “be there” camera.

The family camera

 

I mentioned earlier that I justified the purchase of the RX1 partly as a camera to be used to document the family moments into which a DSLR doesn’t neatly fit. Over the past year I’ve collected thousands and thousands of family images with the RX1. The cold hard truth is that many of those photos could be better if I’d taken a full DSLR kit with me to the park or the beach or the grocery store each time. The RX1 is a difficult camera to use on a toddler (or any moving subject for that matter); autofocus isn’t as fast as a professional DSLR, it’s difficult to perfectly compose via an LCD (especially in bright sunlight), but despite these shortcomings, it’s been an incredibly useful family camera. There are simply so many beautiful moments where I had the RX1 over my shoulder, ready to go that whatever difficulties exist relative to a DSLR, those pale in comparison to the power of it’s convenience. The best camera is the one in your hand.

Where to go from here.

 

So what is the value of these RX1 going forward, especially in a world of the A7/r and it’s yet-to-be-born siblings without an EVF and a pancake lens? Frankly, at its current price (which is quite fair when you consider the value of the the body and the lens) I see precious little room for an independent offering versus a mirrorless, interchangeable lens system with the same image quality in a package just as small. That doesn’t mean Sony won’t make an RX2 or an RX1 Mark II (have a look at it’s other product lines to see how many SKUs are maintained despite low demand). Instead, I see the RX1 as a bridge that needed to exist for engineers, managers, and the market to make it to the A7/r and it’s descendants.A Facebook friend recently paid me a great compliment; he said something like, “Justin, via your blog, you’ve sold a ton of RX1 cameras.” Indeed, despite my efforts not to be a salesman, I think he’s right: I have and would continue to recommend this camera.The true value of the RX1 going forward is for those of us who have the thing on our shoulders; and yes, if you have an investment in and a love for a DSLR system, there’s still tremendous value in getting one, slinging it over your shoulder, and heading out into the wide, bright world; A7/r or no, this is just an unbelievably capable camera.

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.”

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TO MY VALUED VIEWERS: THIS IS JUST AN EXPERIMENT PUTTING THIS STORY WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPH. THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER!

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(879catlegsathumanesociety) <---------- just my file name

 

"Experiment ~ Cat's Fur Has Pattern of Bear or Wolf's Face"

  

the gentleman was not s'posed to be in the shot, came to retrieve his ride as I was framing... after 10 minutes of his careful, methodical prepping of clothing for riding in mid-30's temps, I clicked the shutter & moved on, LOL

 

please also view → flic.kr/p/e6d9YC → William Rayburn

In the south-west corner of Western Australia, there were Aboriginal communities full of mysteries, one of these mysteries was a boat that had come up from out of the sand, only the prow could be seen, the rest was imprisoned in the ground.

 

One day, the Little Girl Giant, busy with her travels, fell into one of the Aboriginal communities of the Noongar Nation, into one of those families who are in love with the barrab (sky), the boodja (earth), the yorgam (trees) and keap (water).

 

She was so welcomed that she decided to stay with them for a long time.

 

She then witnessed the evolution and change of these inhabitants in the face of the transformation of the Australian continent. She lived there as though it were a beelya (river), full of dreams that jumped like fish.

 

One day, one of the community’s children brought her an old book full of drawings. It was dog-eared, crumpled, aged. It told the story of a little girl in a lighthouse full of love and sorrow, who watched soldiers leaving Australia on ships, carrying hope into lost battles. It was 1915 on the beaches of Gallipoli where the sand, reddened by the blood of men, frightened the moon. Through the book, the Little Girl Giant, as she looked at the sky, saw the past, the present and even the future.

  

Her gaze plunged into the centre of the battle, and she could see men disappearing, like being suddenly wiped from the earth as an eraser would rub out on a drawing. She also saw a boat sink, snatched by a gust stronger than a cathedral and laid down on the bottom of the ocean, then an Australian diver, sent to find survivors, stuck in air bubbles. As he could not see a living soul on the seabed, he decided to stay there. Miraculously and without knowing it, he started walking and this removed the tubes and the air that filled his lungs. As he turned his head, he saw dozens of boats lying in the sand. Methodically, he entered each ship and brought dead men out of them. He dug the ground to bury each one and he continued, his muscles toned by an infernal will, so much so that around each sunken boat, there was a graveyard, like small heaps of sand without crosses, only small bellies emerging from the dust. There were hundreds like this around each boat, peaceful. With a madness which cannot be named, he continued his work. But from graveyard to graveyard, his body grew thicker, denser and without realising it, one day he was able to overturn the ships. He had monumental strength. He had quite simply grown like a child in a bath who suddenly realises that his feet are touching the taps. It was simply the story of a Giant who became big at the bottom of the sea.

 

In the Noongar country, the Little Girl Giant closed the last page of the book. The little Aboriginal child, his eyes full of colours, was sad then, in his gaze a rainbow flew away to the clouds.

 

He understood then that the Little Girl Giant had to leave to re-join her family, and when the sun lifted the horizon, he hurried to fetch his father. Whilst the stars hid in the sky, lying behind the morning light, all the people of the Noongar Nation saw a tear come from the Little Girl Giant’s eyelid. As it touched the ground, a small puddle was swallowed up by the soil. In this very spot, a tree could be seen growing in the space of two hours. From a small and barely awoken sprout, a trunk developed, full of branches with leaves that the wind enjoyed moving. It was just a tree in the boodja (country).

 

Then she thought that the buried boat could sail the earth to find the diver. The Aboriginals began digging and within ten days, the ship was ready on the ground. The Little Girl Giant climbed onto it and the Noongars began to sing the rain. Accompanied by the sound of the boomerangs, she crossed Western Australia. The sand made waves, the boodja filling with water. In short, she arrived in Minang boodja (Albany) from where she sent a hot air balloon, like a moon over the ocean, to call the diver. Then she headed to Whadjuk boodja (Perth).

 

Upon her arrival in the big city, she placed her head underwater and blew bubbles which echoed at the bottom of the ocean. Everyone knows that whales can hear sounds from 5,000 kilometres away when they call each other and that the sound of people’s footsteps on pavements reverberates to the centre of the earth.

 

The air bubbles that were pushed by the tide floated around the Giant Diver. With their large, small or tiny shapes, they followed one another like a convoy of boats and one after the other, they exploded in front of the Giant’s eyes. They expressed signals like Morse code: a point, a line, two points then nothing and again two lines and a point. It was a language the man of the sea knew well. He could then read sentences in which each message ended with ‘come’. No sooner had he understood he was surrounded by a tornado of fishes. They circled him faster and faster so that the swirl of force became a gust of wind. On the surface, the agitated fog started to cough so hard that a storm swallowed the bottom of the water, throwing the diver into the sky all the way into the clouds. Then, like a lost body, he fell down unconscious in Perth. The earth trembled and suddenly a great spray of water burst out of the ground between two buildings. A geyser was born, as if to greet through space the arrival of the Giants.

 

A Whitetip Shark of the coast of Isabella

 

Whitetip Shark

The whitetip reef shark, Triaenodon obesus, is a species of requiem shark, family Carcharhinidae, and the only member of its genus. A small shark usually not exceeding 1.6 m (5.2 ft) in length, this species is easily recognizable by its slender body and short but broad head, as well as tubular skin flaps beside the nostrils, oval eyes with vertical pupils, and white-tipped dorsal and caudal fins. One of the most common sharks found on Indo-Pacific coral reefs, the whitetip reef shark occurs as far west as South Africa and as far east as Central America. It is typically found on or near the bottom in clear water, at a depth of 8–40 m (26–130 ft). During the day, whitetip reef sharks spend much of their time resting inside caves. Unlike other requiem sharks, which rely on ram ventilation and must constantly swim to breathe, this shark can pump water over its gills and lie still on the bottom. At night, whitetip reef sharks emerge to hunt bony fishes, crustaceans, and octopus in groups, their elongate bodies allowing them to force their way into crevices and holes to extract hidden prey. Individual whitetip reef sharks may stay within a particular area of the reef for months to years, time and again returning to the same shelter. This species is viviparous, in which the developing embryos sustained by a placental connection to their mother. One of the few sharks in which mating has been observed in the wild, receptive female whitetip reef sharks are followed by prospective males, who attempt to grasp her pectoral fin and maneuver the two of them into positions suitable for copulation. Females give birth to 1–6 pups every other year, after a gestation period of 10–13 months. Whitetip reef sharks are rarely aggressive towards humans, though they may investigate swimmers closely. However, spear fishers are at risk of being bitten by one attempting to steal their catch. This species is caught for food, though there are reports of ciguatera poisoning resulting from its consumption. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed the whitetip reef shark as Near Threatened, noting that its numbers are dwindling due to increasing levels of unregulated fishing activity across its range. The slow reproductive rate and limited habitat preferences of this species renders its populations vulnerable to over-exploitation. The whitetip reef shark is distributed widely across the entire Indo-Pacific region. In the Indian Ocean, it occurs from northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to the Red Sea and the Indian subcontinent, including Madagascar, Mauritius, the Comoros, the Aldabra Group, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and the Chagos Archipelago. In the western and central Pacific, it is occurs from off southern China, Taiwan, and the Ryukyu Islands, to the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, to northern Australia, and is also found around numerous islands in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as far as Hawaii to the north and the Pitcairn Islands to the southeast. In the eastern Pacific, it occurs from Costa Rica to Panama, and off the Galápagos Islands. Associated almost exclusively with coral reef habitats, whitetip reef sharks are most often encountered around coral heads and ledges with high vertical relief, and additionally over sandy flats, in lagoons, and near drop-offs to deeper water. They prefer very clear water and rarely swim far from the bottom. This species is most common at a depth of 8–40 m (26–130 ft). On occasion they may enter water less than a meter deep. A relatively small species, few whitetip reef sharks are longer than 1.6 m (5.2 ft). The whitetip reef shark has a slim body and a short, broad head. The snout is flattened and blunt. With its slender, lithe body, the whitetip reef shark specializes in wriggling into narrow crevices and holes in the reef and extracting prey inaccessible to other reef sharks. Alternately, it is rather clumsy when attempting to take food suspended in open water. This species feeds mainly on bony fishes, including eels, squirrelfishes, snappers, damselfishes, parrotfishes, surgeonfishes, triggerfishes, and goatfishes, as well as octopus, spiny lobsters, and crabs. The whitetip reef shark is highly responsive to the olfactory, acoustic, and electrical cues given off by potential prey, while its visual system is attuned more to movement and/or contrast than to object details. It is especially sensitive to natural and artificial low-frequency sounds in the 25–100 Hz range, which evoke struggling fish. Whitetip reef sharks hunt primarily at night, when many fishes are asleep and easily taken. After dusk, groups of sharks methodically scour the reef, often breaking off pieces of coral in their vigorous pursuit of prey. Multiple sharks may target the same prey item, covering every exit route from a particular coral head. Each shark hunts for itself and in competition with the others in its group. Unlike blacktip reef sharks and grey reef sharks, whitetip reef sharks do not become more excited when feeding in groups and are unlikely to be stirred into a feeding frenzy. Despite their nocturnal habits, whitetip reef sharks will hunt opportunistically in daytime. Off Borneo, this species gathers around reef drop-offs to feed on food brought up by the rising current. Off Hawaii, they follow Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi) and attempt to steal their catches. A whitetip reef shark can survive for six weeks without food. Fearless and curious, whitetip reef sharks may approach swimmers closely but are seldom aggressive unless provoked. However, these sharks readily attempt, and quite boldly, to steal catches from spear fishers, which have resulted in several people being bitten in the process. In some places, local whitetip reef sharks have learned to associate the sound of a speargun discharge or a boat dropping anchor with food and respond within seconds. As of 2008, the International Shark Attack File lists two provoked and three unprovoked attacks to this species. Whitetip reef sharks are well-suited to ecotourism diving, and with conditioning they can be hand-fed by divers. In Hawaiian mythology, the fidelity (i.e. "loyalty") of whitetip reef sharks to certain areas of the reef for years at a time may have inspired belief in ʻaumākua, the spirits of family ancestors that take animal form and protect their descendants.

 

Isabella

Shaped like a sea horse, Isabela is the largest of the the islands in the Galapagos, more than 4 times larger than Santa Cruz the next largest. Isabela is 80 miles (100 km) in length and though it is remarkably beautiful it is not one of the most visited islands in the chain. Its visitor sites are far apart making them accessible only to faster boats or those with longer itineraries. One of the youngest islands, Isabela is located on the western edge of the archipelago near the Galapagos hot spot. At approximately 1 million years old, the island was formed by the merger of 6 shield volcanoes - Alcedo, Cerro Azul, Darwin, Ecuador, Sierra Negra and Wolf. Five of the six volcanoes are still active (the exception is Ecuador) making it one of the most volcanically active places on earth. Visitors cruising past Elizabeth Bay on the west coast can see evidence of this activity in the fumaroles rising from Volcan Chico on Sierra Negra. Two of Isabela's volcanoes lie directly on the equator - Ecuador and Volcan Wolf. Volcan Wolf is the youngest of Isabela's volcanoes and at 5,600ft (1707 m) the highest point in the Galapagos. Isabela is known for its geology, providing visitors with excellent examples of the geologic occurrences that have created the Galapagos Islands including uplifts at Urbina Bay and the Bolivar Channel, Tuft cones at Tagus Cove, and Pulmace on Alcedo. Isabela is also interesting for its flora and fauna. The young island does not follow the vegetation zones of the other islands. The relatively new lava fields and surrounding soils have not developed the sufficient nutrients required to support the varied life zones found on other islands. Another obvious difference occurs on Volcan Wolf and Cerro Azul, these volcanoes loft above the cloud cover and are arid on top. Isabela's rich animal, bird, and marine life is beyond compare. Isabela is home to more wild tortoises than all the other islands. Isabela's large size and notable topography created barriers for the slow moving tortoises; apparently the creatures were unable to cross lava flows and other obstacles, causing several different sub-species of tortoise to develop. Today tortoises roam free in the calderas of Alcedo, Wolf, Cerro Azul, Darwin and Sierra Negra. Alcedo Tortoises spend most of their life wallowing in the mud at the volcano crater. The mud offers moisture, insulation and protects their exposed flesh from mosquitoes, ticks and other insects. The giant tortoises have a mediocre heat control system requiring them to seek the coolness of the mud during the heat of the day and the extra insulation during the cool of the night. On the west coast of Isabela the nutrient rich Cromwell Current upwelling creating a feeding ground for fish, whales, dolphin and birds. These waters have long been known as the best place to see whales in the Galapagos. Some 16 species of whales have been identified in the area including humpbacks, sperms, sei, minkes and orcas. During the 19th century whalers hunted in these waters until the giant creatures were near extinction. The steep cliffs of Tagus Cove bare the names of many of the whaling ships and whalers which hunted in these waters. Birders will be delighted with the offerings of Isabela. Galapagos Penguins and flightless cormorants also feed from the Cromwell Current upwelling. These endemic birds nest along the coast of Isabela and neighboring Fernandina. The mangrove finch, Galapagos Hawk, brown pelican, pink flamingo and blue heron are among the birds who make their home on Isabela. A colorful part to any tour located on the western shore of Isabela, Punta Moreno is often the first or last stopping point on the island (depending on the direction the boat is heading). Punta Moreno is a place where the forces of the Galapagos have joined to create a work of art. The tour starts with a panga ride along the beautiful rocky shores where Galapagos penguins and shore birds are frequently seen. After a dry landing the path traverses through jagged black lava rock. As the swirling black lava flow gave way to form craters, crystal tide pools formed-some surrounded by mangroves. This is a magnet for small blue lagoons, pink flamingos, blue herons, and Bahama pintail ducks. Brown pelican can be seen nesting in the green leaves of the mangroves. You can walk to the edge of the lava to look straight down on these pools including the occasional green sea turtle, white-tipped shark and puffer fish. This idyllic setting has suffered from the presence of introduced species. Feral dogs in the area are known to attack sea Lions and marine iguanas.

 

Galapagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands (official name: Archipiélago de Colón; other Spanish names: Islas de Colón or Islas Galápagos) are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator in the Pacific Ocean, some 900 km west of Ecuador. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site: wildlife is its most notable feature. Because of the only very recent arrival of man the majority of the wildlife has no fear of humans and will allow visitors to walk right up them, often having to step over Iguanas or Sea Lions.The Galápagos islands and its surrounding waters are part of a province, a national park, and a biological marine reserve. The principal language on the islands is Spanish. The islands have a population of around 40,000, which is a 40-fold expansion in 50 years. The islands are geologically young and famed for their vast number of endemic species, which were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Patron of Art Homage to Napoléon Bonaparte Limited Edition 4810 Fountain Pen M

CAD$4,200.00 plus 13% HST.

 

Montblanc Patron of Art 2021 Napoléon Bonaparte Overview - 4810/888/92 L...

youtu.be/aoUCXxtyqbE

 

Montblanc Homage to Napoléon Bonaparte Blue Fountain Pen Ink

youtu.be/n7mtYv_vYic

 

Napoléon is mainly remembered for his military achievements, but he was a true patron of the arts. His glory lives on in the great ‘architecture parlante’ style of the famous Parisian structures built during his reign. In addition to architecture, other arts such as painting, sculpture and the decorative arts also blossomed under his leadership.

 

The overall design of the pen is inspired by the neoclassic style. The pattern of golden bees on dark blue lacquer is inspired by Napoléon’s throne in Fontainebleau, and the sword-shaped clip bears the Napoléonic “N”. The engravings on the cap top – a laurel wreath, imperial crown and an eagle – refer to Napoléon’s coronation insignia. The clip end is decorated with a red stone recalling the coronation ring of Napoleon’s wife Joséphine.The cap is crowned by the Montblanc Emblem in precious resin.

In homage to Napoléon Bonaparte, the handcrafted 18kt solid gold nib bears a portrait of Napoléon with the typical bicorn.

 

Golden Bees importance: CLICK on links to see his Golden Bee images. *********

www.geriwalton.com/the-importance-of-bees-to-napoleon-bon...

 

www.hhantiquejewelry.com/napoleon-bees-jewelry-tomb-child...

 

The Importance of Bees to Napoleon Bonaparte

By Geri Walton | February 8, 2019 | 1

The importance of bees to Napoleon Bonaparte became obvious when he decided to adopt this ancient symbol older than the fleur-de-lys. Supposedly, when Napoleon thought about wearing the imperial purple, he decided to adopt the bee based on the following story:

 

“It was a custom in France, during its early and barbarous ages, that whenever a monarch died, his horse and page were killed and buried with their master, that they might be in ready attendance upon him in the next world. In the year 1658, the tomb of Childeric, the father of Clovis, was discovered [by the archeologist Jean-Jacques Chifflet*], and within it were found the skeleton of a man that of a horse, and part of the skeleton of a youth, concluded to be the remains of Childeric and his companions … a gold signet ring was taken from the finger of the large skeleton; upon it appeared an engraved head, having long hair flowing over the shoulders, and around it the words, ‘Childerici Regis;’ several buckles, massy gold bracelets and a gold head of an ox, supposed to be an image of the idolatrous worship of the deceased. … [In addition,] on further search in the tomb were found a purse, containing a hundred pieces of gold and two hundred pieces of silver, bearing the heads of different emperors of France; a crystal ball or orb, a pike, a battleaxe, the hand, mounting, and blade of a sword; gold tablets and style; the bit and part of the harness of a horse; fragments of a dress or robe; and more than three hundred little bees of the purest gold, their wings behind inlaid with a red stone like cornelian.”[1]

 

When Childeric’s tomb was discovered in 1653, Louis XIV received the treasure, but he wasn’t impressed and stored it at what later became the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. When Napoleon came to power, his advisor, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, suggested he adopt the bee as his personal symbol and mentioned the treasure of Childeric. Napoleon took his advisor’s advice after learning that Childeric had lived between 437 and 481 and that he founded the Merovingian dynasty. Moreover, Napoleon learned that Childeric’s symbol of the bee preceded the fleur-de-lis adopted by his son Clovis.

 

Besides being associated with the Merovingians, Napoleon also wanted to be associated with the Carolingians, a dynasty that reached its peak in AD 800 with the crowning of Charlemagne as the first Emperor of Romans. The spread eagle that Napoleon used on his shield came from the Carolingian founder Charlemagne and was suggested for use by by the Council Commission, made up from members of the Council of State, whose job was to oversee the coronation of Napoleon and his Empress, Josephine. They soon determined:

 

“Even if the arms of Charlemagne were not accurately known, it could still be pointed out … that in the time of Louis le Débonnaire, and doubtless earlier, ‘an eagle of metal was placed in the western portion of the Imperial palace at Aix, and it was always the custom of those who got possession of the palace, first of all to seize upon this eagle.’”[2]

 

It was also pointed out that the fleur de lys would have been inappropriate alongside the Carolingian symbol of the eagle, another reason for selecting the bee. Moreover, some in the Council Commission erroneously suggested that the fleur-de-lys were just badly drawn bees. One twentieth-century historian noted:

 

“The fleurs de lys which had been sown broadcast on the carpets, hangings, and insignia of the Capetian kings would have been scarcely suitable to match with the eagles. Besides, they belonged to the old order of things which was to be forgotten. It was necessary to choose some plant or animal from the heraldic flora or fauna which could be adopted in the place of the fleur de lys, and was yet known to French historical tradition. As nothing suitable of this kind could be found in the Age of Charlemagne, it was necessary to search farther back. … [It was also] remembered that, during the sitting of the National Convention on the 3rd of Brumaire of the year IV, Daubermesnil, speaking in the name of the Committee of Public Instruction, had proposed that the emblem of the State should be a hive swarming with bees, and that it should be placed upon the front of every national building. To which Citizen Barallion had indeed objected that ‘bees were cognizance of several Kings of France of the first dynasty, such as Childebert and Chileric. Besides,’ he added, ‘bees can never be the emblem of the Republic, for is it not well known that they all pay court to a queen?’ The convention was struck with this merry quip, and rejected the harmless suggestion of Daubermesnil.”[3]

Napoleon apparently ignored the idea that bees might be related to a queen and found bees an appropriate symbol for his empire. He knew illusion was power and that the bee had greater antiquity than the fleur-de-lis. He also thought because the bees were a symbol of the Merovingian kings, it would give him added legitimacy to rule as Emperor. Thus, when he was crowned, the importance of bees to Napoleon was obvious as he made sure bees appeared prominently on his coronation robes.

 

To aid in this, he used the best-known miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey, who also happened to be a close friend of the Bonaparte family. Isabey decided the bee found with Childeric’s remains lacked detail and was too small and dense. Therefore, he developed a new larger bee created volant en arrière, or in other words, when viewed from the top its wings were partially opened.

 

Isabey’s bee was the one used to embellish the coronation mantles. Embroidery of the bees on the mantles cost 15,000 francs and were accomplished by Picot, embroiderer to the Emperor and the Empress. One historian gave the details of Napoleon’s mantle, stating:

 

“The Imperial mantle of purple velvet powdered with golden bees; in the embroidery are interlaced branches of olive, laurel and oak surrounding the letter N. The lining, the border, and the tippet are of ermine. The mantle, open on the left side, allows the sword to be seen, which is sustained by a scarf of white satin embroidered and trimmed with a cord of gold; the long robe is of white satin embroidered with gold on all the seams, the hem of the robe embroidered with a cord of gold.”[4]

The Empress was also resplendent and likewise had a mantle of purple velvet powdered with golden bees, as did the French princes. Pages wore green coats with shoulder-knots of green silk embroidered with eagles at each end and powdered with bees. Moreover, golden bees also appeared on the square purple velvet cushion that held Charlemagne’s crown. (To see the only known embroidered bee that survives, click here).

 

Despite the importance of bees to Napoleon, he never gave an Order in Council or officially announced the adoption of it. He also never gave a formal explanation for why he chose the bee. He did, however, make sure that the bee was an important symbol at his imperial court after he was crowned. Bees could be found embellishing clothing and fabric and were incorporated into ceramics, furniture, glass, and metalwork. One historian also reported:

 

“He [Napoleon] sprinkled bees liberally on his ensign as General-in-Chief, he introduced them on the borders of the Army colours, he adorned the upper portion of the escutcheons of the Grand Dignitaries and good towns with them, he powdered them over his own carpets and hangings.”[5]

The bee was so important to Napoleon, it was exclusively reserved for the imperial family, and not even dukes could use it. However, on 19 May 1802, Napoleon established a reward for civil and military merit called the Légion d’Honneur and to indicate the importance of the bee, he used a version in the medal. This was, and is, France’s highest honor, and although there were critics who thought of it as a bauble, Napoleon knew its value, stating, “It is with baubles that men are led.”[6]

 

After the Treaty of Fontainebleau and his exile to Elba, he designed his own flag for Elba and once again used the bee that he so cherished. Perhaps, he did so because it linked him to the imperial mantle. The flag that floated over the island had a white background with a diagonal red stripe and three golden bees in the stripe. Gloria Peria, director of the Historical Archives of the Communes of the Island of Elba, notes:

 

“Having chosen to give the Island of Elba three bees meant giving the island a sense of unity under his reign, even though from an administrative point of view it was divided into several Municipalities … Napoleon’s flag of Elba was immediately a great success, so much so that, according to Pons de l’Herault in his Souvenirs et Anecdotes de l’Ile d’Elbe, even the Barbaresque pirates greeted it, because they saw in it the symbol of their war hero, Napoleon, in person, as they sailed the Tyrrhenian Sea.”[7]

 

When Louis XVIII came to power in 1815, he methodically replaced or destroyed Napoleon’s bee with the fleur-de-lys. Ultimately, few bees from Napoleon’s reign survived Louis’ eradication. The bee seemed to all but disappear until Napoleon’s remains were returned in 1840. One newspaper reported that the car carrying Napoleon’s body was “truly magnificent,” and that on the pedestal, “on both sides hung two velvet imperial mantles, sprinkled with bees.”[8]

 

*Although Chifflet thought what he discovered was bees, some scholars have suggested they were cicadas, a symbol that meant both death and resurrection to the Merovingians. However, other scholars believe they were flies because flies were found on the coats of arms of families from the territories of Venice and Flanders that were once controlled by the Merovingians. If they were flies, Napoleon’s enemies would have likely got a chuckle thinking he was covered with flies rather than bees.

 

References:

[1] W. H. Ireland, The Napoleon anecdotes, ed. by W.H. Ireland (London: C.S. Arnold, 1822), p. 18.

[2] F. Masson, Napoleon and His Coronation, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1907), p. 97.

[3] Ibid., p. 98–99.

[4] Ibid, p. 314.

[5] Ibid., p. 99.

[6] B. Farwell, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 488.

[7] “History of the flag of the Island of Elba,” Info Elba, accessed November 16, 2018, www.infoelba.com/discovering-elba/curious-facts/the-flag-...

[8] Downpatrick Recorder, “Funeral of Napoleon,” December 26, 1840, p. 1.

Stressful times over here at my house...husband's computer crashed late yesterday afternoon and it is not looking good. Fucking computers. Can't live with 'em, sure as hell can't live without 'em!

Poor Pete has been methodically trying various things all day long, and still nothing. He still hasn't given up though. Gotta admire that. I would have thrown the whole fucking thing into the street last night if it were me. ;-)

***UPDATE*** Gaurav methodically set his set sights on this specific sofa, and so this one is very deservingly leaving for San Francisco. Thank you immensely for the trust.

 

Major Update.... Incoming Broyhill Sculptra bedroom set including Magna dresser, long low dresser and tall dresser, Hooker Mainline gentlemens chest and long dresser, Warren Platner coffee table, three or four teak Danish credenzas, long John Kapel long dresser, three different pairs of Danish lounge chairs, four of five sofas, Joseph Burlini sculpture, Milo Baughman nightstands, three or four Baughman lounge chairs.....

They are back now!

 

Migratory big white beautiful bird! They remain at White Rock Lake's Sunset Bay (Dallas, TX) until March or April. Click on image for best view.

 

One of the largest North American birds, the American White Pelican is majestic in the air. The birds soar with incredible steadiness on broad, white-and-black wings. Their large heads and huge, heavy bills give them a prehistoric look. On the water they dip their pouched bills to scoop up fish, or tip-up like an oversized dabbling duck. Sometimes, groups of pelicans work together to herd fish into the shallows for easy feeding. Look for them on inland lakes in summer and near coastlines in winter.

 

Size & Shape

 

A huge waterbird with very broad wings, a long neck, and a massive bill that gives the head a unique, long shape. They have thick bodies, short legs, and short, square tails. During the breeding season, adults grow an unusual projection or horn on the upper mandible near the tip of the bill.

 

Color Pattern

 

Adult American White Pelicans are snowy white with black flight feathers visible only when the wings are spread. A small patch of ornamental feathers on the chest can become yellow in spring. The bill and legs are yellow-orange. Immatures are mostly white as well, but the head, neck, and back are variably dusky.

 

Behavior

 

American White Pelicans feed from the water’s surface, dipping their beaks into the water to catch fish and other aquatic organisms. They often upend, like a very large dabbling duck, in this process. They do not plunge-dive the way Brown Pelicans do. They are superb soarers (they are among the heaviest flying birds in the world) and often travel long distances in large flocks by soaring. When flapping, their wingbeats are slow and methodical.

 

Habitat

 

American White Pelicans typically breed on islands in shallow wetlands in the interior of the continent. They spend winters mainly on coastal waters, bays, and estuaries, or a little distance inland.

 

allaboutbirds.org

 

With so few flowers in bloom at this time, I had to really be on the lookout for Hummers. The foraging Hummers also have to be on the lookout for any blooming plant.This lady was methodically sampling all of these red blooms on an ornamental shrub in my daughter's back yard. I saw only a few flying Hummers species (mostly female Anna's and Costa's). These ladies are segregated from each other for IDs mainly on their bill shapes. This bill is said to be straighter... but there is overlap. This lady also usually has a dark spot on her throat (like shown).

 

IMG_9919; Anna's Hummingbird

Call me crazy... One of the most understated beauties at the show. Coolaid aside...

 

You can see Jamie's methodical progression of this beauty here:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/48950170@N03/albums/72157666973254391

Emperor moth larva (Saturnia pavonia) feeding on heather. Dorset, UK.

 

For some reason Mrs Emperor Moth had decided that 3 feet from a wood ant nest was the perfect place to lay her eggs. The eggs hatched just fine, but when I returned today the 1st instar population was severely depleted. One ant in particular was methodically searching every heather shoot in turn, until it pounced upon this unfortunate caterpillar and wrenched it to the ground.

 

photo.domgreves.com

Afghan National Army Counter IED specialist is pictured during a training exercise in Afghanistan.

 

Members of the UK's Explosive Ordnance Disposal & Search Task Force (EOD&S TF) are stepping back from their frontline role to develop the Afghan National Army's counter IED capability.

 

British advisors have been deployed to train, mentor and 'authorise-for-action' Afghan National Army Explosive Hazard Reduction Teams (EHRTs). The Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers complete an initial four week course provided by US forces before graduating onto the advanced training given by British specialists.

 

They are put through their paces by an experienced instructor pairing from EOD & Search to ensure they are confident, methodical, professional and aware of current threats. To complete the course the ANA team have to pass three assessed tasks either in camp or 'live' on patrol before they can be utilised as a team.

 

Photographer: Cpl Paul Morrison RLC

Image 45153935.jpg from www.defenceimages.mod.uk

 

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Acer palmatum, commonly known as Japanese maple, palmate maple, or smooth Japanese maple is a species of woody plant native to Korea, Japan, China, eastern Mongolia, and southeast Russia. Many different cultivars of this maple have been selected and they are grown worldwide for their large variety of attractive forms, leaf shapes, and spectacular colors.

 

Description

Acer palmatum is deciduous, with the growth habit of a shrub or small tree reaching heights of 6 to 10 m (20 to 33 ft), rarely 16 m (52 ft), reaching a mature width of 4.5 to 10 m (15 to 33 ft), often growing as an understory plant in shady woodlands. It may have multiple trunks joining close to the ground. In habit, its canopy often takes on a dome-like form, especially when mature. The leaves are 4–12 cm (1+1⁄2–4+3⁄4 in) long and wide, palmately lobed with five, seven, or nine acutely pointed lobes. The flowers are produced in small cymes, the individual flowers with five red or purple sepals and five whitish petals. The fruit is a pair of winged samaras, each samara 2–3 cm (3⁄4–1+1⁄4 in) long with a 6–8 mm (1⁄4–5⁄16 in) seed. The seeds of Acer palmatum and similar species require stratification in order to germinate.

 

Even in nature, Acer palmatum displays considerable genetic variation, with seedlings from the same parent tree typically showing differences in such traits as leaf size, shape, and color. The overall form of the tree can vary from upright to weeping.

 

Three subspecies are recognised:

 

Acer palmatum subsp. palmatum. Leaves small, 4–7 cm (1+1⁄2–2+3⁄4 in) wide, with five or seven lobes and double-serrate margins; seed wings 10–15 mm (3⁄8–5⁄8 in). Lower altitudes throughout central and southern Japan (not Hokkaido).

Acer palmatum subsp. amoenum (Carrière) H.Hara. Leaves larger, 6–12 cm (2+1⁄4–4+3⁄4 in) wide, with seven or nine lobes and single-serrate margins; seed wings 20–25 mm (3⁄4–1 in). Higher altitudes throughout Japan and South Korea.

Acer palmatum subsp. matsumurae Koidz. Leaves larger, 6–12 cm (2+1⁄4–4+3⁄4 in) wide, with seven (rarely five or nine) lobes and double-serrate margins; seed wings 15–25 mm (5⁄8–1 in). Higher altitudes throughout Japan.

Cultivation and uses

Leaves at Shimogamo-jinja

Shimogamo-jinja

Leaves, Nison-in

Nison-in

Acer palmatum has been cultivated in Japan for centuries and in temperate areas around the world since the 1800s. The first specimen of the tree reached Britain in 1821.

 

When Swedish doctor-botanist Carl Peter Thunberg traveled in Japan late in the eighteenth century, he produced drawings of a small tree that would eventually become synonymous with the high art of oriental gardens. He gave it the species name palmatum after the hand-like shape of its leaves, similar to the centuries-old Japanese names kaede and momiji, references to the 'hands' of frogs and babies,[citation needed] respectively.

 

Japanese horticulturalists have long developed cultivars from maples found in Japan and nearby Korea and China. They are a popular choice for bonsai enthusiasts and have long been a subject in art.

 

Numerous cultivars are popular in Europe and North America, with red-leafed favored, followed by cascading green shrubs with deeply dissected leaves.

 

Acer palmatum includes thousands of named cultivars with a variety of forms, colors, leaf types, sizes, and preferred growing conditions. Heights of mature specimens range from 0.5 to 25 m (1 1⁄2 to 82 ft), depending on type.

 

Preparations from the branches and leaves are used as a treatment in traditional Chinese medicine.

 

Growing conditions

In their natural habitat, they grow in the understory; most cultivars prefer part shade, especially in hotter climates, but they will also grow in heavy shade. Some cultivars will tolerate full sun, more so at higher latitudes and less at lower latitudes; red, purple-red, black-red, bronze, and some dark green cultivars are generally more full sun tolerant. Variegated white, cream, yellow, yellow-orange, or light green cultivars mostly require shade protection. Almost all are adaptable and blend well with companion plants. The trees are particularly suitable for borders and ornamental paths because the root systems are compact and not invasive. Many varieties of Acer palmatum are successfully grown in containers. Trees are prone to die during periods of drought and prefer consistent water conditions; more established trees are less prone to drought. Moderate to well-drained soil is essential as they will not survive in poorly drained waterlogged soil. Trees do not require heavy fertilization and should only be very lightly fertilized.

 

Japanese maples are best to grow in hardiness zones.

 

Pruning

If space is not a constraint, no pruning is necessary except to remove any dead branches. Trees naturally self-prune foliage that doesn't receive enough light, such as internal branches which are overly shaded by its own canopy. Some growers prefer to shape their trees artistically or to thin out interior branches to better expose the graceful main branches. The form of the tree, especially without leaves in winter, can be of great interest and can be pruned to highlight this feature. Trees heal readily after pruning without needing aftercare. This species should not be pruned like a hedge, but instead methodically shaped by carefully choosing individual branches to remove. They can also be pruned just to maintain a smaller size to suit a particular location. Acer palmatum can also be used as espalier.

 

Over 1,000 cultivars have been chosen for particular characteristics, which are propagated by asexual reproduction most often by grafting, but some cultivars can also be propagated by budding, cuttings, tissue culture, or layering. Some cultivars are not in cultivation in the Western world or have been lost over the generations, but many new cultivars are developed each decade. Cultivars are chosen for phenotypical aspects such as leaf shape and size (shallowly to deeply lobed, some also palmately compound), leaf color (ranging from chartreuse through dark green or from orange to red, to dark purple, others variegated with various patterns of white and pink), bark texture and color, and growth pattern. Most cultivars are less vigorous and smaller than is typical for the species, but are more interesting than the relatively mundane species. Cultivars come in a large variety of forms including upright, broom, vase, umbrella, weeping, cascading, dwarf, shrub, and ground cover. Most cultivars are artificially selected from seedlings of open-pollinated plants, purposeful breeding is not common, and less often from grafts of witch's brooms.

 

In Japan, iromomiji is used as an accent tree in Japanese gardens, providing gentle shade next to the house in the summer and beautiful colors in autumn. Many cultivars have characteristics that come into prominence during different seasons, including the color of new or mature leaves, extraordinary autumn color, color and shape of samaras, or even bark that becomes more brightly colored during the winter. Some cultivars can scarcely be distinguished from others unless labeled. In some cases, identical cultivars go by different names, while in other cases, different cultivars may be given the same name.

 

Popular cultivars

A selection of notable or popular cultivars, with brief notes about characteristics that apply during at least one season, includes the following. agm indicates the cultivar has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.

 

Popular red-foliaged cultivars include 'Atropurpureum' and 'Bloodgood'.

'Atropurpureum' ; wine-red, including new branches (see 'Dissectum Atropurpureum'); original cultivar lost and diluted by use of the name to market seedlings of a similar look.

'Beni-malko' ; agm

'Beni-tsukasa' ; agm

'Bloodgood' ; agm; a cultivar of 'Atropurpureum', vigorous growth, large size, a classic cultivar, but supplanted by improved similar selections like 'Emperor I' and 'Fireglow'.

'Burgundy Lace' ; agm

'Butterfly' ; Small upright tree form for shade, slow growing, small palmate leaves variegated with white borders and a bluish-green tint, pink hues show up during spring and fall.

'Chitose-Yama' ; agm

'Crimson Queen' ; (see var. dissectum 'Crimson Queen')

'Dissectum' ; lace-like leaves, drooping habit

'Dissectum Atropurpureum' ;

var. dissectum 'Crimson Queen' ; agm

var. dissectum 'Garnet' ; agm

var. dissectum 'Inaba-shidare' ; agm

var. dissectum 'Seiryu' ; agm a green, tree-like shrub with finely dissected leaves

'Elegans' ; agm

'Emperor 1' ; One of the best red amoenums, similar to 'Bloodgood', but slightly smaller size, holds a deep red color even in shade and summer heat.

'Garnet' ; (see var. dissectum 'Garnet')

'Golden Pond' ; greenish-yellow summer foliage

'Goshiki koto hime' ; a delicate, variegated dwarf

'Higasa yama' ; crinkled leaves variegated with yellow

'Hogyuko' ; rich green leaves, turning orange in autumn

'Hupp's Dwarf' ; a small, dense shrub with miniature leaves

'Inaba-shidare' ; (see var. dissectum 'Inaba-shidare')

'Issai nishiki kawazu' ; very rough, rigid bark

'Jerre Schwartz' ; dwarf variety, toothed, deeply lobed, mid-dark green leaves, flushed pink and then bronze-green in spring, turning red in autumn.

'Kagiri nishiki' ; similar to 'Butterfly' but more pinkish tones

'Karasu gawa' ; slow-growing variegate with brilliant pink and white

'Katsura' ; agm yellow-green leaves tipped with orange

'Koto no ito' ; light green, thread-like leaves

'Little Princess' ; a sparsely branched dwarf with irregular habit

'Mama' ; a bushy dwarf with extremely variable foliage

'Masu murasaki' ; a shrubby tree with purple leaves

'Mizu kuguri' ; orange-tinted new growth and very wide habit

'Nigrum' ;[31] deep purple leaves turning to crimson

'Nishiki gawa' ; pinetree-like bark desirable for bonsai

'Nomura nishiki' ; dark purple, lace-like leaves

'Ojishi' ; tiny dwarf, grows only a few centimetres per year

'Orange Dream' ; agm an ssp. palmatum cultivar, with small leaves yellow with orange in spring, green in summer, orange-yellow in autumn. Bark bright green

'Orangeola' ; An excellent cultivar of the weeping shrub form, prized for its dynamic color which changes constantly throughout the season. agm

'Ornatum' ; agm

'Osakazuki' ; agm tree-like shrub with spectacular autumn colour, 4 metres (13 ft) tall, green leaves.

'Peaches and Cream' ; similar to 'Aka shigitatsu sawa'

'Pink Filigree' ; finely dissected, brownish-pink leaves

'Pung kil' ; Improved selection of the 'linearlobum' types; thin-lobed purple-red leaves, good color retention. Even the new growth displays the linearlobum type leaf form.

'Red Dragon' ; One of the finest of the lace-leaf weeping umbrella-shaped forms. Similar to 'Crimson Queen', but smaller overall size and with better red color retention into the summer heat.

'Red Filigree Lace' ; Dwarf sized umbrella-shaped weeping form, extra finely dissected delicate dark purple leaves, slow growth rate.

'Red Pygmy' ; agm

'Sango kaku' ; agm Coral-bark maple (formerly 'Senkaki'); with pinkish-red bark

'Seiryu' ; (see var. dissectum 'Seiryu')

'Shaina' ; a dwarf sport from 'Bloodgood'

'Shin deshojo' ; an improved selection of the 'coralinum' type ssp. palmatum cultivars, with a small overall size, small leaves, and a vibrant red spring coloration different from most other red cultivars. One of the best cultivars for bonsai. agm

'Shikage ori nishiki' ; vase-shaped shrub with dull purple foliage

'Shishigashira' ; a unique cultivar, notable for its growth habit similar to a puffy cloud or lion's mane, and its crinkled thick leaves. agm

'Skeeter's Broom' ; derived from a 'Bloodgood' witch's broom

'Tamukeyama' ; finely dissected, dark purple, cascading habit

'Trompenburg' ; agm slender, upright grower, convex lobes, purple leaves

'Tsuma gaki' ; yellow leaves with reddish-purple borders

'Villa Taranto' ; agm

'Yuba e' ; upright tree with scarlet variegation

In addition to the cultivars described above, a number of cultivar groups have been naturally selected over time to such an extent that seedlings often resemble the parent. Many of these are sold under the same name as the cultivars, or even propagated by grafting, so there is often much ambiguity in distinguishing them. In particular, a number of dark-red Acer palmatum are sold with the names ‘Atropurpureum’ and ‘Bloodgood’. Many different cultivars with delicate lace-like foliage are sold under names such as ‘Dissectum’, ‘Filigree’ and ‘Laceleaf’

 

Similar species

The term "Japanese maple" is also sometimes used to describe other species, usually within the series Palmata, that are similar to A. palmatum and native to China, Korea or Japan, including:

 

Acer duplicatoserratum (syn. A. palmatum var. pubescens Li)

Acer japonicum—downy Japanese maple

Acer pseudosieboldianum—Korean maple

Acer shirasawanum—fullmoon maple

Acer sieboldianum—Siebold's maple

Acer buergerianum—trident maple

Acer circinatum—vine maple

Given that these maples are phenotypically variable within each species, and may hybridise with one another, distinguishing between them may be a matter of gradient speciation. In commercial propagation, A. palmatum is often used as rootstock for many of these other species.[

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.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhara

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha

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.

 

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For the "If These Walls Could Talk (group)" They would say, what is that lady doing here in the shower with her camera, anyway. Strange, but at least the water is not running right now. Guess she likes our patterns and our shininess.

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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.”

 

(IMG_1525)

 

"Tiles & Shower Curtain Textures & Patterns in My Room at Hospital" was my title for a long time.

 

Changed my title slightly to indicate it definitely was a tile wall for Walls groups on May 25, 2022 ,,,

 

"Interior Wall Tiles & Shower Curtain Textures & Patterns in My Room at Hospital"

Danish Internationale Street Theater Festival 2018

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.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhara

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha

In an isolated house, the clock’s hands freeze at midnight, it's the time that's perfect for murder—it's the silence.

 

Meticulous killer believes they have planned the perfect time for murder, covering every track with flawless precision. The terror begins, it's a murder of the soul, not the body, for no one can die twice.

 

The real horror is realizing that the perfect time for murder is a concept, an idea that takes hold of a person's mind and never lets go.

 

Ultimately, the perfect time for murder is not at night or when a person is alone, but when the victim's fear is at its peak, when they believe they have nowhere left to run, and when they are fully aware of what is about to happen to them. It is then that the killer strikes, a cold, calculated, and methodical act that leaves the victim's soul forever scarred.

 

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.

 

This wasn't the view from my room. This was the view from sort of a respite and observation room down the hall from me. I walked there and back sometimes for my therapy.

 

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.”

   

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Golden Conure amidst colorful flowers at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, PA. Golden Conures are native to Northeastern Brazil and are endangered.

 

This little guy was flying about in the wetlands free-flight room at the Aviary and he landed on this plant right behind me. He didn't care how close I got to him. His attention was firmly directed to those flowers which he methodically crawled out to and snipped off in his beak. With each flower that he snipped, he would look up at me to see if I approved or disapproved and then lacking anybody stopping him, he would move on to the next flower and snip it off. Within an hour he had twelve flowers laying on the floor and the plant was completely barren. Bad bird !!!

 

For more information on the National Aviary and how you can help support this great oasis for birds please visit www.aviary.org

 

Taken on 11-24-2008.. View Large

 

Modern and Contemporary Art

The origins of the Moravian Gallery collections go back to the Francis Museum (now the Moravian Provincial Museum) in Brno, established in 1818. However, systematic acquisition only started under Dr. Jaroslav Helfert, the first director of the museum (from 1923) and curator of its picture gallery. His methodical approach enabled a more consistent structure to be brought to the collections and their expansion with topical works representing Czech modernism. The first acquisitions included, for example, the sculpture Before the Bath (1906) by Jan Štursa. The picture gallery permanent exhibition was installed in the Dietrichstein Palace in the late 1920's.

 

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Helfert's successor in the gallery management was Dr. Albert Kutal, who (apart from building a collection of Moravian Gothic art) compiled a series of modern Czech art at the end of the 1920's and the beginning of the 1930's. Among major acquisitions in these years were Procházka's Players (1909) and Prometheus (1911), as well as further works of Czech modernism by Emil Filla, Josef Šíma and Jaroslav Král.

 

In 1948 Albert Kutal was succeeded by Dr. Karel Krejčí, followed by Dr. Jiří Hlušička, Dr. Vlasta Kratinová, Dr. Marie Dohnalová, Dr. Kateřina Svobodová and Dr. Jitka Sedlářová. The period after 1945 was associated with unprecedented expansion of the collections; for example, in 1945 the gallery received donations of Kubišta's Still Life with a Lamp (1909), and in 1948 Haymaking (1939) by Jaroslav Král. The complicated administrative situation of the picture gallery, part of the Moravian Provincial Museum, improved under Director Jiří Hlušička in 1961 when the Moravian Gallery in Brno came into existence, through the separation of the picture gallery of the museum and its merging with the Museum of Applied Arts.

 

The gallery activities centre upon the documentation of the main features of the development of 20th- and 21st-century art. A remarkable series of sculptures and a collection of drawings and graphic art gradually developed alongside the painting collection. The first permanent exhibition of Czech 20th-century art was created in 1970 (in the Moravian Provincial Museum building) by Jiří Hlušička; the collection had later to be stored in a depository.

 

The collection of modern and contemporary art boasts masterpieces by the luminaries of Czech modern art: Jan Štursa, Jan Preisler, Josef Mařatka and František Bílek, leading protagonist of Czech symbolism. It contains a series of major works by the members of the Osma [Eight] group and the Group of Visual Artists (paintings by Filla, Kubišta, Kubín, Špála, Čapek, early pieces by Antonín Procházka and Jan Zrzavý and cubist sculptures by Otto Gutfreund such as Anxiety, 1911). A large collection of works by Antonín Procházka enables viewers to observe changes in his artistic approaches, largely associated with Brno culture. The Czech interwar avant-garde is represented by works of Czech poetism, by the artificialism of Jindřich Štyrský and Toyen (Dawn, 1931) and reflections of surrealism (sculpture Girl with Child by Vincenc Makovský, Josef Šíma's painting Europe, works by František Muzika, František Foltýn and others). The 1940's are represented by echoes of the war (Emil Filla, Jan Bauch), works by members of Skupina 42 [Group 42] (František Gross, Bohumír Matal, Jan Smetana and others) and the Ra Group (Bohdan Lacina, Václav Zykmund). The Czech informel is illustrated with works of Mikuláš Medek, Robert Piesen, Josef Istler and others, while art trends in the second half of the 20th century are represented by selected works by Adriena Šimotová, Jiří John, Václav Boštík, Jiří Kolář, Michael Rittstein, Brno artists Dalibor Chatrný, Miroslav Štolfa and others.

 

A new permanent exhibition of modern and contemporary Czech art was opened in 1994 in the reconstructed Pražák Palace. A section mapping the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was opened, in revised form, in 2001. A year later it was supplemented with a further section spanning the mid-20th century and the present.

www.moravska-galerie.cz/moravska-galerie/o-galerii/sbirky...

One Piece at a Time

 

Grigsby, the great recycler. Very methodical. Chomp, rip, spit, chomp, rip, spit. How to get it done.

 

[SOOC, f/1.4, ISO 100, shutter speed 1/4000]

There were a few of these guys lower down than the swifties. They were demolishing the new growth on the tree trunks in quite a methodical manner as well as ripping pieces of bark off the trunk. I imagine there is a purpose...

An interesting thing I learned while looking up the distribution of these birds is that originally they were confined to the extreme south-east of the country but now have populations in quite a few locations right up into Qld, central Australia and WA probably established from aviary escapees.

Thought I would share one of the female on the Purple flower as well from the same setup! She can be pretty bossy and often runs the males off the feeders.

I have been working with these in some pretty close proximity, I have had them eat from the feeders with me as close as 12" away. dont have any eating from my hand yet but trying, I have had them land on my lens and my finger, but not eat. All Provided Movement is slow and methodical.

I can’t believe that these merely happen to be random cards that Babbage somehow swept off his desk and then hauled all over Europe. Charles Babbage was an extremely methodical guy.

 

The cards are not numbered, the have no apparent sequence, and they are of different sizes and materials. It may also be that some have gone missing with time. Still, I think they are a meaningful and deliberate set of closely-related cards, and that they all have one purpose. I am very much wondering what that was.

 

I can offer a few hints.

 

First, the long card with the smaller punch-holes is a “number card,” while the many smaller and squarer cards are “operations cards.”

 

The number card has “Pi” on it, and you’ll note that the numbers of Pi correspond to the pattern of punch-holes in the columns beneath them on the card. That card is not a way to calculate Pi, it’s actually the number, Pi, used as a constant, which is readable by a difference engine.

 

This particular card is described in the famous essay written by Menabrea in Turin and much-expanded by Ada Lovelace in London.

 

www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

   

www.phaselis.org/en/about/about-project

Phaselis Research

 

Phaselis

 

When compared with the previous period of research on the history of the city over the past quarter century it has undergone radical changes. While modern scientists follow the path of their predecessors in collecting data through systematic processes and methodically analysing them, they change the route whereby they approach the city as a context- and a process-oriented structure, having economic, social, cultural, political and environmental dimensions which come together at different levels.

 

This considerably more inclusive definition expands the discipline concerning the city’s historical research, which consists of archaeology, epigraphy, ancient history and the other ancillary sciences and it encourages scientists from the natural and health sciences to participate within these studies. This is because in the course of the exploration of an ancient settlement the study of both the environment and the ecological setting which make human life possible; together with health issues, such as diet and epidemics, form the context within which human beings live, and which are thereby as important as the human actors.

 

Within the context of the planned Phaselis Research, even certain knowledge such as the settlement’s appearing on the stage of history as a favorite break-point with its three natural harbours, it being famous for its roses, the frequent seismic upheavals at sea and on its shores and its citizens leaving their homes because of a devastating malaria epidemic suggest the necessity of the application of this multi-dimensional research methodology in order to understand more fully the historical adventure of this city.

 

By presenting this research project, we aim to implement and realize this multi-dimensional research method, which as yet lacks widespread application in the field in our country, however conceptually and practically with a multi-disciplinary research team consisting of both national and international scientists, we intend to register systematically every kind of data/information regarding all contexts of the city employing modern methods and to present the results to the scientific world in the form of regular reports and monographic studies, thus forming a strong tie between past and future research.

 

Phaselis Territorium

 

The boundaries of the ancient city of Phaselis’ territorium are today within the administrative borders of the township of Tekirova, in Kemer District, determined from the archaeological, epigraphic and historical-geographical evidence, reaching the Gökdere valley to the north, continue on a line drawn from Üç Adalar to Mount Tahtalı to the south and extend along the Çandır valley to the west.

 

Phaselis was discovered in 1811-1812 by Captain F. Beaufort during his work of charting the southern coastline of Asia Minor for the British Royal Navy. Beaufort drew Phaselis’ plan and in the course of conducting his cartographic studies, he saw the word Φασηλίτης ethnikon on the inscriptions and consequently identified these ruins with Phaselis. C. R. Cockerell, the English architect, archaeologist and author came to Phaselis by ship and met Beaufort there. Then in 1838 C. Fellows, the English archaeologist visited the city. He found the fragments of the dedicatory inscription over the monumental gate built in honour of the Emperor Hadrianus and mistakenly thought the Imperial Period main street was the stadion due to the seats-steps on either side of the street. In 1842 Lt. T. A. B. Spratt, the English hydrographer and geographer, and the Rev. E. Forbes, the naturalist came to Phaselis via the Olympos and Khimaira routes. Due to the fact that they all came by sea and they only stayed for a short time, their descriptions of the topography inland are without detailed and there are serious errors in orientation.

 

PhaselisThose researchers who visited Phaselis between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries concentrated primarily upon the discovery of inscriptions. In 1881-1882 while the Austrian archaeologist and the epigraphist O. Benndorf, the founder of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and his team were conducting research in southwestern Asia Minor, they examined Phaselis. In the winter of 1883 and 1884 F. von Luschan from the Austrian team took the first photographs which provide information concerning the regional features of Phaselis’ shoreline. In the same year the French scientist V. Bérard also visited Phaselis. In 1892 the members of the Austrian research team, O. Benndorf, E. Kalinka and their colleagues continued their architectural, archaeological and epigraphical studies in Phaselis. In 1904 they were followed by D. G. Hogarth, R. Norton and A. W. van Buren from the British research team. In 1908 the Austrian classical philologist E. Kalinka visited the settlement again, collected epigraphic documents and conducted research on the history of city (published in TAM II in 1944). The Italian researchers R. Paribeni and P. Romanelli visited Phaselis in1913 and C. Anti in 1921. Anti returned to Antalya overland and in consequence discovered several epigraphs and the ruins of structures within the territorium of Phaselis.

 

Further archaeological, epigraphical and historical-geographical studies of Phaselis were conducted by the English researchers F. M. Stark and G. Bean, who came to the region after World War II. In 1968 H. Schläger, the German architect and underwater archaeologist began exploring the topographical and architectural structures of Phaselis’s harbours. After Schläger’s death in 1969, the research was conducted under the leadership of the archaeologist J. Schäfer in 1970. H. Schläger, J. Schäfer and their colleagues obtained important data concerning the architecture and history of Phaselis through the surface exploration of the city and its periphery. Following the excavations conducted along the main axial street of the city, in 1980 under the direction of Kayhan Dörtlük, the then Director of the Antalya Museum and between 1981-1985 under the leadership of the archaeologist Cevdet Bayburtluoğlu; underwater exploration was carried out in the South Harbour under the direction of Metin Pehlivaner, the then Director of the Antalya Museum.

  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaselis

 

Isaac Watts ( 17 July 1674 – 25 November 1748) was an English Christian minister, hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymn writer, his work was part of evangelization. He was recognized as the "Father of English Hymnody", credited with some 750 hymns. Many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages.

 

Born in Southampton, England, in 1674, Watts was brought up in the home of a committed religious Nonconformist; his father, also Isaac Watts, had been incarcerated twice for his views. At King Edward VI School, Watts had a classical education, learning Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

 

From an early age, Watts displayed a propensity for rhyme. Once, he responded when asked why he had his eyes open during prayers:

 

A little mouse for want of stairs

ran up a rope to say its prayers.

 

Receiving corporal punishment for this, he cried:

 

O father, father, pity take

And I will no more verses make.

 

Because he was a Nonconformist, Watts could not attend Oxford or Cambridge, which were each restricted to Anglicans, as were government positions at the time. He went to the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington in 1690. Much of the remainder of his life centred around that village, which is now part of Inner London.

 

Following his education, Watts was called as pastor of a large independent chapel in London, where he helped train preachers, despite his poor health. Isaac Watts held religious opinions that were more non-denominational or ecumenical than was at that time common for a Nonconformist; he had a greater interest in promoting education and scholarship than preaching for any particular sect.

 

Taking work as a private tutor, Watts lived with the Nonconformist Hartopp family at Fleetwood House, on Church Street in Stoke Newington. Through them he became acquainted with their immediate neighbours, Sir Thomas Abney and Lady Mary.

 

Invited for a week to Hertfordshire, Watts eventually lived for a total of 36 years in the Abney household, most of the time at Abney House, their second residence. (Lady Mary had inherited the Manor of Stoke Newington in 1701 from her late brother, Thomas Gunston.)

 

On the death of Sir Thomas Abney in 1722, the widow Lady Mary and her last unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, moved all her household to Abney Hall from Hertfordshire. She invited Watts to continue with their household. He lived at Abney Hall until his death in 1748.

 

Watts particularly enjoyed the grounds at Abney Park, which Lady Mary planted with two elm walks leading down to an island heronry in the Hackney Brook. Watts often sought inspiration there for the many books and hymns he wrote.

 

Watts died in Stoke Newington in 1748, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. He left an extensive legacy of hymns, treatises, educational works and essays. His work was influential amongst Nonconformist independents and religious revivalists of the 18th century, such as Philip Doddridge, who dedicated his best-known work to Watts.

 

Sacred music scholar Stephen Marini (2003) describes the ways in which Watts contributed to English hymnody. Notably, Watts led by including new poetry for "original songs of Christian experience" to be used in worship. The older tradition was based on the poetry of the Bible, notably the Psalms. This had developed from the teachings of the 16th-century Reformation leader John Calvin, who initiated the practice of creating verse translations of the Psalms in the vernacular for congregational singing. Watts' introduction of extra-Biblical poetry opened up a new era of Protestant hymnody as other poets followed in his path.

 

Watts also introduced a new way of rendering the Psalms in verse for church services. The Psalms were originally written in Biblical Hebrew within Judaism. In early Christendom, they were affirmed in the Biblical canon as part of the Old Testament. Watts proposed that the metrical translations of the Psalms as sung by Protestant Christians should give them a specifically Christian perspective. While he granted that David [to whom authorship of many of the Psalms is traditionally ascribed] was unquestionably a chosen instrument of God, Watts claimed that his religious understanding could not have fully apprehended the truths later revealed through Jesus Christ. The Psalms should therefore be "renovated" as if David had been a Christian, or as Watts put it in the title of his 1719 metrical Psalter, they should be "imitated in the language of the New Testament."

 

Marini discerns two particular trends in Watts' verses, which he calls "emotional subjectivity" and "doctrinal objectivity". By the former he means that "Watts' voice broke down the distance between poet and singer and invested the text with personal spirituality." As an example of this, he cites "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross". By "doctrinal objectivity," Marini means that Watts verse achieved an "axiomatic quality" that "presented Christian doctrinal content with the explicit confidence that befits affirmations of faith." As examples, Marini cites the hymns "Joy to the World" as well as "From All That Dwell Below the Skies":

 

From all that dwell below the skies

Let the Creator's praise arise;

Let the Redeemer's name be sung

Through every land, by every tongue.

 

Besides writing hymns, Isaac Watts was also a theologian and logician, writing books and essays on these subjects.

 

Watts wrote a text book on logic which was particularly popular; its full title was, Logic, or The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth With a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences. This was first published in 1724, and it was printed in twenty editions.

 

Watts wrote this work for beginners of logic, and arranged the book methodically. He divided the content of his elementary treatment of logic into four parts: perception, judgement, reasoning, and method, which he treated in this order. Each of these parts is divided into chapters, and some of these chapters are divided into sections. The content of the chapters and sections is subdivided by the following devices: divisions, distributions, notes, observations, directions, rules, illustrations, and remarks. Every contentum of the book comes under one or more of these headings, and this methodical arrangement serves to make the exposition clear.

 

In Watts' Logic, there are notable departures from other works of the time, and some notable innovations. The influence of British empiricism may be seen, especially that of contemporary philosopher and empiricist John Locke. Logic includes several references to Locke and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he espoused his empiricist views. Watts was careful to distinguish between judgements and propositions, unlike some other logic authors. According to Watts, judgement is "to compare... ideas together, and to join them by affirmation, or disjoin then by negation, according as we find them to agree or disagree". He continues, "when mere ideas are joined in the mind without words, it is rather called a judgement; but when clothed with words it is called a proposition". Watts' Logic follows the scholastic tradition and divides propositions into universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative, and particular negative.

 

In the third part, Watts discusses reasoning and argumentation, with particular emphasis on the theory of syllogism. This was considered a centrally important part of classical logic. According to Watts, and in keeping with logicians of his day, Watts defined logic as an art (see liberal arts), as opposed to a science. Throughout Logic, Watts revealed his high conception of logic by stressing the practical side of logic, rather than the speculative side. According to Watts, as a practical art, logic can be really useful in any inquiry, whether it is an inquiry in the arts, or inquiry in the sciences, or inquiry of an ethical kind. Watts' emphasis on logic as a practical art distinguishes his book from others.

 

By stressing a practical and non-formal part of logic, Watts gave rules and directions for any kind of inquiry, including the inquiries of science and the inquiries of philosophy. These rules of inquiry were given in addition to the formal content of classical logic common to text books on logic from that time. Watts' conception of logic as being divided into its practical part and its speculative part marks a departure from the conception of logic of most other authors. His conception of logic is more akin to that of the later, nineteenth-century logician, C.S. Peirce.

 

Isaac Watts' Logic became the standard text on logic at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, being used at Oxford for well over 100 years. C.S. Peirce, the great nineteenth-century logician, wrote favorably of Watts' Logic. When preparing his own text book, entitled A Critick of Arguments: How to Reason (also known as the Grand Logic), Peirce wrote, 'I shall suppose the reader to be acquainted with what is contained in Dr Watts' Logick, a book... far superior to the treatises now used in colleges, being the production of a man distinguished for good sense.'

 

Watts followed the Logic in 1741 by a supplement, The Improvement of the Mind. This also went through numerous editions and later inspired Michael Faraday. It was also widely used as a moral textbook in schools.

 

On his death, Isaac Watts' papers were given to Yale University in the Colony of Connecticut, which Nonconformists had established. King Edward VI School, which he attended, named one of its houses "Watts" in his honour.

 

The Church of England and Lutheran Church remember Watts (and his priestly service) annually in the Calendar of Saints on November 25, and the Episcopal Church on the following day.

 

The earliest surviving built memorial to Isaac Watts is at Westminster Abbey; this was completed shortly after his death. His much-visited chest tomb at Bunhill Fields, dates from 1808, replacing the original that had been paid for and erected by Lady Mary Abney and the Hartopp family. A stone bust of Watts is installed at the Nonconformist Dr Williams's Library, in central London. The earliest public statue, erected in 1845, stands at Abney Park, where Watts had lived for more than 30 years at the manor house, where he also died. The park was later devoted to uses as a cemetery and public arboretum. A later, rather similar statue was funded by public subscription and erected in a new Victorian public park named for Watts in Southampton, the city of his birth. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Congregational Dr Watts Memorial Hall was built in Southampton and named for him. After World War II, it was lost to redevelopment. The Isaac Watts Memorial United Reformed Church was built on the site and named for him. One of the earliest built memorials may also now be lost: a bust to Watts that was commissioned on his death for the London chapel with which he was associated. The chapel was demolished in the late 18th century; remaining parts of the memorial were rescued at the last minute by a wealthy landowner for installation in his chapel near Liverpool. It is unclear whether the bust survives. The stone statue in front of the Abney Park Chapel at Dr Watts' Walk, Abney Park Cemetery, was erected in 1845 by public subscription. It was designed by the leading British sculptor, Edward Hodges Baily RA FRS. A scheme for a commemorative statue on this spot had first been promoted in the late 1830s by George Collison, who in 1840 published an engraving as the frontispiece of his book about cemetery design in Europe and America; and at Abney Park Cemetery in particular. This first cenotaph proposal was never commissioned, and Baily's later design was adopted in 1845. In 1974, the City of Southampton (Watts' home city) commemorated the 300 year anniversary of his birth by commissioning the biography Isaac Watts Remembered, written by David G. Fountain, who like Watts, was also a non-conformist minister from Southampton.

 

The water buffalo or domestic Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) is a large bovid originating in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. Today, it is also found in Europe, Australia, and some American countries. The wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee) native to Southeast Asia is considered a different species, but most likely represents the ancestor of the domestic water buffalo.

 

Two extant types of water buffalo are recognized based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of South Asia and further west to the Balkans, Egypt, and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The origins of the domestic water buffalo types are debated, although results of a phylogenetic study indicate that the swamp type may have originated in China and was domesticated about 4,000 years ago, while the river type may have originated from India and was domesticated about 5,000 years ago. Water buffalo were traded from the Indus Valley Civilisation to Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, 2500 BC by the Meluhhas. The seal of a scribe employed by an Akkadian king shows the sacrifice of water buffalo.

 

At least 130 million domestic water buffalo exist, and more human beings depend on them than on any other domestic animal. They are especially suitable for tilling rice fields, and their milk is richer in fat and protein than that of dairy cattle. The large feral population of northern Australia became established in the late 19th century, and smaller feral herds are in New Guinea, Tunisia, and northeastern Argentina. Feral herds are also present in New Britain, New Ireland, Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and Uruguay.

 

CHARACTERISTICS

The skin of river buffalo is black, but some specimens may have dark, slate-coloured skin. Swamp buffalo have a grey skin at birth, but become slate blue later. Albinoids are present in some populations. River buffalo have comparatively longer faces, smaller girths, and bigger limbs than swamp buffalo. Their dorsal ridges extend further back and taper off more gradually. Their horns grow downward and backward, then curve upward in a spiral. Swamp buffalo are heavy-bodied and stockily built; the body is short and the belly large. The forehead is flat, the eyes prominent, the face short, and the muzzle wide. The neck is comparatively long, and the withers and croup are prominent. A dorsal ridge extends backward and ends abruptly just before the end of the chest. Their horns grow outward, and curve in a semicircle, but always remain more or less on the plane of the forehead. The tail is short, reaching only to the hocks. Height at withers is 129–133 cm for males, and 120–127 cm for females. They range in weight from 300–550 kg, but weights of over 1,000 kg have also been observed.

 

Tedong bonga is a black pied buffalo featuring a unique black and white colouration that is favoured by the Toraja of Sulawesi.

 

The swamp buffalo has 48 chromosomes; the river buffalo has 50 chromosomes. The two types do not readily interbreed, but fertile offspring can occur. Buffalo-cattle hybrids have not been observed to occur, and the embryos of such hybrids do not reach maturity in laboratory experiments.

 

The rumen of the water buffalo has important differences from that of other ruminants. It contains a larger population of bacteria, particularly the cellulolytic bacteria, lower protozoa, and higher fungi zoospores. In addition, higher rumen ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) and higher pH have been found as compared to those in cattle

 

ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

River buffalo prefer deep water. Swamp buffalo prefer to wallow in mudholes which they make with their horns. During wallowing, they acquire a thick coating of mud. Both are well adapted to a hot and humid climate with temperatures ranging from 0 °C in the winter to 30 °C and greater in the summer. Water availability is important in hot climates, since they need wallows, rivers, or splashing water to assist in thermoregulation. Some breeds are adapted to saline seaside shores and saline sandy terrain.

 

DIET

Water buffalo thrive on many aquatic plants and during floods, will graze submerged, raising their heads above the water and carrying quantities of edible plants. They eat reeds (quassab), a giant reed (birdi), a kind of bulrush (kaulan), water hyacinth, and marsh grasses. Some of these plants are of great value to local peoples. Others, such as water hyacinth, are a major problem in some tropical valleys, and water buffalo may help to keep waterways clear.

 

Green fodders are used widely for intensive milk production and for fattening. Many fodder crops are conserved as hay, chaffed, or pulped. Fodders include alfalfa, berseem and bancheri, the leaves, stems or trimmings of banana, cassava, fodder beet, halfa, ipil-ipil and kenaf, maize, oats, pandarus, peanut, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane, bagasse, and turnips. Citrus pulp and pineapple wastes have been fed safely to buffalo. In Egypt, whole sun-dried dates are fed to milk-buffalo up to 25% of the standard feed mixture.

 

REPRODUCTION

Swamp buffalo generally become reproductive at an older age than river breeds. Young males in Egypt, India, and Pakistan are first mated at about 3.0–3.5 years of age, but in Italy

 

they may be used as early as 2 years of age. Successful mating behaviour may continue until the animal is 12 years or even older. A good river male can impregnate 100 females in a year. A strong seasonal influence on mating occurs. Heat stress reduces libido

 

Although buffalo are polyoestrous, their reproductive efficiency shows wide variation throughout the year. Buffalo cows exhibit a distinct seasonal change in displaying oestrus, conception rate, and calving rate. The age at first oestrus of heifers varies between breeds from 13–33 months, but mating at the first oestrus is often infertile and usually deferred until they are 3 years old. Gestation lasts from 281–334 days, but most reports give a range between 300 and 320 days. Swamp buffalo carry their calves for one or two weeks longer than river buffalo. It is not rare to find buffalo that continue to work well at the age of 30, and instances of a working life of 40 years are recorded.

 

TAXONOMIC HISTORY

Carl Linnaeus first described the genus Bos and the water buffalo under the binomial Bubalis bubalus in 1758; the latter was known to occur in Asia and as a domestic form in Italy. Ellerman and Morrison-Scott treated the wild and domestic forms of the water buffalo as conspecifics whereas others treated them as different species. The nomenclatorial treatment of wild and domestic forms has been inconsistent and varies between authors and even within the works of single authors.

 

In March 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature achieved consistency in the naming of wild and domestic water buffalo by ruling that the scientific name Bubalus arnee is valid for the wild form. B. bubalis continues to be valid for the domestic form and applies also to feral populations.

 

DOMESTICATION AND BREEDING

Water buffalo were domesticated in India about 5000 years ago, and in China about 4000 years ago. Two types are recognized, based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of the Indian subcontinent and further west to the Balkans and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The present-day river buffalo is the result of complex domestication processes involving more than one maternal lineage and a significant maternal gene flow from wild populations after the initial domestication events. Twenty-two breeds of the river type water buffalo are known, including Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Surti, Jafarabadi, Anatolian, Mediterranean, and Egyptian buffalo. China has a huge variety of buffalo genetic resources, comprising 16 local swamp buffalo breeds in various regions.

 

Results of mitochondrial DNA analyses indicate that the two types were domesticated independently. Sequencing of cytochrome b genes of Bubalus species implies that the domestic buffalo originated from at least two populations, and that the river and the swamp types have differentiated at the full species level. The genetic distance between the two types is so large that a divergence time of about 1.7 million years has been suggested. The swamp type was noticed to have the closest relationship with the tamaraw.

 

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATIONS

The water buffalo population in the world is about 172 million.

 

IN ASIA

More than 95.8% of the world population of water buffalo are found in Asia including both river and swamp types. The water buffalo population in India numbered over 97.9 million head in 2003, representing 56.5% of the world population. They are primarily of the river type, with 10 well-defined breeds comprising Badhawari, Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Jafarabadi, Marathwada, Mehsana, Nagpuri, Pandharpuri, Toda, and Surti. Swamp buffalo occur only in small areas in the north-eastern part of the country and are not distinguished into breeds.

 

In 2003, the second-largest population lived in China, with 22.759 million head, all of the swamp type with breeds kept only in the lowlands, and other breeds kept only in the mountains; as of 2003, 3.2 million swamp-type carabao buffalo were in the Philippines, nearly three million swamp buffalo were in Vietnam, and 772,764 buffalo were in Bangladesh. About 750,000 head were estimated in Sri Lanka in 1997.

 

The water buffalo is the main dairy animal in Pakistan, with 23.47 million head in 2010. Of these, 76% are kept in the Punjab. The rest of them are mostly in the province of Sindh. Breeds used are Nili-Ravi, Kundi, and Azi Kheli. Karachi has the largest population of water buffalos for an area where fodder is not grown, consisting of 350,000 head kept mainly for milking.

 

In Thailand, the number of water buffalo dropped from more than 3 million head in 1996 to less than 1.24 million head in 2011. Slightly over 75% of them are kept in the country's northeastern region. The statistics also indicate that by the beginning of 2012, less than one million were in the country, partly as a result of illegal shipments to neighboring countries where sales prices are higher than in Thailand.

 

Water buffalo are also present in the southern region of Iraq, in the marshes. These marshes were drained by Saddam Hussein in 1991 in an attempt to punish the south for the uprisings of 1991. Following 2003, and the fall of the Saddam regime, these lands were reflooded and a 2007 report in the provinces of Maysan and Thi Qar shows a steady increase in the number of water buffalo. The report puts the number at 40,008 head in those two provinces.

 

IN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Water buffalo likely were introduced to Europe from India or other Oriental countries. To Italy they were introduced about the year 600 in the reign of the Longobard King Agilulf. As they appear in the company of wild horses, they probably were a present from the Khan of the Avars, a Turkic nomadic tribe that dwelt near the Danube River at the time. Sir H. Johnston knew of a herd of water buffalo presented by a King of Naples to the Bey of Tunis in the mid-19th century that had resumed the feral state in northern Tunis.

 

European buffalo are all of the river type and considered to be of the same breed named Mediterranean buffalo. In Italy, the Mediterranean type was particularly selected and is called Mediterranean Italian breed to distinguish it from other European breeds, which differ genetically. Mediterranean buffalo are also found in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Kosovo, and the Republic of Macedonia, with a few hundred in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Hungary. Little exchange of breeding buffalo has occurred among countries, so each population has its own phenotypic features and performances. In Bulgaria, they were crossbred with the Indian Murrah breed, and in Romania, some were crossbred with Bulgarian Murrah. Populations in Turkey are of the Anatolian buffalo breed.

 

IN AUSTRALIA

Between 1824 and 1849, water buffalo were introduced into the Northern Territory from Timor, Kisar, and probably other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1886, a few milking types were brought from India to Darwin. They have been the main grazing animals on the subcoastal plains and river basins between Darwin and Arnhem Land since the 1880s. In the early 1960s, an estimated population of 150,000 to 200,000 buffalo were living in the plains and nearby areas.

 

They became feral and are causing significant environmental damage. Buffalo are also found in the Top End. As a result, they were hunted in the Top End from 1885 until 1980. The commencement of the brucellosis and tuberculosis campaign (BTEC) resulted in a huge culling program to reduce buffalo herds to a fraction of the numbers that were reached in the 1980s. The BTEC was finished when the Northern Territory was declared free of the disease in 1997. Numbers dropped dramatically as a result of the campaign, but have since recovered to an estimated 150,000 animals across northern Australia in 2008.

 

During the 1950s, buffalo were hunted for their skins and meat, which was exported and used in the local trade. In the late 1970s, live exports were made to Cuba and continued later into other countries. Buffalo are now crossed with riverine buffalo in artificial insemination programs, and may be found in many areas of Australia. Some of these crossbreds are used for milk production. Melville Island is a popular hunting location, where a steady population up to 4,000 individuals exists. Safari outfits are run from Darwin to Melville Island and other locations in the Top End, often with the use of bush pilots. The horns, which can measure up to a record of 3.1 m tip-to-tip, are prized hunting trophies.

 

The buffalo have developed a different appearance from the Indonesian buffalo from which they descend. They live mainly in freshwater marshes and billabongs, and their territory range can be quite expansive during the wet season. Their only natural predators in Australia are adult saltwater crocodiles, with whom they share the billabongs, and dingoes, which have been known to prey on buffalo calves and occasionally adult buffalo when the dingoes are in large packs.

 

Buffalo were exported live to Indonesia until 2011, at a rate of about 3000 per year. After the live export ban that year, the exports dropped to zero, and had not resumed as of June 2013.

 

IN SOUTH AMERICA

Water buffalo were introduced into the Amazon River basin in 1895. They are now extensively used there for meat and dairy production. In 2005, the buffalo herd in the Brazilian Amazon stood at roughly 1.6 million head, of which 460,000 were located in the lower Amazon floodplain. Breeds used include Mediterranean from Italy, Murrah and Jafarabadi from India, and Carabao from the Philippines.

 

During the 1970s, small herds were imported to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Cayenne, Panama, Surinam, Guyana, and Venezuela.

 

In Argentina, many game ranches raise water buffalo for commercial hunting

 

IN NORTH AMERICA

In 1974, four water buffalo were imported to the United States from Guam to be studied at the University of Florida. In February 1978, the first herd arrived for commercial farming. Until 2002, only one commercial breeder was in the United States. Water buffalo meat is imported from Australia. Until 2011, water buffalo were raised in Gainesville, Florida, from young obtained from zoo overflow. They were used primarily for meat production, frequently sold as hamburger.[38] Other US ranchers use them for production of high-quality mozzarella cheese.

 

HUSBANDRY

The husbandry system of water buffalo depends on the purpose for which they are bred and maintained. Most of them are kept by people who work on small farms in family units. Their buffalo live in very close association with them, and are often their greatest capital asset. The women and girls in India generally look after the milking buffalo while the men and boys are concerned with the working animals. Throughout Asia, they are commonly tended by children who are often seen leading or riding their charges to wallowing places. Water buffalo are the ideal animals for work in the deep mud of paddy fields because of their large hooves and flexible foot joints. They are often referred to as "the living tractor of the East". It probably is possible to plough deeper with buffalo than with either oxen or horses. They are the most efficient and economical means of cultivation of small fields. In most rice-producing countries, they are used for threshing and for transporting the sheaves during the rice harvest. They provide power for oilseed mills, sugarcane presses, and devices for raising water. They are widely used as pack animals, and in India and Pakistan also for heavy haulage. In their invasions of Europe, the Turks used buffalo for hauling heavy battering rams. Their dung is used as a fertilizer, and as a fuel when dried.

 

Buffalo contribute 72 million tones of milk and three million tones of meat annually to world food, much of it in areas that are prone to nutritional imbalances. In India, river-type buffalo are kept mainly for milk production and for transport, whereas swamp-type buffalo are kept mainly for work and a small amount of milk.

 

DAIRY PRODUCTS

Water buffalo milk presents physicochemical features different from that of other ruminant species, such as a higher content of fatty acids and proteins. The physical and chemical parameters of swamp and river type water buffalo milk differ. Water buffalo milk contains higher levels of total solids, crude protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus, and slightly higher content of lactose compared with those of cow milk. The high level of total solids makes water buffalo milk ideal for processing into value-added dairy products such as cheese. The conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) content in milk ranged from 4.4 mg/g fat in September to 7.6 mg/g fat in June. Seasons and genetics may play a role in variation of CLA level and changes in gross composition of the water buffalo milk.

 

Water buffalo milk is processed into a large variety of dairy products:

 

- Cream churns much faster at higher fat levels and gives higher overrun than cow cream.

- Butter from water buffalo cream displays more stability than that from cow cream.

- Ghee from water buffalo milk has a different texture with a bigger grain size than ghee from cow milk.

- Heat-concentrated milk products in the Indian subcontinent include paneer, khoa, rabri, kheer and basundi.

- Fermented milk products include dahi, yogurt, and chakka.

- Whey is used for making ricotta and mascarpone in Italy, and alkarish in Syria and Egypt.

- Soft cheeses made include mozzarella in Italy, karish, mish, and domiati in Egypt, madhfor in Iraq, alghab in Syria, kesong puti in the Philippines, and vladeasa in Romania.

- The semihard cheese beyaz peynir is made in Turkey.

- Hard cheeses include braila in Romania, rahss in Egypt, white brine in Bulgaria, and akkawi in Syria.

- Watered-down buffalo milk is used as a cheaper alternative to regular milk.

 

MEAT AND SKIN PRODUCTS

Water buffalo meat, sometimes called "carabeef", is often passed off as beef in certain regions, and is also a major source of export revenue for India. In many Asian regions, buffalo meat is less preferred due to its toughness; however, recipes have evolved (rendang, for example) where the slow cooking process and spices not only make the meat palatable, but also preserve it, an important factor in hot climates where refrigeration is not always available.Their hides provide tough and useful leather, often used for shoes.

 

BONE AND HORN PRODUCTS

The bones and horns are often made into jewellery, especially earrings. Horns are used for the embouchure of musical instruments, such as ney and kaval.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Wildlife conservation scientists have started to recommend and use introduced populations of feral domestic water buffalo in far-away lands to manage uncontrolled vegetation growth in and around natural wetlands. Introduced water buffalo at home in such environs provide cheap service by regularly grazing the uncontrolled vegetation and opening up clogged water bodies for waterfowl, wetland birds, and other wildlife. Grazing water buffalo are sometimes used in Great Britain for conservation grazing, such as in Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve. The buffalo can better adapt to wet conditions and poor-quality vegetation than cattle.

 

Currently, research is being conducted at the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies to determine the levels of nutrients removed and returned to wetlands when water buffalo are used for wetland vegetation management.

 

However, in uncontrolled circumstances, water buffalo can cause environmental damage, such as trampling vegetation, disturbing bird and reptile nesting sites, and spreading exotic weeds.

 

RESEARCH

The world's first cloned buffalo was developed by Indian scientists from National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal. The buffalo calf was named Samrupa. The calf did not survive more than a week, and died due to some genetic disorders. So, the scientists created another cloned buffalo a few months later, and named it Garima.

 

On 15 September 2007, the Philippines announced its development of Southeast Asia's first cloned buffalo. The Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), under the Department of Science and Technology in Los Baños, Laguna, approved this project. The Department of Agriculture's Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) will implement cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer as a tool for genetic improvement in water buffalo. "Super buffalo calves" will be produced. There will be no modification or alteration of the genetic materials, as in genetically modified organisms.

 

On 1 January 2008, the Philippine Carabao Center in Nueva Ecija, per Filipino scientists, initiated a study to breed a super water buffalo that could produce 4 to 18 litres of milk per day using gene-based technology. Also, the first in vitro river buffalo was born there in 2004 from an in vitro-produced, vitrified embryo, named "Glory" after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Joseph Estrada's most successful project as an opposition senator, the PCC was created through Republic Act 3707, the Carabao Act of 1992.

 

IN CULTURE

Some ethnic groups, such as Batak and Toraja in Indonesia and the Derung in China, use water buffalo or kerbau (called horbo in Batak or tedong in Toraja) as sacrificial animals at several festivals.

 

- Legend has it that the Chinese philosophical sage Laozi left China through the Han Gu Pass riding a water buffalo.

- According to Hindu lore, the god of death Yama, rides on a male water buffalo.

- The carabao subspecies is considered a national symbol in the Philippines.

- In Vietnam, water buffalo are often the most valuable possession of poor farmers: "Con trâu là đầu cơ nghiệp". They are treated as a member of the family: "Chồng cày, vợ cấy, con trâu đi bừa" ("The husband ploughs, the wife sows, water buffalo draws the rake") and are friends of the children. Children talk to their water buffalo, "Bao giờ cây lúa còn bông. Thì còn ngọn cỏ ngoài đồng trâu ăn." (Vietnamese children are responsible for grazing water buffalo. They feed them grass if they work laboriously for men.) In the old days, West Lake, Hà Nội, was named Kim Ngưu - Golden Water Buffalo.

- The Yoruban Orisha Oya (goddess of change) takes the form of a water buffalo.

 

FIGHTING FESTIVALS

- Pasungay Festival is held annually in the town of San Joaquin, Iloilo in the Philippines.

- Moh juj Water Buffalo fighting, is held every year in Bhogali Bihu in Assam. Ahotguri in Nagaon is famous for it.

- Do Son Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, held each year on the ninth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar at Do Son Township, Haiphong City in Vietnam, is one of the most popular Vietnam festivals and events in Haiphong City. The preparations for this buffalo fighting festival begin from the two to three months earlier. The competing buffalo are selected and methodically trained months in advance. It is a traditional festival of Vietnam attached to a Water God worshipping ceremony and the Hien Sinh custom to show martial spirit of the local people of Do Son, Haiphong.

- "Hai Luu" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, According to ancient records, the buffalo fighting in Hai Luu Commune has existed from the 2nd century B.C. General Lu Gia at that time, had the buffalo slaughtered to give a feast to the local people and the warriors, and organized buffalo fighting for amusement. Eventually, all the fighting buffalo will be slaughtered as tributes to the deities.

- "Ko Samui" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Thailand, is a very popular event held on special occasions such as New Year's Day in January, and Songkran in mid-April, this festival features head-wrestling bouts in which two male Asian water buffalo are pitted against one another. Unlike in Spanish Bullfighting, wherein bulls get killed while fighting sword-wielding men, Buffalo Fighting Festival held at Ko Samui, Thailand is fairly harmless contest. The fighting season varies according to ancient customs & ceremonies. The first Buffalo to turn and run away is considered the loser, the winning buffalo becomes worth several million baht. Ko Samui is an island in the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea, it is 700 km from Bangkok and is connected to it by regular flights.

- "Ma'Pasilaga Tedong" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival, in Tana Toraja Regency of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, is a very popular event where the Rambu Solo' or a Burial Festival took place in Tana Toraja.

 

RACING FESTIVALS

Carabao Carroza Festival is being held annually every May in the town of Pavia, Iloilo, Philippines.

Kambala races of Karnataka, India, take place between December and March. The races are conducted by having the water buffalo (he buffalo) run in long parallel slushy ditches, where they are driven by men standing on wooden planks drawn by the buffalo. The objectives of the race are to finish first and to raise the water to the greatest height and also a rural sport. Kambala races are arranged with competition, as well as without competition and as a part of thanks giving (to god) in about 50 villages of coastal Karnataka.

 

In the Chonburi Province of Thailand, and in Pakistan, there are annual water buffalo races.

 

Chon Buri Water buffalo racing festival, Thailand In downtown Chonburi, 70 km south of Bangkok, at the annual water buffalo festival held in mid-October. About 300 buffalo race in groups of five or six, spurred on by bareback jockeys wielding wooden sticks, as hundreds of spectators cheer. The water buffalo has always played an important role in agriculture in Thailand. For farmers of Chon Buri Province, near Bangkok, it is an important annual festival, beginning in mid-October. It is also a celebration among rice farmers before the rice harvest. At dawn, farmers walk their buffalo through surrounding rice fields, splashing them with water to keep them cool before leading them to the race field. This amazing festival started over a hundred years ago when two men arguing about whose buffalo was the fastest ended up having a race between them. That’s how it became a tradition and gradually a social event for farmers who gathered from around the country in Chonburi to trade their goods. The festival also helps a great deal in preserving the number of buffalo, which have been dwindling at quite an alarming rate in other regions. Modern machinery is rapidly replacing buffalo in Thai agriculture. With most of the farm work mechanized, the buffalo-racing tradition has continued. Racing buffalo are now raised just to race; they do not work at all. The few farm buffalo which still do work are much bigger than the racers because of the strenuous work they perform. Farm buffalo are in the "Buffalo Beauty Pageant", a Miss Farmer beauty contest and a comic buffalo costume contest etc.. This festival perfectly exemplifies a favored Thai attitude to life — "sanuk," meaning fun.

 

Babulang Water buffalo racing festival, Sarawak, Malaysia, is the largest or grandest of the many rituals, ceremonies and festivals of the traditional Bisaya (Borneo) community of Limbang, Sarawak. Highlights are the Ratu Babulang competition and the Water buffalo races which can only be found in this town in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Vihear Suor village Water buffalo racing festival, in Cambodia, each year, people visit Buddhist temples across the country to honor their deceased loved ones during a 15-day period commonly known as the Festival of the Dead but in Vihear Suor village, about 35 km northeast of Cambodia, citizens each year wrap up the festival with a water buffalo race to entertain visitors and honour a pledge made hundreds of years ago. There was a time when many village cattle which provide rural Cambodians with muscle power to plough their fields and transport agricultural products died from an unknown disease. The villagers prayed to a spirit to help save their animals from the disease and promised to show their gratitude by holding a buffalo race each year on the last day of "P'chum Ben" festival as it is known in Cambodian. The race draws hundreds of spectators who come to see riders and their animals charge down the racing field, the racers bouncing up and down on the backs of their buffalo, whose horns were draped with colorful cloth.

Pothu puttu matsaram, Kerala, South India, is similar to Kambala races.

 

WIKIPEDIA

The water buffalo or domestic Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) is a large bovid originating in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. Today, it is also found in Europe, Australia, and some American countries. The wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee) native to Southeast Asia is considered a different species, but most likely represents the ancestor of the domestic water buffalo.

 

Two extant types of water buffalo are recognized based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of South Asia and further west to the Balkans, Egypt, and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The origins of the domestic water buffalo types are debated, although results of a phylogenetic study indicate that the swamp type may have originated in China and was domesticated about 4,000 years ago, while the river type may have originated from India and was domesticated about 5,000 years ago. Water buffalo were traded from the Indus Valley Civilisation to Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, 2500 BC by the Meluhhas. The seal of a scribe employed by an Akkadian king shows the sacrifice of water buffalo.

 

At least 130 million domestic water buffalo exist, and more human beings depend on them than on any other domestic animal. They are especially suitable for tilling rice fields, and their milk is richer in fat and protein than that of dairy cattle. The large feral population of northern Australia became established in the late 19th century, and smaller feral herds are in New Guinea, Tunisia, and northeastern Argentina. Feral herds are also present in New Britain, New Ireland, Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and Uruguay.

 

CHARACTERISTICS

The skin of river buffalo is black, but some specimens may have dark, slate-coloured skin. Swamp buffalo have a grey skin at birth, but become slate blue later. Albinoids are present in some populations. River buffalo have comparatively longer faces, smaller girths, and bigger limbs than swamp buffalo. Their dorsal ridges extend further back and taper off more gradually. Their horns grow downward and backward, then curve upward in a spiral. Swamp buffalo are heavy-bodied and stockily built; the body is short and the belly large. The forehead is flat, the eyes prominent, the face short, and the muzzle wide. The neck is comparatively long, and the withers and croup are prominent. A dorsal ridge extends backward and ends abruptly just before the end of the chest. Their horns grow outward, and curve in a semicircle, but always remain more or less on the plane of the forehead. The tail is short, reaching only to the hocks. Height at withers is 129–133 cm for males, and 120–127 cm for females. They range in weight from 300–550 kg, but weights of over 1,000 kg have also been observed.

 

Tedong bonga is a black pied buffalo featuring a unique black and white colouration that is favoured by the Toraja of Sulawesi.

 

The swamp buffalo has 48 chromosomes; the river buffalo has 50 chromosomes. The two types do not readily interbreed, but fertile offspring can occur. Buffalo-cattle hybrids have not been observed to occur, and the embryos of such hybrids do not reach maturity in laboratory experiments.

 

The rumen of the water buffalo has important differences from that of other ruminants. It contains a larger population of bacteria, particularly the cellulolytic bacteria, lower protozoa, and higher fungi zoospores. In addition, higher rumen ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) and higher pH have been found as compared to those in cattle

 

ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

River buffalo prefer deep water. Swamp buffalo prefer to wallow in mudholes which they make with their horns. During wallowing, they acquire a thick coating of mud. Both are well adapted to a hot and humid climate with temperatures ranging from 0 °C in the winter to 30 °C and greater in the summer. Water availability is important in hot climates, since they need wallows, rivers, or splashing water to assist in thermoregulation. Some breeds are adapted to saline seaside shores and saline sandy terrain.

 

DIET

Water buffalo thrive on many aquatic plants and during floods, will graze submerged, raising their heads above the water and carrying quantities of edible plants. They eat reeds (quassab), a giant reed (birdi), a kind of bulrush (kaulan), water hyacinth, and marsh grasses. Some of these plants are of great value to local peoples. Others, such as water hyacinth, are a major problem in some tropical valleys, and water buffalo may help to keep waterways clear.

 

Green fodders are used widely for intensive milk production and for fattening. Many fodder crops are conserved as hay, chaffed, or pulped. Fodders include alfalfa, berseem and bancheri, the leaves, stems or trimmings of banana, cassava, fodder beet, halfa, ipil-ipil and kenaf, maize, oats, pandarus, peanut, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane, bagasse, and turnips. Citrus pulp and pineapple wastes have been fed safely to buffalo. In Egypt, whole sun-dried dates are fed to milk-buffalo up to 25% of the standard feed mixture.

 

REPRODUCTION

Swamp buffalo generally become reproductive at an older age than river breeds. Young males in Egypt, India, and Pakistan are first mated at about 3.0–3.5 years of age, but in Italy

 

they may be used as early as 2 years of age. Successful mating behaviour may continue until the animal is 12 years or even older. A good river male can impregnate 100 females in a year. A strong seasonal influence on mating occurs. Heat stress reduces libido

 

Although buffalo are polyoestrous, their reproductive efficiency shows wide variation throughout the year. Buffalo cows exhibit a distinct seasonal change in displaying oestrus, conception rate, and calving rate. The age at first oestrus of heifers varies between breeds from 13–33 months, but mating at the first oestrus is often infertile and usually deferred until they are 3 years old. Gestation lasts from 281–334 days, but most reports give a range between 300 and 320 days. Swamp buffalo carry their calves for one or two weeks longer than river buffalo. It is not rare to find buffalo that continue to work well at the age of 30, and instances of a working life of 40 years are recorded.

 

TAXONOMIC HISTORY

Carl Linnaeus first described the genus Bos and the water buffalo under the binomial Bubalis bubalus in 1758; the latter was known to occur in Asia and as a domestic form in Italy. Ellerman and Morrison-Scott treated the wild and domestic forms of the water buffalo as conspecifics whereas others treated them as different species. The nomenclatorial treatment of wild and domestic forms has been inconsistent and varies between authors and even within the works of single authors.

 

In March 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature achieved consistency in the naming of wild and domestic water buffalo by ruling that the scientific name Bubalus arnee is valid for the wild form. B. bubalis continues to be valid for the domestic form and applies also to feral populations.

 

DOMESTICATION AND BREEDING

Water buffalo were domesticated in India about 5000 years ago, and in China about 4000 years ago. Two types are recognized, based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of the Indian subcontinent and further west to the Balkans and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The present-day river buffalo is the result of complex domestication processes involving more than one maternal lineage and a significant maternal gene flow from wild populations after the initial domestication events. Twenty-two breeds of the river type water buffalo are known, including Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Surti, Jafarabadi, Anatolian, Mediterranean, and Egyptian buffalo. China has a huge variety of buffalo genetic resources, comprising 16 local swamp buffalo breeds in various regions.

 

Results of mitochondrial DNA analyses indicate that the two types were domesticated independently. Sequencing of cytochrome b genes of Bubalus species implies that the domestic buffalo originated from at least two populations, and that the river and the swamp types have differentiated at the full species level. The genetic distance between the two types is so large that a divergence time of about 1.7 million years has been suggested. The swamp type was noticed to have the closest relationship with the tamaraw.

 

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATIONS

The water buffalo population in the world is about 172 million.

 

IN ASIA

More than 95.8% of the world population of water buffalo are found in Asia including both river and swamp types. The water buffalo population in India numbered over 97.9 million head in 2003, representing 56.5% of the world population. They are primarily of the river type, with 10 well-defined breeds comprising Badhawari, Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Jafarabadi, Marathwada, Mehsana, Nagpuri, Pandharpuri, Toda, and Surti. Swamp buffalo occur only in small areas in the north-eastern part of the country and are not distinguished into breeds.

 

In 2003, the second-largest population lived in China, with 22.759 million head, all of the swamp type with breeds kept only in the lowlands, and other breeds kept only in the mountains; as of 2003, 3.2 million swamp-type carabao buffalo were in the Philippines, nearly three million swamp buffalo were in Vietnam, and 772,764 buffalo were in Bangladesh. About 750,000 head were estimated in Sri Lanka in 1997.

 

The water buffalo is the main dairy animal in Pakistan, with 23.47 million head in 2010. Of these, 76% are kept in the Punjab. The rest of them are mostly in the province of Sindh. Breeds used are Nili-Ravi, Kundi, and Azi Kheli. Karachi has the largest population of water buffalos for an area where fodder is not grown, consisting of 350,000 head kept mainly for milking.

 

In Thailand, the number of water buffalo dropped from more than 3 million head in 1996 to less than 1.24 million head in 2011. Slightly over 75% of them are kept in the country's northeastern region. The statistics also indicate that by the beginning of 2012, less than one million were in the country, partly as a result of illegal shipments to neighboring countries where sales prices are higher than in Thailand.

 

Water buffalo are also present in the southern region of Iraq, in the marshes. These marshes were drained by Saddam Hussein in 1991 in an attempt to punish the south for the uprisings of 1991. Following 2003, and the fall of the Saddam regime, these lands were reflooded and a 2007 report in the provinces of Maysan and Thi Qar shows a steady increase in the number of water buffalo. The report puts the number at 40,008 head in those two provinces.

 

IN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Water buffalo likely were introduced to Europe from India or other Oriental countries. To Italy they were introduced about the year 600 in the reign of the Longobard King Agilulf. As they appear in the company of wild horses, they probably were a present from the Khan of the Avars, a Turkic nomadic tribe that dwelt near the Danube River at the time. Sir H. Johnston knew of a herd of water buffalo presented by a King of Naples to the Bey of Tunis in the mid-19th century that had resumed the feral state in northern Tunis.

 

European buffalo are all of the river type and considered to be of the same breed named Mediterranean buffalo. In Italy, the Mediterranean type was particularly selected and is called Mediterranean Italian breed to distinguish it from other European breeds, which differ genetically. Mediterranean buffalo are also found in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Kosovo, and the Republic of Macedonia, with a few hundred in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Hungary. Little exchange of breeding buffalo has occurred among countries, so each population has its own phenotypic features and performances. In Bulgaria, they were crossbred with the Indian Murrah breed, and in Romania, some were crossbred with Bulgarian Murrah. Populations in Turkey are of the Anatolian buffalo breed.

 

IN AUSTRALIA

Between 1824 and 1849, water buffalo were introduced into the Northern Territory from Timor, Kisar, and probably other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1886, a few milking types were brought from India to Darwin. They have been the main grazing animals on the subcoastal plains and river basins between Darwin and Arnhem Land since the 1880s. In the early 1960s, an estimated population of 150,000 to 200,000 buffalo were living in the plains and nearby areas.

 

They became feral and are causing significant environmental damage. Buffalo are also found in the Top End. As a result, they were hunted in the Top End from 1885 until 1980. The commencement of the brucellosis and tuberculosis campaign (BTEC) resulted in a huge culling program to reduce buffalo herds to a fraction of the numbers that were reached in the 1980s. The BTEC was finished when the Northern Territory was declared free of the disease in 1997. Numbers dropped dramatically as a result of the campaign, but have since recovered to an estimated 150,000 animals across northern Australia in 2008.

 

During the 1950s, buffalo were hunted for their skins and meat, which was exported and used in the local trade. In the late 1970s, live exports were made to Cuba and continued later into other countries. Buffalo are now crossed with riverine buffalo in artificial insemination programs, and may be found in many areas of Australia. Some of these crossbreds are used for milk production. Melville Island is a popular hunting location, where a steady population up to 4,000 individuals exists. Safari outfits are run from Darwin to Melville Island and other locations in the Top End, often with the use of bush pilots. The horns, which can measure up to a record of 3.1 m tip-to-tip, are prized hunting trophies.

 

The buffalo have developed a different appearance from the Indonesian buffalo from which they descend. They live mainly in freshwater marshes and billabongs, and their territory range can be quite expansive during the wet season. Their only natural predators in Australia are adult saltwater crocodiles, with whom they share the billabongs, and dingoes, which have been known to prey on buffalo calves and occasionally adult buffalo when the dingoes are in large packs.

 

Buffalo were exported live to Indonesia until 2011, at a rate of about 3000 per year. After the live export ban that year, the exports dropped to zero, and had not resumed as of June 2013.

 

IN SOUTH AMERICA

Water buffalo were introduced into the Amazon River basin in 1895. They are now extensively used there for meat and dairy production. In 2005, the buffalo herd in the Brazilian Amazon stood at roughly 1.6 million head, of which 460,000 were located in the lower Amazon floodplain. Breeds used include Mediterranean from Italy, Murrah and Jafarabadi from India, and Carabao from the Philippines.

 

During the 1970s, small herds were imported to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Cayenne, Panama, Surinam, Guyana, and Venezuela.

 

In Argentina, many game ranches raise water buffalo for commercial hunting

 

IN NORTH AMERICA

In 1974, four water buffalo were imported to the United States from Guam to be studied at the University of Florida. In February 1978, the first herd arrived for commercial farming. Until 2002, only one commercial breeder was in the United States. Water buffalo meat is imported from Australia. Until 2011, water buffalo were raised in Gainesville, Florida, from young obtained from zoo overflow. They were used primarily for meat production, frequently sold as hamburger.[38] Other US ranchers use them for production of high-quality mozzarella cheese.

 

HUSBANDRY

The husbandry system of water buffalo depends on the purpose for which they are bred and maintained. Most of them are kept by people who work on small farms in family units. Their buffalo live in very close association with them, and are often their greatest capital asset. The women and girls in India generally look after the milking buffalo while the men and boys are concerned with the working animals. Throughout Asia, they are commonly tended by children who are often seen leading or riding their charges to wallowing places. Water buffalo are the ideal animals for work in the deep mud of paddy fields because of their large hooves and flexible foot joints. They are often referred to as "the living tractor of the East". It probably is possible to plough deeper with buffalo than with either oxen or horses. They are the most efficient and economical means of cultivation of small fields. In most rice-producing countries, they are used for threshing and for transporting the sheaves during the rice harvest. They provide power for oilseed mills, sugarcane presses, and devices for raising water. They are widely used as pack animals, and in India and Pakistan also for heavy haulage. In their invasions of Europe, the Turks used buffalo for hauling heavy battering rams. Their dung is used as a fertilizer, and as a fuel when dried.

 

Buffalo contribute 72 million tones of milk and three million tones of meat annually to world food, much of it in areas that are prone to nutritional imbalances. In India, river-type buffalo are kept mainly for milk production and for transport, whereas swamp-type buffalo are kept mainly for work and a small amount of milk.

 

DAIRY PRODUCTS

Water buffalo milk presents physicochemical features different from that of other ruminant species, such as a higher content of fatty acids and proteins. The physical and chemical parameters of swamp and river type water buffalo milk differ. Water buffalo milk contains higher levels of total solids, crude protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus, and slightly higher content of lactose compared with those of cow milk. The high level of total solids makes water buffalo milk ideal for processing into value-added dairy products such as cheese. The conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) content in milk ranged from 4.4 mg/g fat in September to 7.6 mg/g fat in June. Seasons and genetics may play a role in variation of CLA level and changes in gross composition of the water buffalo milk.

 

Water buffalo milk is processed into a large variety of dairy products:

 

- Cream churns much faster at higher fat levels and gives higher overrun than cow cream.

- Butter from water buffalo cream displays more stability than that from cow cream.

- Ghee from water buffalo milk has a different texture with a bigger grain size than ghee from cow milk.

- Heat-concentrated milk products in the Indian subcontinent include paneer, khoa, rabri, kheer and basundi.

- Fermented milk products include dahi, yogurt, and chakka.

- Whey is used for making ricotta and mascarpone in Italy, and alkarish in Syria and Egypt.

- Soft cheeses made include mozzarella in Italy, karish, mish, and domiati in Egypt, madhfor in Iraq, alghab in Syria, kesong puti in the Philippines, and vladeasa in Romania.

- The semihard cheese beyaz peynir is made in Turkey.

- Hard cheeses include braila in Romania, rahss in Egypt, white brine in Bulgaria, and akkawi in Syria.

- Watered-down buffalo milk is used as a cheaper alternative to regular milk.

 

MEAT AND SKIN PRODUCTS

Water buffalo meat, sometimes called "carabeef", is often passed off as beef in certain regions, and is also a major source of export revenue for India. In many Asian regions, buffalo meat is less preferred due to its toughness; however, recipes have evolved (rendang, for example) where the slow cooking process and spices not only make the meat palatable, but also preserve it, an important factor in hot climates where refrigeration is not always available.Their hides provide tough and useful leather, often used for shoes.

 

BONE AND HORN PRODUCTS

The bones and horns are often made into jewellery, especially earrings. Horns are used for the embouchure of musical instruments, such as ney and kaval.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Wildlife conservation scientists have started to recommend and use introduced populations of feral domestic water buffalo in far-away lands to manage uncontrolled vegetation growth in and around natural wetlands. Introduced water buffalo at home in such environs provide cheap service by regularly grazing the uncontrolled vegetation and opening up clogged water bodies for waterfowl, wetland birds, and other wildlife. Grazing water buffalo are sometimes used in Great Britain for conservation grazing, such as in Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve. The buffalo can better adapt to wet conditions and poor-quality vegetation than cattle.

 

Currently, research is being conducted at the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies to determine the levels of nutrients removed and returned to wetlands when water buffalo are used for wetland vegetation management.

 

However, in uncontrolled circumstances, water buffalo can cause environmental damage, such as trampling vegetation, disturbing bird and reptile nesting sites, and spreading exotic weeds.

 

RESEARCH

The world's first cloned buffalo was developed by Indian scientists from National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal. The buffalo calf was named Samrupa. The calf did not survive more than a week, and died due to some genetic disorders. So, the scientists created another cloned buffalo a few months later, and named it Garima.

 

On 15 September 2007, the Philippines announced its development of Southeast Asia's first cloned buffalo. The Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), under the Department of Science and Technology in Los Baños, Laguna, approved this project. The Department of Agriculture's Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) will implement cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer as a tool for genetic improvement in water buffalo. "Super buffalo calves" will be produced. There will be no modification or alteration of the genetic materials, as in genetically modified organisms.

 

On 1 January 2008, the Philippine Carabao Center in Nueva Ecija, per Filipino scientists, initiated a study to breed a super water buffalo that could produce 4 to 18 litres of milk per day using gene-based technology. Also, the first in vitro river buffalo was born there in 2004 from an in vitro-produced, vitrified embryo, named "Glory" after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Joseph Estrada's most successful project as an opposition senator, the PCC was created through Republic Act 3707, the Carabao Act of 1992.

 

IN CULTURE

Some ethnic groups, such as Batak and Toraja in Indonesia and the Derung in China, use water buffalo or kerbau (called horbo in Batak or tedong in Toraja) as sacrificial animals at several festivals.

 

- Legend has it that the Chinese philosophical sage Laozi left China through the Han Gu Pass riding a water buffalo.

- According to Hindu lore, the god of death Yama, rides on a male water buffalo.

- The carabao subspecies is considered a national symbol in the Philippines.

- In Vietnam, water buffalo are often the most valuable possession of poor farmers: "Con trâu là đầu cơ nghiệp". They are treated as a member of the family: "Chồng cày, vợ cấy, con trâu đi bừa" ("The husband ploughs, the wife sows, water buffalo draws the rake") and are friends of the children. Children talk to their water buffalo, "Bao giờ cây lúa còn bông. Thì còn ngọn cỏ ngoài đồng trâu ăn." (Vietnamese children are responsible for grazing water buffalo. They feed them grass if they work laboriously for men.) In the old days, West Lake, Hà Nội, was named Kim Ngưu - Golden Water Buffalo.

- The Yoruban Orisha Oya (goddess of change) takes the form of a water buffalo.

 

FIGHTING FESTIVALS

- Pasungay Festival is held annually in the town of San Joaquin, Iloilo in the Philippines.

- Moh juj Water Buffalo fighting, is held every year in Bhogali Bihu in Assam. Ahotguri in Nagaon is famous for it.

- Do Son Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, held each year on the ninth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar at Do Son Township, Haiphong City in Vietnam, is one of the most popular Vietnam festivals and events in Haiphong City. The preparations for this buffalo fighting festival begin from the two to three months earlier. The competing buffalo are selected and methodically trained months in advance. It is a traditional festival of Vietnam attached to a Water God worshipping ceremony and the Hien Sinh custom to show martial spirit of the local people of Do Son, Haiphong.

- "Hai Luu" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, According to ancient records, the buffalo fighting in Hai Luu Commune has existed from the 2nd century B.C. General Lu Gia at that time, had the buffalo slaughtered to give a feast to the local people and the warriors, and organized buffalo fighting for amusement. Eventually, all the fighting buffalo will be slaughtered as tributes to the deities.

- "Ko Samui" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Thailand, is a very popular event held on special occasions such as New Year's Day in January, and Songkran in mid-April, this festival features head-wrestling bouts in which two male Asian water buffalo are pitted against one another. Unlike in Spanish Bullfighting, wherein bulls get killed while fighting sword-wielding men, Buffalo Fighting Festival held at Ko Samui, Thailand is fairly harmless contest. The fighting season varies according to ancient customs & ceremonies. The first Buffalo to turn and run away is considered the loser, the winning buffalo becomes worth several million baht. Ko Samui is an island in the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea, it is 700 km from Bangkok and is connected to it by regular flights.

- "Ma'Pasilaga Tedong" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival, in Tana Toraja Regency of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, is a very popular event where the Rambu Solo' or a Burial Festival took place in Tana Toraja.

 

RACING FESTIVALS

Carabao Carroza Festival is being held annually every May in the town of Pavia, Iloilo, Philippines.

Kambala races of Karnataka, India, take place between December and March. The races are conducted by having the water buffalo (he buffalo) run in long parallel slushy ditches, where they are driven by men standing on wooden planks drawn by the buffalo. The objectives of the race are to finish first and to raise the water to the greatest height and also a rural sport. Kambala races are arranged with competition, as well as without competition and as a part of thanks giving (to god) in about 50 villages of coastal Karnataka.

 

In the Chonburi Province of Thailand, and in Pakistan, there are annual water buffalo races.

 

Chon Buri Water buffalo racing festival, Thailand In downtown Chonburi, 70 km south of Bangkok, at the annual water buffalo festival held in mid-October. About 300 buffalo race in groups of five or six, spurred on by bareback jockeys wielding wooden sticks, as hundreds of spectators cheer. The water buffalo has always played an important role in agriculture in Thailand. For farmers of Chon Buri Province, near Bangkok, it is an important annual festival, beginning in mid-October. It is also a celebration among rice farmers before the rice harvest. At dawn, farmers walk their buffalo through surrounding rice fields, splashing them with water to keep them cool before leading them to the race field. This amazing festival started over a hundred years ago when two men arguing about whose buffalo was the fastest ended up having a race between them. That’s how it became a tradition and gradually a social event for farmers who gathered from around the country in Chonburi to trade their goods. The festival also helps a great deal in preserving the number of buffalo, which have been dwindling at quite an alarming rate in other regions. Modern machinery is rapidly replacing buffalo in Thai agriculture. With most of the farm work mechanized, the buffalo-racing tradition has continued. Racing buffalo are now raised just to race; they do not work at all. The few farm buffalo which still do work are much bigger than the racers because of the strenuous work they perform. Farm buffalo are in the "Buffalo Beauty Pageant", a Miss Farmer beauty contest and a comic buffalo costume contest etc.. This festival perfectly exemplifies a favored Thai attitude to life — "sanuk," meaning fun.

 

Babulang Water buffalo racing festival, Sarawak, Malaysia, is the largest or grandest of the many rituals, ceremonies and festivals of the traditional Bisaya (Borneo) community of Limbang, Sarawak. Highlights are the Ratu Babulang competition and the Water buffalo races which can only be found in this town in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Vihear Suor village Water buffalo racing festival, in Cambodia, each year, people visit Buddhist temples across the country to honor their deceased loved ones during a 15-day period commonly known as the Festival of the Dead but in Vihear Suor village, about 35 km northeast of Cambodia, citizens each year wrap up the festival with a water buffalo race to entertain visitors and honour a pledge made hundreds of years ago. There was a time when many village cattle which provide rural Cambodians with muscle power to plough their fields and transport agricultural products died from an unknown disease. The villagers prayed to a spirit to help save their animals from the disease and promised to show their gratitude by holding a buffalo race each year on the last day of "P'chum Ben" festival as it is known in Cambodian. The race draws hundreds of spectators who come to see riders and their animals charge down the racing field, the racers bouncing up and down on the backs of their buffalo, whose horns were draped with colorful cloth.

Pothu puttu matsaram, Kerala, South India, is similar to Kambala races.

 

WIKIPEDIA

November 7, 2021 - The National Register of Historic places Broad Street United Methodist Church at 501 East Broad Street.

 

"The Architectural firm of Yost and Packard originally designed this historic church located on the corner of Broad Street and Washington Ave. The church was built in 1885. It was designed in the gothic revival style with Victorian influences that were prevalent at the time. The design included the selection of green serpentine stone for the exterior façade. The stone was quarried in West Chester Pennsylvania. Serpentine stone is a beautiful looking material with rich veining and flecks of mica that glisten in the sunlight. Unfortunately, the stone is also a very porous material. Soon after the stone was originally installed, the church began experiencing problems with water infiltration and spalling. Attempts over the years were made to patch the stone and mortar. Many of these patching attempts actually did more harm than good.

 

In 2006 the church decided that all of the serpentine stone on the church needed to be removed and replaced. Working with Rogers Krajnak Architects, Inc., a new synthetic cast stone was selected to replace the serpentine stone. The new cast stone was designed to replicate the color, size and texture of the serpentine stone. Because the church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the stone replacement needed and received unanimous approval from the City’s Historic Resources Commission.

 

The original exterior walls were constructed of several layers of brick interconnected in a dovetail manner with the serpentine stone. The painstaking process to remove the serpentine stone on the exterior while minimizing cracks on the interior plaster included the installation of steel braces and needle beams. The original serpentine stone was methodically removed in small sections exposing the brick within the wall. New cast stone was installed in small sections anchored with stainless steel connectors and mortared in place. Subsequent sections of serpentine stone were removed followed by the installation of sections of new cast stone in multiple sequences until the stone replacement on each façade complete." Previous text from the following website: www.rogerskrajnak.com/worship/Archive/worship-13.htm

www.phaselis.org/en/about/about-project

Phaselis Research

 

Phaselis

 

When compared with the previous period of research on the history of the city over the past quarter century it has undergone radical changes. While modern scientists follow the path of their predecessors in collecting data through systematic processes and methodically analysing them, they change the route whereby they approach the city as a context- and a process-oriented structure, having economic, social, cultural, political and environmental dimensions which come together at different levels.

 

This considerably more inclusive definition expands the discipline concerning the city’s historical research, which consists of archaeology, epigraphy, ancient history and the other ancillary sciences and it encourages scientists from the natural and health sciences to participate within these studies. This is because in the course of the exploration of an ancient settlement the study of both the environment and the ecological setting which make human life possible; together with health issues, such as diet and epidemics, form the context within which human beings live, and which are thereby as important as the human actors.

 

Within the context of the planned Phaselis Research, even certain knowledge such as the settlement’s appearing on the stage of history as a favorite break-point with its three natural harbours, it being famous for its roses, the frequent seismic upheavals at sea and on its shores and its citizens leaving their homes because of a devastating malaria epidemic suggest the necessity of the application of this multi-dimensional research methodology in order to understand more fully the historical adventure of this city.

 

By presenting this research project, we aim to implement and realize this multi-dimensional research method, which as yet lacks widespread application in the field in our country, however conceptually and practically with a multi-disciplinary research team consisting of both national and international scientists, we intend to register systematically every kind of data/information regarding all contexts of the city employing modern methods and to present the results to the scientific world in the form of regular reports and monographic studies, thus forming a strong tie between past and future research.

 

Phaselis Territorium

 

The boundaries of the ancient city of Phaselis’ territorium are today within the administrative borders of the township of Tekirova, in Kemer District, determined from the archaeological, epigraphic and historical-geographical evidence, reaching the Gökdere valley to the north, continue on a line drawn from Üç Adalar to Mount Tahtalı to the south and extend along the Çandır valley to the west.

 

Phaselis was discovered in 1811-1812 by Captain F. Beaufort during his work of charting the southern coastline of Asia Minor for the British Royal Navy. Beaufort drew Phaselis’ plan and in the course of conducting his cartographic studies, he saw the word Φασηλίτης ethnikon on the inscriptions and consequently identified these ruins with Phaselis. C. R. Cockerell, the English architect, archaeologist and author came to Phaselis by ship and met Beaufort there. Then in 1838 C. Fellows, the English archaeologist visited the city. He found the fragments of the dedicatory inscription over the monumental gate built in honour of the Emperor Hadrianus and mistakenly thought the Imperial Period main street was the stadion due to the seats-steps on either side of the street. In 1842 Lt. T. A. B. Spratt, the English hydrographer and geographer, and the Rev. E. Forbes, the naturalist came to Phaselis via the Olympos and Khimaira routes. Due to the fact that they all came by sea and they only stayed for a short time, their descriptions of the topography inland are without detailed and there are serious errors in orientation.

 

PhaselisThose researchers who visited Phaselis between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries concentrated primarily upon the discovery of inscriptions. In 1881-1882 while the Austrian archaeologist and the epigraphist O. Benndorf, the founder of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and his team were conducting research in southwestern Asia Minor, they examined Phaselis. In the winter of 1883 and 1884 F. von Luschan from the Austrian team took the first photographs which provide information concerning the regional features of Phaselis’ shoreline. In the same year the French scientist V. Bérard also visited Phaselis. In 1892 the members of the Austrian research team, O. Benndorf, E. Kalinka and their colleagues continued their architectural, archaeological and epigraphical studies in Phaselis. In 1904 they were followed by D. G. Hogarth, R. Norton and A. W. van Buren from the British research team. In 1908 the Austrian classical philologist E. Kalinka visited the settlement again, collected epigraphic documents and conducted research on the history of city (published in TAM II in 1944). The Italian researchers R. Paribeni and P. Romanelli visited Phaselis in1913 and C. Anti in 1921. Anti returned to Antalya overland and in consequence discovered several epigraphs and the ruins of structures within the territorium of Phaselis.

 

Further archaeological, epigraphical and historical-geographical studies of Phaselis were conducted by the English researchers F. M. Stark and G. Bean, who came to the region after World War II. In 1968 H. Schläger, the German architect and underwater archaeologist began exploring the topographical and architectural structures of Phaselis’s harbours. After Schläger’s death in 1969, the research was conducted under the leadership of the archaeologist J. Schäfer in 1970. H. Schläger, J. Schäfer and their colleagues obtained important data concerning the architecture and history of Phaselis through the surface exploration of the city and its periphery. Following the excavations conducted along the main axial street of the city, in 1980 under the direction of Kayhan Dörtlük, the then Director of the Antalya Museum and between 1981-1985 under the leadership of the archaeologist Cevdet Bayburtluoğlu; underwater exploration was carried out in the South Harbour under the direction of Metin Pehlivaner, the then Director of the Antalya Museum.

  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaselis

 

“After I served in the forces for a few years I went onto work at the BBC. I worked in radio. I suppose you could have called me a sound engineer. It was a series of lucky breaks which got me that job. If you do get these chances, you have to make the most of them. Every day was different; I met all kinds of people. Being a sound person involved a lot of living by your wits. When something unexpected happened, I tried to keep absolutely calm and deal with things methodically. Nothing will be resolved by panic.”

A rather nicely restored section of the North Range of Dunnottar Castle. I thought at the time that this was a recent restoration, but I notice from the drawings that MacGibbon & Ross made of Dunnottar in the late 19th century, that this section of the building had a roof over it at least as far back as 120 years ago. A wedding reception had just been held here when I arrived.

 

The inscription that appears to have been made with industrial sized blue dymo-tape over the fireplace, commemorates the most famous event that happened here at Dunnottar - the great siege of 1651-52 and the saving of the Scottish regalia.

 

William, 7th Earl Marischal, not long after entertaining Charles II here at Dunnottar in 1650, was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London - where he remained until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. He appointed George Ogilvie of Barras to be Governor of the Castle of Dunnottar and made him responsible for holding the castle in the king's name against the forces of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, the Scottish parliament having turned against him, set himself to the task of crushing all resistance in Scotland in his usual methodical manner!

 

After the hasty coronation of Charles II at Scone, the Scottish parliament, fearing that Cromwell would seize the Scottish regalia and destroy them (as he had the English royal regalia, which is why the Scottish regalia these days is older than the English regalia), decided to send them for safekeeping to Dunnottar. In October 1651, an army under the command of General Overton (or possibly Lambert) arrived at Dunnottar and found it held against them by a garrison of some 70 men. The defences of the castle were impressive and the walls were defended by a number of old iron cannon, twenty-one brass cannon and four mortars. General Overton had no siege equipment so he settled down to blockade the fortress and either starve it into submission or wait until Cromwell sent him the necessary siege guns.

 

The months passed and 1651 rolled into 1652. There are really only two outcomes to a siege - either the fortress falls due to capture or starvation, of the siege is called off. George Ogilvie of Barras would have known that Dunnottar was by now the only fortress remaining in royal hands and that there was nobody to come and relieve him, and he would have known his enemy's reputation for thoroughness and tenacity. The only possible outcome therefore, was that the fortress would eventually fall. A plan was therefore put in place, to prevent the regalia from falling into Cromwell's hands.

 

There are a couple of different stories as to how the regalia were smuggled out of the castle. One states that they were simply lowered to the seashore where a servant, posing as a seaweed collector, recovered the regalia and removed them to safety. The other story (which also has slightly differing versions) is that Mrs. Ogilvie, wife of the Governor of Dunnottar, devised a plan to get the regalia out of the castle, without the knowledge of her husband, so that he would not be compromised when it was missed.

 

"She took into her counsel the Rev. James Grainger, minister of Kinneff, and his wife. One day the minister’s wife went past Dunnottar, on horseback, to Stonehaven for flax to spin, accompanied by a servant woman to carry the flax. When returning, she asked leave of the commanding officer of the besieging army to visit Mrs. Ogilvie in the castle, and was permitted to pass followed by her servant with the bag of flax. On reaching the Governor’s quarters, the servant was relieved of her burden and sent to another apartment, until the two mistresses transacted their business, which was to place the regalia in the bag of flax. When Mrs. Grainger returned from the castle, through the lines, the officer on duty kindly assisted her to mount her horse; while the servant knew nothing of what had occurred, or that she was carrying the crown, sceptre, and sword of the kingdom of Scotland in her flax-bag."

 

The regalia were taken to the manse of Kinneff and then "that very night the minister and his wife made a receptacle for the regalia beneath the pulpit of the church. Sometimes it was hid there and at other times in a double-bottomed bed in a room in the manse until after the Restoration in 1660, when it was returned to George Ogilvie of Barras, who restored it to the Court."

 

The siege dragged on until May 1652, when Cromwell's artillery finally arrived. The guns were placed in the gun pits already prepared for them by General Morgan, who had taken over command of the siege. After a ten day bombardment and with the writing on what remained of the walls, honourable terms were agreed and the garrison were allowed to march out carrying their arms. Cromwell's army, on entering the fortress, were dismayed to find the regalia were missing!

 

Cromwell was not a happy chappy!

- 30 June, 2012 -

I am so thrilled to finally make this connection -- reading the JRS yesterday –

I happened across ironmonkeys.org/default.aspx in the Resource Guide.

I decided to click on the link and there, on their web page, is a picture of this bitchen flaming metal sculpture garden that I’ve been trying (ineffectively) to describe.

Now, when I saw the picture, it took me right back to the playa, to a moment in time that occurred nine months ago, a moment in time that has stayed with me and that I have written about and talked about ever since… and with a bit of research I found out that the 2011 incarnation of this flaming metal sculpture garden was called “Garden of Monkey Retrospectus by the Iron Monkeys”

A picture of that garden resides here on Flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/colorstream/6192846928/

 

So why I am writing about the ironmonkeys.org 2011 flaming metal sculpture garden, on the description for my photo of this magnificent Golden Dragon Mutant Vehicle?

Well, I shall tell ye a story, about a beautiful playa-moment, one I have thought of MANY times with a smile. And one I hinted at, in my 2012 application for a Burning Man scholarship/low income ticket.

But first:

– I took this photo of the Golden Dragon Mutant Vehicle, on the way TO the Temple Burn. And I should also preface this with the fact that of the hundreds of Mutant Vehicles on the playa last year – I saw a very small percentage close-up, and even fewer when I had my camera with me, and NO, I did not see the Steam Punk Octopus – but THIS one, I saw TWICE, in one night…

 

It was Temple Burn Night 2011 - after the temple burned - sauntering back toward 2:00+C where I was living in the middle of a Burning Man soundcamp. I had stopped for a moment at an inviting flaming metal sculpture garden (as one tends to do out there) – somewhere between the massive glowing LOVE sculpture and )’(oOlligan Alley, out in the dark playa of late Sunday night après Temple Burn - a quiet gathering place, off the beaten path, accidently found.

As I approached the installation, I noticed people clustered together here and there, low conversational tones, mellow vibe, plain-clothed-citizenry -- chillin and chattin, hanging out, smoking cigarettes, gathered around these flaming metal sculptures. I took the crowd in general to be Artists and perhaps DPW (let’s just say there was a marked absence of flouro-fluffy-blinky-bits) and all around us darkness of playa, with the Temple Burn site visible off in the distance.

So, I am standing there beside one of the many beautiful flaming metal sculptures, feeling the warmth and communion of this thoughtful gathering place, contemplating the Temple Burn and my journey to this moment… when out of the quiet surrounding dark comes the magnificent Golden Dragon Mutant Vehicle I’d seen and taken pictures of at rest earlier – but now, here, this great dragon is prowling and growling across the playa, pumping out the thrasher metal music – oldskool Metalica, or maybe it was Pantera - crunchy Marshall stacks and electric guitars blasting – and this huge golden dragon, in all it’s glory, starts circling, circling the ironmonkey’s Garden of Monkey Retrospectus and all of us quietly gathered there. As the dragon circled round and round and round, my smile grew wider at each consecutive go around, someone near-by may have heard me chuckle. This is the kind of thing that would never happen in the default world and it’s just the kind of moment that I adore out there on the playa. No big deal, just a huge growling golden dragon circling a group of talented individuals and explorers, who have gathered momentarily around a flaming metal sculpture garden in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. I LOVE THIS SHIT!! In fact, here’s a snippet of what I wrote to the BMorg, on my scholarship application for this year’s ticket – alluding to this spontaneous meeting of minds and magic…

 

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Question #27 - Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

 

I can only hope I “make it to the playa this year” - I feel like I have not “seen” enough, met enough people, ate enough dust or drank enough cool-aid to “be done with Burning Man.”

 

I truly love every visceral, scary, mystical, emotionally riddled part of it. I adore the “every moment is a new possibility for connection” part of it. I’ll take the bus of DPW peeps hollering at me to “GO HOME!” last year, on Tuesday after the man burned, as I methodically and magnetically raked my little section of the playaverse, picking up almost a pound of “somebody else’s” micro metallic MOOP. I’ll take the sudden overwhelming sorrow and pain enveloping me from out of nowhere, crumpling me to the ground as I approached an art installation of hand written letters at Metropolis’ Center Camp, my vision blurred with tears “out of nowhere” before I read the first line.

 

I’ll take it LOUD and in my face, when I least expects it…

I for one DON’T mind when an arrant LOUD ass MutantVehicle sporting 30, 40, 100Kwatts of whatthefuckever music blasts its way past our “quiet contemplative gathering.” It’s not like it’s LIFE THREATENING! IMO *that* is what is so amazing about the place! And I *sincerely* hope the BMorg does NOT start trying to regulate that beautiful glorious cacophonic Petri dish. Seriously, WHAT NEXT!? Are we gonna have to get licenses for our fucking Bullhorns!? I can understand no more drive by shooting of wedding cakes made of propane tanks… but “noise complaints” dictating what’s GOOD or BAD noise? Oh dear, my apologies, I do digress…

 

I could go on and on, but I MUST get this thing in the mail.

 

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So there you have it. Just another silly little playa story…

One moment in the vastness of time and space, connected to another moment in the vastness of time in space. Sometimes it takes nine months to get back to that place where you were and bring it all into some kind of perspective. Whether you are out on the playa, or back in the default world, these opportunities for connection and synchronicity occur all the time.

I am ever thankful I am around and open to experiencing them.

 

Hope to see you in the dust.

Safe travels! ~ wendEwho ~

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ARC Identifier: 531370

Title: A grief stricken American infantryman whose buddy has been killed in action is comforted by another soldier. In the background a corpsman methodically fills out casualty tags, Haktong-ni area, Korea., 08/28/1950

   

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Creator: Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. (09/18/1947 - 02/28/1964) ( Most Recent)

 

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Item from Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1982

 

Location: Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001 PHONE: 301-837-3530, FAX: 301-837-3621, EMAIL: stillpix@nara.gov

Production Date: 08/28/1950

 

Part of: Series: Signal Corps Photographs of American Military Activity, 1754 - 1954

 

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Chang, Al. Sergeant First Class, Photographer

  

This came from one of the best days in Mexico. We were settled into our hotel, had the lay of the land, and found the relaxation groove of vacation.

 

I made this the night before (and morning of) my birthday. I sneaked out once my girlfriend and friends had all gone to sleep. Headed down to the ocean to take in some stars on the clearest night I had seen since arriving.

 

Its relaxing to take in the stars and sky at night. Then when you add powerdy white sand beach and the calming methodical surf splashing on shore this is heaven on Earth.

The water buffalo or domestic Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) is a large bovid originating in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. Today, it is also found in Europe, Australia, and some American countries. The wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee) native to Southeast Asia is considered a different species, but most likely represents the ancestor of the domestic water buffalo.

 

Two extant types of water buffalo are recognized based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of South Asia and further west to the Balkans, Egypt, and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The origins of the domestic water buffalo types are debated, although results of a phylogenetic study indicate that the swamp type may have originated in China and was domesticated about 4,000 years ago, while the river type may have originated from India and was domesticated about 5,000 years ago. Water buffalo were traded from the Indus Valley Civilisation to Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, 2500 BC by the Meluhhas. The seal of a scribe employed by an Akkadian king shows the sacrifice of water buffalo.

 

At least 130 million domestic water buffalo exist, and more human beings depend on them than on any other domestic animal. They are especially suitable for tilling rice fields, and their milk is richer in fat and protein than that of dairy cattle. The large feral population of northern Australia became established in the late 19th century, and smaller feral herds are in New Guinea, Tunisia, and northeastern Argentina. Feral herds are also present in New Britain, New Ireland, Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and Uruguay.

 

CHARACTERISTICS

The skin of river buffalo is black, but some specimens may have dark, slate-coloured skin. Swamp buffalo have a grey skin at birth, but become slate blue later. Albinoids are present in some populations. River buffalo have comparatively longer faces, smaller girths, and bigger limbs than swamp buffalo. Their dorsal ridges extend further back and taper off more gradually. Their horns grow downward and backward, then curve upward in a spiral. Swamp buffalo are heavy-bodied and stockily built; the body is short and the belly large. The forehead is flat, the eyes prominent, the face short, and the muzzle wide. The neck is comparatively long, and the withers and croup are prominent. A dorsal ridge extends backward and ends abruptly just before the end of the chest. Their horns grow outward, and curve in a semicircle, but always remain more or less on the plane of the forehead. The tail is short, reaching only to the hocks. Height at withers is 129–133 cm for males, and 120–127 cm for females. They range in weight from 300–550 kg, but weights of over 1,000 kg have also been observed.

 

Tedong bonga is a black pied buffalo featuring a unique black and white colouration that is favoured by the Toraja of Sulawesi.

 

The swamp buffalo has 48 chromosomes; the river buffalo has 50 chromosomes. The two types do not readily interbreed, but fertile offspring can occur. Buffalo-cattle hybrids have not been observed to occur, and the embryos of such hybrids do not reach maturity in laboratory experiments.

 

The rumen of the water buffalo has important differences from that of other ruminants. It contains a larger population of bacteria, particularly the cellulolytic bacteria, lower protozoa, and higher fungi zoospores. In addition, higher rumen ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) and higher pH have been found as compared to those in cattle

 

ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

River buffalo prefer deep water. Swamp buffalo prefer to wallow in mudholes which they make with their horns. During wallowing, they acquire a thick coating of mud. Both are well adapted to a hot and humid climate with temperatures ranging from 0 °C in the winter to 30 °C and greater in the summer. Water availability is important in hot climates, since they need wallows, rivers, or splashing water to assist in thermoregulation. Some breeds are adapted to saline seaside shores and saline sandy terrain.

 

DIET

Water buffalo thrive on many aquatic plants and during floods, will graze submerged, raising their heads above the water and carrying quantities of edible plants. They eat reeds (quassab), a giant reed (birdi), a kind of bulrush (kaulan), water hyacinth, and marsh grasses. Some of these plants are of great value to local peoples. Others, such as water hyacinth, are a major problem in some tropical valleys, and water buffalo may help to keep waterways clear.

 

Green fodders are used widely for intensive milk production and for fattening. Many fodder crops are conserved as hay, chaffed, or pulped. Fodders include alfalfa, berseem and bancheri, the leaves, stems or trimmings of banana, cassava, fodder beet, halfa, ipil-ipil and kenaf, maize, oats, pandarus, peanut, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane, bagasse, and turnips. Citrus pulp and pineapple wastes have been fed safely to buffalo. In Egypt, whole sun-dried dates are fed to milk-buffalo up to 25% of the standard feed mixture.

 

REPRODUCTION

Swamp buffalo generally become reproductive at an older age than river breeds. Young males in Egypt, India, and Pakistan are first mated at about 3.0–3.5 years of age, but in Italy

 

they may be used as early as 2 years of age. Successful mating behaviour may continue until the animal is 12 years or even older. A good river male can impregnate 100 females in a year. A strong seasonal influence on mating occurs. Heat stress reduces libido

 

Although buffalo are polyoestrous, their reproductive efficiency shows wide variation throughout the year. Buffalo cows exhibit a distinct seasonal change in displaying oestrus, conception rate, and calving rate. The age at first oestrus of heifers varies between breeds from 13–33 months, but mating at the first oestrus is often infertile and usually deferred until they are 3 years old. Gestation lasts from 281–334 days, but most reports give a range between 300 and 320 days. Swamp buffalo carry their calves for one or two weeks longer than river buffalo. It is not rare to find buffalo that continue to work well at the age of 30, and instances of a working life of 40 years are recorded.

 

TAXONOMIC HISTORY

Carl Linnaeus first described the genus Bos and the water buffalo under the binomial Bubalis bubalus in 1758; the latter was known to occur in Asia and as a domestic form in Italy. Ellerman and Morrison-Scott treated the wild and domestic forms of the water buffalo as conspecifics whereas others treated them as different species. The nomenclatorial treatment of wild and domestic forms has been inconsistent and varies between authors and even within the works of single authors.

 

In March 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature achieved consistency in the naming of wild and domestic water buffalo by ruling that the scientific name Bubalus arnee is valid for the wild form. B. bubalis continues to be valid for the domestic form and applies also to feral populations.

 

DOMESTICATION AND BREEDING

Water buffalo were domesticated in India about 5000 years ago, and in China about 4000 years ago. Two types are recognized, based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of the Indian subcontinent and further west to the Balkans and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The present-day river buffalo is the result of complex domestication processes involving more than one maternal lineage and a significant maternal gene flow from wild populations after the initial domestication events. Twenty-two breeds of the river type water buffalo are known, including Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Surti, Jafarabadi, Anatolian, Mediterranean, and Egyptian buffalo. China has a huge variety of buffalo genetic resources, comprising 16 local swamp buffalo breeds in various regions.

 

Results of mitochondrial DNA analyses indicate that the two types were domesticated independently. Sequencing of cytochrome b genes of Bubalus species implies that the domestic buffalo originated from at least two populations, and that the river and the swamp types have differentiated at the full species level. The genetic distance between the two types is so large that a divergence time of about 1.7 million years has been suggested. The swamp type was noticed to have the closest relationship with the tamaraw.

 

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATIONS

The water buffalo population in the world is about 172 million.

 

IN ASIA

More than 95.8% of the world population of water buffalo are found in Asia including both river and swamp types. The water buffalo population in India numbered over 97.9 million head in 2003, representing 56.5% of the world population. They are primarily of the river type, with 10 well-defined breeds comprising Badhawari, Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Jafarabadi, Marathwada, Mehsana, Nagpuri, Pandharpuri, Toda, and Surti. Swamp buffalo occur only in small areas in the north-eastern part of the country and are not distinguished into breeds.

 

In 2003, the second-largest population lived in China, with 22.759 million head, all of the swamp type with breeds kept only in the lowlands, and other breeds kept only in the mountains; as of 2003, 3.2 million swamp-type carabao buffalo were in the Philippines, nearly three million swamp buffalo were in Vietnam, and 772,764 buffalo were in Bangladesh. About 750,000 head were estimated in Sri Lanka in 1997.

 

The water buffalo is the main dairy animal in Pakistan, with 23.47 million head in 2010. Of these, 76% are kept in the Punjab. The rest of them are mostly in the province of Sindh. Breeds used are Nili-Ravi, Kundi, and Azi Kheli. Karachi has the largest population of water buffalos for an area where fodder is not grown, consisting of 350,000 head kept mainly for milking.

 

In Thailand, the number of water buffalo dropped from more than 3 million head in 1996 to less than 1.24 million head in 2011. Slightly over 75% of them are kept in the country's northeastern region. The statistics also indicate that by the beginning of 2012, less than one million were in the country, partly as a result of illegal shipments to neighboring countries where sales prices are higher than in Thailand.

 

Water buffalo are also present in the southern region of Iraq, in the marshes. These marshes were drained by Saddam Hussein in 1991 in an attempt to punish the south for the uprisings of 1991. Following 2003, and the fall of the Saddam regime, these lands were reflooded and a 2007 report in the provinces of Maysan and Thi Qar shows a steady increase in the number of water buffalo. The report puts the number at 40,008 head in those two provinces.

 

IN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Water buffalo likely were introduced to Europe from India or other Oriental countries. To Italy they were introduced about the year 600 in the reign of the Longobard King Agilulf. As they appear in the company of wild horses, they probably were a present from the Khan of the Avars, a Turkic nomadic tribe that dwelt near the Danube River at the time. Sir H. Johnston knew of a herd of water buffalo presented by a King of Naples to the Bey of Tunis in the mid-19th century that had resumed the feral state in northern Tunis.

 

European buffalo are all of the river type and considered to be of the same breed named Mediterranean buffalo. In Italy, the Mediterranean type was particularly selected and is called Mediterranean Italian breed to distinguish it from other European breeds, which differ genetically. Mediterranean buffalo are also found in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Kosovo, and the Republic of Macedonia, with a few hundred in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Hungary. Little exchange of breeding buffalo has occurred among countries, so each population has its own phenotypic features and performances. In Bulgaria, they were crossbred with the Indian Murrah breed, and in Romania, some were crossbred with Bulgarian Murrah. Populations in Turkey are of the Anatolian buffalo breed.

 

IN AUSTRALIA

Between 1824 and 1849, water buffalo were introduced into the Northern Territory from Timor, Kisar, and probably other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1886, a few milking types were brought from India to Darwin. They have been the main grazing animals on the subcoastal plains and river basins between Darwin and Arnhem Land since the 1880s. In the early 1960s, an estimated population of 150,000 to 200,000 buffalo were living in the plains and nearby areas.

 

They became feral and are causing significant environmental damage. Buffalo are also found in the Top End. As a result, they were hunted in the Top End from 1885 until 1980. The commencement of the brucellosis and tuberculosis campaign (BTEC) resulted in a huge culling program to reduce buffalo herds to a fraction of the numbers that were reached in the 1980s. The BTEC was finished when the Northern Territory was declared free of the disease in 1997. Numbers dropped dramatically as a result of the campaign, but have since recovered to an estimated 150,000 animals across northern Australia in 2008.

 

During the 1950s, buffalo were hunted for their skins and meat, which was exported and used in the local trade. In the late 1970s, live exports were made to Cuba and continued later into other countries. Buffalo are now crossed with riverine buffalo in artificial insemination programs, and may be found in many areas of Australia. Some of these crossbreds are used for milk production. Melville Island is a popular hunting location, where a steady population up to 4,000 individuals exists. Safari outfits are run from Darwin to Melville Island and other locations in the Top End, often with the use of bush pilots. The horns, which can measure up to a record of 3.1 m tip-to-tip, are prized hunting trophies.

 

The buffalo have developed a different appearance from the Indonesian buffalo from which they descend. They live mainly in freshwater marshes and billabongs, and their territory range can be quite expansive during the wet season. Their only natural predators in Australia are adult saltwater crocodiles, with whom they share the billabongs, and dingoes, which have been known to prey on buffalo calves and occasionally adult buffalo when the dingoes are in large packs.

 

Buffalo were exported live to Indonesia until 2011, at a rate of about 3000 per year. After the live export ban that year, the exports dropped to zero, and had not resumed as of June 2013.

 

IN SOUTH AMERICA

Water buffalo were introduced into the Amazon River basin in 1895. They are now extensively used there for meat and dairy production. In 2005, the buffalo herd in the Brazilian Amazon stood at roughly 1.6 million head, of which 460,000 were located in the lower Amazon floodplain. Breeds used include Mediterranean from Italy, Murrah and Jafarabadi from India, and Carabao from the Philippines.

 

During the 1970s, small herds were imported to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Cayenne, Panama, Surinam, Guyana, and Venezuela.

 

In Argentina, many game ranches raise water buffalo for commercial hunting

 

IN NORTH AMERICA

In 1974, four water buffalo were imported to the United States from Guam to be studied at the University of Florida. In February 1978, the first herd arrived for commercial farming. Until 2002, only one commercial breeder was in the United States. Water buffalo meat is imported from Australia. Until 2011, water buffalo were raised in Gainesville, Florida, from young obtained from zoo overflow. They were used primarily for meat production, frequently sold as hamburger.[38] Other US ranchers use them for production of high-quality mozzarella cheese.

 

HUSBANDRY

The husbandry system of water buffalo depends on the purpose for which they are bred and maintained. Most of them are kept by people who work on small farms in family units. Their buffalo live in very close association with them, and are often their greatest capital asset. The women and girls in India generally look after the milking buffalo while the men and boys are concerned with the working animals. Throughout Asia, they are commonly tended by children who are often seen leading or riding their charges to wallowing places. Water buffalo are the ideal animals for work in the deep mud of paddy fields because of their large hooves and flexible foot joints. They are often referred to as "the living tractor of the East". It probably is possible to plough deeper with buffalo than with either oxen or horses. They are the most efficient and economical means of cultivation of small fields. In most rice-producing countries, they are used for threshing and for transporting the sheaves during the rice harvest. They provide power for oilseed mills, sugarcane presses, and devices for raising water. They are widely used as pack animals, and in India and Pakistan also for heavy haulage. In their invasions of Europe, the Turks used buffalo for hauling heavy battering rams. Their dung is used as a fertilizer, and as a fuel when dried.

 

Buffalo contribute 72 million tones of milk and three million tones of meat annually to world food, much of it in areas that are prone to nutritional imbalances. In India, river-type buffalo are kept mainly for milk production and for transport, whereas swamp-type buffalo are kept mainly for work and a small amount of milk.

 

DAIRY PRODUCTS

Water buffalo milk presents physicochemical features different from that of other ruminant species, such as a higher content of fatty acids and proteins. The physical and chemical parameters of swamp and river type water buffalo milk differ. Water buffalo milk contains higher levels of total solids, crude protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus, and slightly higher content of lactose compared with those of cow milk. The high level of total solids makes water buffalo milk ideal for processing into value-added dairy products such as cheese. The conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) content in milk ranged from 4.4 mg/g fat in September to 7.6 mg/g fat in June. Seasons and genetics may play a role in variation of CLA level and changes in gross composition of the water buffalo milk.

 

Water buffalo milk is processed into a large variety of dairy products:

 

- Cream churns much faster at higher fat levels and gives higher overrun than cow cream.

- Butter from water buffalo cream displays more stability than that from cow cream.

- Ghee from water buffalo milk has a different texture with a bigger grain size than ghee from cow milk.

- Heat-concentrated milk products in the Indian subcontinent include paneer, khoa, rabri, kheer and basundi.

- Fermented milk products include dahi, yogurt, and chakka.

- Whey is used for making ricotta and mascarpone in Italy, and alkarish in Syria and Egypt.

- Soft cheeses made include mozzarella in Italy, karish, mish, and domiati in Egypt, madhfor in Iraq, alghab in Syria, kesong puti in the Philippines, and vladeasa in Romania.

- The semihard cheese beyaz peynir is made in Turkey.

- Hard cheeses include braila in Romania, rahss in Egypt, white brine in Bulgaria, and akkawi in Syria.

- Watered-down buffalo milk is used as a cheaper alternative to regular milk.

 

MEAT AND SKIN PRODUCTS

Water buffalo meat, sometimes called "carabeef", is often passed off as beef in certain regions, and is also a major source of export revenue for India. In many Asian regions, buffalo meat is less preferred due to its toughness; however, recipes have evolved (rendang, for example) where the slow cooking process and spices not only make the meat palatable, but also preserve it, an important factor in hot climates where refrigeration is not always available.Their hides provide tough and useful leather, often used for shoes.

 

BONE AND HORN PRODUCTS

The bones and horns are often made into jewellery, especially earrings. Horns are used for the embouchure of musical instruments, such as ney and kaval.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Wildlife conservation scientists have started to recommend and use introduced populations of feral domestic water buffalo in far-away lands to manage uncontrolled vegetation growth in and around natural wetlands. Introduced water buffalo at home in such environs provide cheap service by regularly grazing the uncontrolled vegetation and opening up clogged water bodies for waterfowl, wetland birds, and other wildlife. Grazing water buffalo are sometimes used in Great Britain for conservation grazing, such as in Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve. The buffalo can better adapt to wet conditions and poor-quality vegetation than cattle.

 

Currently, research is being conducted at the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies to determine the levels of nutrients removed and returned to wetlands when water buffalo are used for wetland vegetation management.

 

However, in uncontrolled circumstances, water buffalo can cause environmental damage, such as trampling vegetation, disturbing bird and reptile nesting sites, and spreading exotic weeds.

 

RESEARCH

The world's first cloned buffalo was developed by Indian scientists from National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal. The buffalo calf was named Samrupa. The calf did not survive more than a week, and died due to some genetic disorders. So, the scientists created another cloned buffalo a few months later, and named it Garima.

 

On 15 September 2007, the Philippines announced its development of Southeast Asia's first cloned buffalo. The Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), under the Department of Science and Technology in Los Baños, Laguna, approved this project. The Department of Agriculture's Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) will implement cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer as a tool for genetic improvement in water buffalo. "Super buffalo calves" will be produced. There will be no modification or alteration of the genetic materials, as in genetically modified organisms.

 

On 1 January 2008, the Philippine Carabao Center in Nueva Ecija, per Filipino scientists, initiated a study to breed a super water buffalo that could produce 4 to 18 litres of milk per day using gene-based technology. Also, the first in vitro river buffalo was born there in 2004 from an in vitro-produced, vitrified embryo, named "Glory" after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Joseph Estrada's most successful project as an opposition senator, the PCC was created through Republic Act 3707, the Carabao Act of 1992.

 

IN CULTURE

Some ethnic groups, such as Batak and Toraja in Indonesia and the Derung in China, use water buffalo or kerbau (called horbo in Batak or tedong in Toraja) as sacrificial animals at several festivals.

 

- Legend has it that the Chinese philosophical sage Laozi left China through the Han Gu Pass riding a water buffalo.

- According to Hindu lore, the god of death Yama, rides on a male water buffalo.

- The carabao subspecies is considered a national symbol in the Philippines.

- In Vietnam, water buffalo are often the most valuable possession of poor farmers: "Con trâu là đầu cơ nghiệp". They are treated as a member of the family: "Chồng cày, vợ cấy, con trâu đi bừa" ("The husband ploughs, the wife sows, water buffalo draws the rake") and are friends of the children. Children talk to their water buffalo, "Bao giờ cây lúa còn bông. Thì còn ngọn cỏ ngoài đồng trâu ăn." (Vietnamese children are responsible for grazing water buffalo. They feed them grass if they work laboriously for men.) In the old days, West Lake, Hà Nội, was named Kim Ngưu - Golden Water Buffalo.

- The Yoruban Orisha Oya (goddess of change) takes the form of a water buffalo.

 

FIGHTING FESTIVALS

- Pasungay Festival is held annually in the town of San Joaquin, Iloilo in the Philippines.

- Moh juj Water Buffalo fighting, is held every year in Bhogali Bihu in Assam. Ahotguri in Nagaon is famous for it.

- Do Son Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, held each year on the ninth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar at Do Son Township, Haiphong City in Vietnam, is one of the most popular Vietnam festivals and events in Haiphong City. The preparations for this buffalo fighting festival begin from the two to three months earlier. The competing buffalo are selected and methodically trained months in advance. It is a traditional festival of Vietnam attached to a Water God worshipping ceremony and the Hien Sinh custom to show martial spirit of the local people of Do Son, Haiphong.

- "Hai Luu" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, According to ancient records, the buffalo fighting in Hai Luu Commune has existed from the 2nd century B.C. General Lu Gia at that time, had the buffalo slaughtered to give a feast to the local people and the warriors, and organized buffalo fighting for amusement. Eventually, all the fighting buffalo will be slaughtered as tributes to the deities.

- "Ko Samui" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Thailand, is a very popular event held on special occasions such as New Year's Day in January, and Songkran in mid-April, this festival features head-wrestling bouts in which two male Asian water buffalo are pitted against one another. Unlike in Spanish Bullfighting, wherein bulls get killed while fighting sword-wielding men, Buffalo Fighting Festival held at Ko Samui, Thailand is fairly harmless contest. The fighting season varies according to ancient customs & ceremonies. The first Buffalo to turn and run away is considered the loser, the winning buffalo becomes worth several million baht. Ko Samui is an island in the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea, it is 700 km from Bangkok and is connected to it by regular flights.

- "Ma'Pasilaga Tedong" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival, in Tana Toraja Regency of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, is a very popular event where the Rambu Solo' or a Burial Festival took place in Tana Toraja.

 

RACING FESTIVALS

Carabao Carroza Festival is being held annually every May in the town of Pavia, Iloilo, Philippines.

Kambala races of Karnataka, India, take place between December and March. The races are conducted by having the water buffalo (he buffalo) run in long parallel slushy ditches, where they are driven by men standing on wooden planks drawn by the buffalo. The objectives of the race are to finish first and to raise the water to the greatest height and also a rural sport. Kambala races are arranged with competition, as well as without competition and as a part of thanks giving (to god) in about 50 villages of coastal Karnataka.

 

In the Chonburi Province of Thailand, and in Pakistan, there are annual water buffalo races.

 

Chon Buri Water buffalo racing festival, Thailand In downtown Chonburi, 70 km south of Bangkok, at the annual water buffalo festival held in mid-October. About 300 buffalo race in groups of five or six, spurred on by bareback jockeys wielding wooden sticks, as hundreds of spectators cheer. The water buffalo has always played an important role in agriculture in Thailand. For farmers of Chon Buri Province, near Bangkok, it is an important annual festival, beginning in mid-October. It is also a celebration among rice farmers before the rice harvest. At dawn, farmers walk their buffalo through surrounding rice fields, splashing them with water to keep them cool before leading them to the race field. This amazing festival started over a hundred years ago when two men arguing about whose buffalo was the fastest ended up having a race between them. That’s how it became a tradition and gradually a social event for farmers who gathered from around the country in Chonburi to trade their goods. The festival also helps a great deal in preserving the number of buffalo, which have been dwindling at quite an alarming rate in other regions. Modern machinery is rapidly replacing buffalo in Thai agriculture. With most of the farm work mechanized, the buffalo-racing tradition has continued. Racing buffalo are now raised just to race; they do not work at all. The few farm buffalo which still do work are much bigger than the racers because of the strenuous work they perform. Farm buffalo are in the "Buffalo Beauty Pageant", a Miss Farmer beauty contest and a comic buffalo costume contest etc.. This festival perfectly exemplifies a favored Thai attitude to life — "sanuk," meaning fun.

 

Babulang Water buffalo racing festival, Sarawak, Malaysia, is the largest or grandest of the many rituals, ceremonies and festivals of the traditional Bisaya (Borneo) community of Limbang, Sarawak. Highlights are the Ratu Babulang competition and the Water buffalo races which can only be found in this town in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Vihear Suor village Water buffalo racing festival, in Cambodia, each year, people visit Buddhist temples across the country to honor their deceased loved ones during a 15-day period commonly known as the Festival of the Dead but in Vihear Suor village, about 35 km northeast of Cambodia, citizens each year wrap up the festival with a water buffalo race to entertain visitors and honour a pledge made hundreds of years ago. There was a time when many village cattle which provide rural Cambodians with muscle power to plough their fields and transport agricultural products died from an unknown disease. The villagers prayed to a spirit to help save their animals from the disease and promised to show their gratitude by holding a buffalo race each year on the last day of "P'chum Ben" festival as it is known in Cambodian. The race draws hundreds of spectators who come to see riders and their animals charge down the racing field, the racers bouncing up and down on the backs of their buffalo, whose horns were draped with colorful cloth.

Pothu puttu matsaram, Kerala, South India, is similar to Kambala races.

 

WIKIPEDIA

The water buffalo or domestic Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) is a large bovid originating in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. Today, it is also found in Europe, Australia, and some American countries. The wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee) native to Southeast Asia is considered a different species, but most likely represents the ancestor of the domestic water buffalo.

 

Two extant types of water buffalo are recognized based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of South Asia and further west to the Balkans, Egypt, and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The origins of the domestic water buffalo types are debated, although results of a phylogenetic study indicate that the swamp type may have originated in China and was domesticated about 4,000 years ago, while the river type may have originated from India and was domesticated about 5,000 years ago. Water buffalo were traded from the Indus Valley Civilisation to Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, 2500 BC by the Meluhhas. The seal of a scribe employed by an Akkadian king shows the sacrifice of water buffalo.

 

At least 130 million domestic water buffalo exist, and more human beings depend on them than on any other domestic animal. They are especially suitable for tilling rice fields, and their milk is richer in fat and protein than that of dairy cattle. The large feral population of northern Australia became established in the late 19th century, and smaller feral herds are in New Guinea, Tunisia, and northeastern Argentina. Feral herds are also present in New Britain, New Ireland, Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and Uruguay.

 

CHARACTERISTICS

The skin of river buffalo is black, but some specimens may have dark, slate-coloured skin. Swamp buffalo have a grey skin at birth, but become slate blue later. Albinoids are present in some populations. River buffalo have comparatively longer faces, smaller girths, and bigger limbs than swamp buffalo. Their dorsal ridges extend further back and taper off more gradually. Their horns grow downward and backward, then curve upward in a spiral. Swamp buffalo are heavy-bodied and stockily built; the body is short and the belly large. The forehead is flat, the eyes prominent, the face short, and the muzzle wide. The neck is comparatively long, and the withers and croup are prominent. A dorsal ridge extends backward and ends abruptly just before the end of the chest. Their horns grow outward, and curve in a semicircle, but always remain more or less on the plane of the forehead. The tail is short, reaching only to the hocks. Height at withers is 129–133 cm for males, and 120–127 cm for females. They range in weight from 300–550 kg, but weights of over 1,000 kg have also been observed.

 

Tedong bonga is a black pied buffalo featuring a unique black and white colouration that is favoured by the Toraja of Sulawesi.

 

The swamp buffalo has 48 chromosomes; the river buffalo has 50 chromosomes. The two types do not readily interbreed, but fertile offspring can occur. Buffalo-cattle hybrids have not been observed to occur, and the embryos of such hybrids do not reach maturity in laboratory experiments.

 

The rumen of the water buffalo has important differences from that of other ruminants. It contains a larger population of bacteria, particularly the cellulolytic bacteria, lower protozoa, and higher fungi zoospores. In addition, higher rumen ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) and higher pH have been found as compared to those in cattle

 

ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

River buffalo prefer deep water. Swamp buffalo prefer to wallow in mudholes which they make with their horns. During wallowing, they acquire a thick coating of mud. Both are well adapted to a hot and humid climate with temperatures ranging from 0 °C in the winter to 30 °C and greater in the summer. Water availability is important in hot climates, since they need wallows, rivers, or splashing water to assist in thermoregulation. Some breeds are adapted to saline seaside shores and saline sandy terrain.

 

DIET

Water buffalo thrive on many aquatic plants and during floods, will graze submerged, raising their heads above the water and carrying quantities of edible plants. They eat reeds (quassab), a giant reed (birdi), a kind of bulrush (kaulan), water hyacinth, and marsh grasses. Some of these plants are of great value to local peoples. Others, such as water hyacinth, are a major problem in some tropical valleys, and water buffalo may help to keep waterways clear.

 

Green fodders are used widely for intensive milk production and for fattening. Many fodder crops are conserved as hay, chaffed, or pulped. Fodders include alfalfa, berseem and bancheri, the leaves, stems or trimmings of banana, cassava, fodder beet, halfa, ipil-ipil and kenaf, maize, oats, pandarus, peanut, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane, bagasse, and turnips. Citrus pulp and pineapple wastes have been fed safely to buffalo. In Egypt, whole sun-dried dates are fed to milk-buffalo up to 25% of the standard feed mixture.

 

REPRODUCTION

Swamp buffalo generally become reproductive at an older age than river breeds. Young males in Egypt, India, and Pakistan are first mated at about 3.0–3.5 years of age, but in Italy

 

they may be used as early as 2 years of age. Successful mating behaviour may continue until the animal is 12 years or even older. A good river male can impregnate 100 females in a year. A strong seasonal influence on mating occurs. Heat stress reduces libido

 

Although buffalo are polyoestrous, their reproductive efficiency shows wide variation throughout the year. Buffalo cows exhibit a distinct seasonal change in displaying oestrus, conception rate, and calving rate. The age at first oestrus of heifers varies between breeds from 13–33 months, but mating at the first oestrus is often infertile and usually deferred until they are 3 years old. Gestation lasts from 281–334 days, but most reports give a range between 300 and 320 days. Swamp buffalo carry their calves for one or two weeks longer than river buffalo. It is not rare to find buffalo that continue to work well at the age of 30, and instances of a working life of 40 years are recorded.

 

TAXONOMIC HISTORY

Carl Linnaeus first described the genus Bos and the water buffalo under the binomial Bubalis bubalus in 1758; the latter was known to occur in Asia and as a domestic form in Italy. Ellerman and Morrison-Scott treated the wild and domestic forms of the water buffalo as conspecifics whereas others treated them as different species. The nomenclatorial treatment of wild and domestic forms has been inconsistent and varies between authors and even within the works of single authors.

 

In March 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature achieved consistency in the naming of wild and domestic water buffalo by ruling that the scientific name Bubalus arnee is valid for the wild form. B. bubalis continues to be valid for the domestic form and applies also to feral populations.

 

DOMESTICATION AND BREEDING

Water buffalo were domesticated in India about 5000 years ago, and in China about 4000 years ago. Two types are recognized, based on morphological and behavioural criteria – the river buffalo of the Indian subcontinent and further west to the Balkans and Italy, and the swamp buffalo, found from Assam in the west through Southeast Asia to the Yangtze valley of China in the east. The present-day river buffalo is the result of complex domestication processes involving more than one maternal lineage and a significant maternal gene flow from wild populations after the initial domestication events. Twenty-two breeds of the river type water buffalo are known, including Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Surti, Jafarabadi, Anatolian, Mediterranean, and Egyptian buffalo. China has a huge variety of buffalo genetic resources, comprising 16 local swamp buffalo breeds in various regions.

 

Results of mitochondrial DNA analyses indicate that the two types were domesticated independently. Sequencing of cytochrome b genes of Bubalus species implies that the domestic buffalo originated from at least two populations, and that the river and the swamp types have differentiated at the full species level. The genetic distance between the two types is so large that a divergence time of about 1.7 million years has been suggested. The swamp type was noticed to have the closest relationship with the tamaraw.

 

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATIONS

The water buffalo population in the world is about 172 million.

 

IN ASIA

More than 95.8% of the world population of water buffalo are found in Asia including both river and swamp types. The water buffalo population in India numbered over 97.9 million head in 2003, representing 56.5% of the world population. They are primarily of the river type, with 10 well-defined breeds comprising Badhawari, Murrah, Nili-Ravi, Jafarabadi, Marathwada, Mehsana, Nagpuri, Pandharpuri, Toda, and Surti. Swamp buffalo occur only in small areas in the north-eastern part of the country and are not distinguished into breeds.

 

In 2003, the second-largest population lived in China, with 22.759 million head, all of the swamp type with breeds kept only in the lowlands, and other breeds kept only in the mountains; as of 2003, 3.2 million swamp-type carabao buffalo were in the Philippines, nearly three million swamp buffalo were in Vietnam, and 772,764 buffalo were in Bangladesh. About 750,000 head were estimated in Sri Lanka in 1997.

 

The water buffalo is the main dairy animal in Pakistan, with 23.47 million head in 2010. Of these, 76% are kept in the Punjab. The rest of them are mostly in the province of Sindh. Breeds used are Nili-Ravi, Kundi, and Azi Kheli. Karachi has the largest population of water buffalos for an area where fodder is not grown, consisting of 350,000 head kept mainly for milking.

 

In Thailand, the number of water buffalo dropped from more than 3 million head in 1996 to less than 1.24 million head in 2011. Slightly over 75% of them are kept in the country's northeastern region. The statistics also indicate that by the beginning of 2012, less than one million were in the country, partly as a result of illegal shipments to neighboring countries where sales prices are higher than in Thailand.

 

Water buffalo are also present in the southern region of Iraq, in the marshes. These marshes were drained by Saddam Hussein in 1991 in an attempt to punish the south for the uprisings of 1991. Following 2003, and the fall of the Saddam regime, these lands were reflooded and a 2007 report in the provinces of Maysan and Thi Qar shows a steady increase in the number of water buffalo. The report puts the number at 40,008 head in those two provinces.

 

IN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Water buffalo likely were introduced to Europe from India or other Oriental countries. To Italy they were introduced about the year 600 in the reign of the Longobard King Agilulf. As they appear in the company of wild horses, they probably were a present from the Khan of the Avars, a Turkic nomadic tribe that dwelt near the Danube River at the time. Sir H. Johnston knew of a herd of water buffalo presented by a King of Naples to the Bey of Tunis in the mid-19th century that had resumed the feral state in northern Tunis.

 

European buffalo are all of the river type and considered to be of the same breed named Mediterranean buffalo. In Italy, the Mediterranean type was particularly selected and is called Mediterranean Italian breed to distinguish it from other European breeds, which differ genetically. Mediterranean buffalo are also found in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Kosovo, and the Republic of Macedonia, with a few hundred in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Hungary. Little exchange of breeding buffalo has occurred among countries, so each population has its own phenotypic features and performances. In Bulgaria, they were crossbred with the Indian Murrah breed, and in Romania, some were crossbred with Bulgarian Murrah. Populations in Turkey are of the Anatolian buffalo breed.

 

IN AUSTRALIA

Between 1824 and 1849, water buffalo were introduced into the Northern Territory from Timor, Kisar, and probably other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1886, a few milking types were brought from India to Darwin. They have been the main grazing animals on the subcoastal plains and river basins between Darwin and Arnhem Land since the 1880s. In the early 1960s, an estimated population of 150,000 to 200,000 buffalo were living in the plains and nearby areas.

 

They became feral and are causing significant environmental damage. Buffalo are also found in the Top End. As a result, they were hunted in the Top End from 1885 until 1980. The commencement of the brucellosis and tuberculosis campaign (BTEC) resulted in a huge culling program to reduce buffalo herds to a fraction of the numbers that were reached in the 1980s. The BTEC was finished when the Northern Territory was declared free of the disease in 1997. Numbers dropped dramatically as a result of the campaign, but have since recovered to an estimated 150,000 animals across northern Australia in 2008.

 

During the 1950s, buffalo were hunted for their skins and meat, which was exported and used in the local trade. In the late 1970s, live exports were made to Cuba and continued later into other countries. Buffalo are now crossed with riverine buffalo in artificial insemination programs, and may be found in many areas of Australia. Some of these crossbreds are used for milk production. Melville Island is a popular hunting location, where a steady population up to 4,000 individuals exists. Safari outfits are run from Darwin to Melville Island and other locations in the Top End, often with the use of bush pilots. The horns, which can measure up to a record of 3.1 m tip-to-tip, are prized hunting trophies.

 

The buffalo have developed a different appearance from the Indonesian buffalo from which they descend. They live mainly in freshwater marshes and billabongs, and their territory range can be quite expansive during the wet season. Their only natural predators in Australia are adult saltwater crocodiles, with whom they share the billabongs, and dingoes, which have been known to prey on buffalo calves and occasionally adult buffalo when the dingoes are in large packs.

 

Buffalo were exported live to Indonesia until 2011, at a rate of about 3000 per year. After the live export ban that year, the exports dropped to zero, and had not resumed as of June 2013.

 

IN SOUTH AMERICA

Water buffalo were introduced into the Amazon River basin in 1895. They are now extensively used there for meat and dairy production. In 2005, the buffalo herd in the Brazilian Amazon stood at roughly 1.6 million head, of which 460,000 were located in the lower Amazon floodplain. Breeds used include Mediterranean from Italy, Murrah and Jafarabadi from India, and Carabao from the Philippines.

 

During the 1970s, small herds were imported to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Cayenne, Panama, Surinam, Guyana, and Venezuela.

 

In Argentina, many game ranches raise water buffalo for commercial hunting

 

IN NORTH AMERICA

In 1974, four water buffalo were imported to the United States from Guam to be studied at the University of Florida. In February 1978, the first herd arrived for commercial farming. Until 2002, only one commercial breeder was in the United States. Water buffalo meat is imported from Australia. Until 2011, water buffalo were raised in Gainesville, Florida, from young obtained from zoo overflow. They were used primarily for meat production, frequently sold as hamburger.[38] Other US ranchers use them for production of high-quality mozzarella cheese.

 

HUSBANDRY

The husbandry system of water buffalo depends on the purpose for which they are bred and maintained. Most of them are kept by people who work on small farms in family units. Their buffalo live in very close association with them, and are often their greatest capital asset. The women and girls in India generally look after the milking buffalo while the men and boys are concerned with the working animals. Throughout Asia, they are commonly tended by children who are often seen leading or riding their charges to wallowing places. Water buffalo are the ideal animals for work in the deep mud of paddy fields because of their large hooves and flexible foot joints. They are often referred to as "the living tractor of the East". It probably is possible to plough deeper with buffalo than with either oxen or horses. They are the most efficient and economical means of cultivation of small fields. In most rice-producing countries, they are used for threshing and for transporting the sheaves during the rice harvest. They provide power for oilseed mills, sugarcane presses, and devices for raising water. They are widely used as pack animals, and in India and Pakistan also for heavy haulage. In their invasions of Europe, the Turks used buffalo for hauling heavy battering rams. Their dung is used as a fertilizer, and as a fuel when dried.

 

Buffalo contribute 72 million tones of milk and three million tones of meat annually to world food, much of it in areas that are prone to nutritional imbalances. In India, river-type buffalo are kept mainly for milk production and for transport, whereas swamp-type buffalo are kept mainly for work and a small amount of milk.

 

DAIRY PRODUCTS

Water buffalo milk presents physicochemical features different from that of other ruminant species, such as a higher content of fatty acids and proteins. The physical and chemical parameters of swamp and river type water buffalo milk differ. Water buffalo milk contains higher levels of total solids, crude protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus, and slightly higher content of lactose compared with those of cow milk. The high level of total solids makes water buffalo milk ideal for processing into value-added dairy products such as cheese. The conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) content in milk ranged from 4.4 mg/g fat in September to 7.6 mg/g fat in June. Seasons and genetics may play a role in variation of CLA level and changes in gross composition of the water buffalo milk.

 

Water buffalo milk is processed into a large variety of dairy products:

 

- Cream churns much faster at higher fat levels and gives higher overrun than cow cream.

- Butter from water buffalo cream displays more stability than that from cow cream.

- Ghee from water buffalo milk has a different texture with a bigger grain size than ghee from cow milk.

- Heat-concentrated milk products in the Indian subcontinent include paneer, khoa, rabri, kheer and basundi.

- Fermented milk products include dahi, yogurt, and chakka.

- Whey is used for making ricotta and mascarpone in Italy, and alkarish in Syria and Egypt.

- Soft cheeses made include mozzarella in Italy, karish, mish, and domiati in Egypt, madhfor in Iraq, alghab in Syria, kesong puti in the Philippines, and vladeasa in Romania.

- The semihard cheese beyaz peynir is made in Turkey.

- Hard cheeses include braila in Romania, rahss in Egypt, white brine in Bulgaria, and akkawi in Syria.

- Watered-down buffalo milk is used as a cheaper alternative to regular milk.

 

MEAT AND SKIN PRODUCTS

Water buffalo meat, sometimes called "carabeef", is often passed off as beef in certain regions, and is also a major source of export revenue for India. In many Asian regions, buffalo meat is less preferred due to its toughness; however, recipes have evolved (rendang, for example) where the slow cooking process and spices not only make the meat palatable, but also preserve it, an important factor in hot climates where refrigeration is not always available.Their hides provide tough and useful leather, often used for shoes.

 

BONE AND HORN PRODUCTS

The bones and horns are often made into jewellery, especially earrings. Horns are used for the embouchure of musical instruments, such as ney and kaval.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Wildlife conservation scientists have started to recommend and use introduced populations of feral domestic water buffalo in far-away lands to manage uncontrolled vegetation growth in and around natural wetlands. Introduced water buffalo at home in such environs provide cheap service by regularly grazing the uncontrolled vegetation and opening up clogged water bodies for waterfowl, wetland birds, and other wildlife. Grazing water buffalo are sometimes used in Great Britain for conservation grazing, such as in Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve. The buffalo can better adapt to wet conditions and poor-quality vegetation than cattle.

 

Currently, research is being conducted at the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies to determine the levels of nutrients removed and returned to wetlands when water buffalo are used for wetland vegetation management.

 

However, in uncontrolled circumstances, water buffalo can cause environmental damage, such as trampling vegetation, disturbing bird and reptile nesting sites, and spreading exotic weeds.

 

RESEARCH

The world's first cloned buffalo was developed by Indian scientists from National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal. The buffalo calf was named Samrupa. The calf did not survive more than a week, and died due to some genetic disorders. So, the scientists created another cloned buffalo a few months later, and named it Garima.

 

On 15 September 2007, the Philippines announced its development of Southeast Asia's first cloned buffalo. The Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), under the Department of Science and Technology in Los Baños, Laguna, approved this project. The Department of Agriculture's Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) will implement cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer as a tool for genetic improvement in water buffalo. "Super buffalo calves" will be produced. There will be no modification or alteration of the genetic materials, as in genetically modified organisms.

 

On 1 January 2008, the Philippine Carabao Center in Nueva Ecija, per Filipino scientists, initiated a study to breed a super water buffalo that could produce 4 to 18 litres of milk per day using gene-based technology. Also, the first in vitro river buffalo was born there in 2004 from an in vitro-produced, vitrified embryo, named "Glory" after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Joseph Estrada's most successful project as an opposition senator, the PCC was created through Republic Act 3707, the Carabao Act of 1992.

 

IN CULTURE

Some ethnic groups, such as Batak and Toraja in Indonesia and the Derung in China, use water buffalo or kerbau (called horbo in Batak or tedong in Toraja) as sacrificial animals at several festivals.

 

- Legend has it that the Chinese philosophical sage Laozi left China through the Han Gu Pass riding a water buffalo.

- According to Hindu lore, the god of death Yama, rides on a male water buffalo.

- The carabao subspecies is considered a national symbol in the Philippines.

- In Vietnam, water buffalo are often the most valuable possession of poor farmers: "Con trâu là đầu cơ nghiệp". They are treated as a member of the family: "Chồng cày, vợ cấy, con trâu đi bừa" ("The husband ploughs, the wife sows, water buffalo draws the rake") and are friends of the children. Children talk to their water buffalo, "Bao giờ cây lúa còn bông. Thì còn ngọn cỏ ngoài đồng trâu ăn." (Vietnamese children are responsible for grazing water buffalo. They feed them grass if they work laboriously for men.) In the old days, West Lake, Hà Nội, was named Kim Ngưu - Golden Water Buffalo.

- The Yoruban Orisha Oya (goddess of change) takes the form of a water buffalo.

 

FIGHTING FESTIVALS

- Pasungay Festival is held annually in the town of San Joaquin, Iloilo in the Philippines.

- Moh juj Water Buffalo fighting, is held every year in Bhogali Bihu in Assam. Ahotguri in Nagaon is famous for it.

- Do Son Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, held each year on the ninth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar at Do Son Township, Haiphong City in Vietnam, is one of the most popular Vietnam festivals and events in Haiphong City. The preparations for this buffalo fighting festival begin from the two to three months earlier. The competing buffalo are selected and methodically trained months in advance. It is a traditional festival of Vietnam attached to a Water God worshipping ceremony and the Hien Sinh custom to show martial spirit of the local people of Do Son, Haiphong.

- "Hai Luu" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Vietnam, According to ancient records, the buffalo fighting in Hai Luu Commune has existed from the 2nd century B.C. General Lu Gia at that time, had the buffalo slaughtered to give a feast to the local people and the warriors, and organized buffalo fighting for amusement. Eventually, all the fighting buffalo will be slaughtered as tributes to the deities.

- "Ko Samui" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival of Thailand, is a very popular event held on special occasions such as New Year's Day in January, and Songkran in mid-April, this festival features head-wrestling bouts in which two male Asian water buffalo are pitted against one another. Unlike in Spanish Bullfighting, wherein bulls get killed while fighting sword-wielding men, Buffalo Fighting Festival held at Ko Samui, Thailand is fairly harmless contest. The fighting season varies according to ancient customs & ceremonies. The first Buffalo to turn and run away is considered the loser, the winning buffalo becomes worth several million baht. Ko Samui is an island in the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea, it is 700 km from Bangkok and is connected to it by regular flights.

- "Ma'Pasilaga Tedong" Water Buffalo Fighting Festival, in Tana Toraja Regency of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, is a very popular event where the Rambu Solo' or a Burial Festival took place in Tana Toraja.

 

RACING FESTIVALS

Carabao Carroza Festival is being held annually every May in the town of Pavia, Iloilo, Philippines.

Kambala races of Karnataka, India, take place between December and March. The races are conducted by having the water buffalo (he buffalo) run in long parallel slushy ditches, where they are driven by men standing on wooden planks drawn by the buffalo. The objectives of the race are to finish first and to raise the water to the greatest height and also a rural sport. Kambala races are arranged with competition, as well as without competition and as a part of thanks giving (to god) in about 50 villages of coastal Karnataka.

 

In the Chonburi Province of Thailand, and in Pakistan, there are annual water buffalo races.

 

Chon Buri Water buffalo racing festival, Thailand In downtown Chonburi, 70 km south of Bangkok, at the annual water buffalo festival held in mid-October. About 300 buffalo race in groups of five or six, spurred on by bareback jockeys wielding wooden sticks, as hundreds of spectators cheer. The water buffalo has always played an important role in agriculture in Thailand. For farmers of Chon Buri Province, near Bangkok, it is an important annual festival, beginning in mid-October. It is also a celebration among rice farmers before the rice harvest. At dawn, farmers walk their buffalo through surrounding rice fields, splashing them with water to keep them cool before leading them to the race field. This amazing festival started over a hundred years ago when two men arguing about whose buffalo was the fastest ended up having a race between them. That’s how it became a tradition and gradually a social event for farmers who gathered from around the country in Chonburi to trade their goods. The festival also helps a great deal in preserving the number of buffalo, which have been dwindling at quite an alarming rate in other regions. Modern machinery is rapidly replacing buffalo in Thai agriculture. With most of the farm work mechanized, the buffalo-racing tradition has continued. Racing buffalo are now raised just to race; they do not work at all. The few farm buffalo which still do work are much bigger than the racers because of the strenuous work they perform. Farm buffalo are in the "Buffalo Beauty Pageant", a Miss Farmer beauty contest and a comic buffalo costume contest etc.. This festival perfectly exemplifies a favored Thai attitude to life — "sanuk," meaning fun.

 

Babulang Water buffalo racing festival, Sarawak, Malaysia, is the largest or grandest of the many rituals, ceremonies and festivals of the traditional Bisaya (Borneo) community of Limbang, Sarawak. Highlights are the Ratu Babulang competition and the Water buffalo races which can only be found in this town in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Vihear Suor village Water buffalo racing festival, in Cambodia, each year, people visit Buddhist temples across the country to honor their deceased loved ones during a 15-day period commonly known as the Festival of the Dead but in Vihear Suor village, about 35 km northeast of Cambodia, citizens each year wrap up the festival with a water buffalo race to entertain visitors and honour a pledge made hundreds of years ago. There was a time when many village cattle which provide rural Cambodians with muscle power to plough their fields and transport agricultural products died from an unknown disease. The villagers prayed to a spirit to help save their animals from the disease and promised to show their gratitude by holding a buffalo race each year on the last day of "P'chum Ben" festival as it is known in Cambodian. The race draws hundreds of spectators who come to see riders and their animals charge down the racing field, the racers bouncing up and down on the backs of their buffalo, whose horns were draped with colorful cloth.

Pothu puttu matsaram, Kerala, South India, is similar to Kambala races.

 

WIKIPEDIA

1797 portrait owned by Alexander Hamilton, who was given it by William Constable.

 

"Gilbert Charles Stuart (born Stewart; December 3, 1755 – July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists.[2] His best known work is the unfinished portrait of George Washington that is sometimes referred to as The Athenaeum, begun in 1796. Stuart retained the portrait and used it to paint 130 copies which he sold for $100 each. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century[2] and on various U.S. postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.[3]

Stuart produced portraits of more than 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents.[4] His work can be found today at art museums throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Frick Collection in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.[5]" — Wikipedia [accessed 5-30-19]

  

Excerpt from American Leaders and Heroes: A Preliminary Text-Book in United States History By Wilbur F. Gordy (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907, public domain):

 

CHAPTER XV

 

We left George Washington at Mount Vernon, his extensive plantation on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River. After his marriage with Mrs. Custis, who had large property of her own, Washington became a man of much wealth. He was at one time one of the largest landholders in America. As a manager of all this property, he had much to do. Let us delay our story a little to get a glimpse of the life led by him and other Virginia planters of his time.

 

The plantations were scattered along the rivers, sometimes many miles apart, with densely wooded stretches of land lying between. Each planter had his own wharf whence vessels, once a year, carried away his tobacco to England, and brought back in exchange whatever manufactured goods he required.

 

Nearly all his needs could be supplied at his wharf or on his plantation. His slaves included not only[Pg 190] workers in large tobacco-fields, but such skilled workmen as millers, weavers, tailors, wheelwrights, coopers, shoemakers, and carpenters. Washington said to his overseers, "Buy nothing that you can make within yourselves." Indeed, each plantation was a little world in itself. Hence towns containing shops with goods and supplies of various kinds did not spring up much in Virginia.

 

The mansion of the planter, built of brick or wood and having at either end a huge chimney, was two stories high, with a large veranda outside and a wide hall-way inside. Near by were the storehouses, barns, workshops, and slave quarters. These last consisted of simple wooden cabins surrounded by gardens, where the negroes raised such things as vegetables and water-melons for their own use. In fact, the mansion and all the buildings clustered about it looked like a village. Here we could have seen, at all hours of the day, swarms of negro children playing happily together.

 

The planter spent most of his time in the open air, with his dogs and his horses. Washington gave to his horses rather fanciful names, such as Ajax, Blueskin, Valiant, and Magnolia, and to his dogs, Vulcan, Sweetlips, Ringwood, Forrester, and Rockwood. Out-door recreations included fishing, shooting, and horse-racing.

 

Washington's Coach. Washington's Coach.

Although life on the plantation was without luxury, there was everywhere a plain and homely abundance.[Pg 191] Visitors were sure to meet a cordial welcome. It was no uncommon thing for a planter to entertain an entire family for weeks, and then to pay a similar visit in return with his own family. Social life absorbed much of Washington's time at Mount Vernon, where visitors were nearly always present. The planter, often living many miles away from any other human habitation, was only too glad to have a traveller spend the night with him and give news of the outside world. Such a visit was somewhat like the coming of the newspaper into our homes to-day.

 

A Stage Coach of the Eighteenth Century. A Stage Coach of the Eighteenth Century.

We must remember that travelling was no such simple and easy matter then as it is now. As the planters in Virginia usually lived on the banks of one of the many rivers, the simplest method of travel was by boat, up or down stream. There were cross-country roads, but these at best were rough, and sometimes full of roots and stumps. Often they were nothing more than forest paths. In trying to follow such roads the traveller at times lost his way and occasionally had to spend a night in the woods. But with even such makeshifts for roads, the planter had his lumbering old coach to which, on state occasions, he harnessed six horses and drove in great style.

 

Washington was in full sympathy with this life, and[Pg 192] threw himself heartily into the work of managing his immense property. He lived up to his favorite motto, "If you want a thing done, do it yourself." He kept his own books, and looked with exactness after the smallest details.

 

He was indeed one of the most methodical of men, and thus accomplished a marvellous amount of work. By habit an early riser, he was often up before daylight in winter. On such occasions he kindled his own fire and read or worked by the light of a candle. At seven in summer and at eight in winter he sat down to a simple breakfast, consisting of two cups of tea, and hoe-cakes made of Indian meal. After breakfast he rode on horseback over his plantation to look after his slaves, often spending much of the day in the saddle superintending the work. At two he ate dinner, early in the evening he took tea, and at nine o'clock went to bed.

 

As he did not spare himself, he expected faithful service from everyone. But to his many slaves he was a kind master, and he took good care of the sick or feeble. It may be a comfort to some of us to learn that Washington was fonder of active life than of reading books, for which he never seemed to get much time. But he was even less fond of public speaking. Like some other great men, he found it difficult to stand up before a body of people and make a speech. After his term of service in the French and Indian War he was elected to the House of Burgesses, where he received a vote of thanks for his brave military ser[Pg 193]vices. Rising to reply, Washington stood blushing and stammering, without being able to say a word. The Speaker, equal to the occasion, said with much grace, "Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language to express."

 

While for many years after the close of the Last French War this modest, home-loving man was living the life of a high-bred Virginia gentleman, the exciting events which finally brought on the Revolution were stirring men's souls to heroic action. It was natural, in these trying days, that his countrymen should look for guidance and inspiration to George Washington, who had been so conspicuous a leader in the Last French War.

 

He represented Virginia at the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774, going to Philadelphia in company with Patrick Henry and others. He was also a delegate from his colony at the second meeting of the Continental Congress in May, 1775. On being elected by this body Commander-in-Chief of the American army, he at once thanked the members for the election, and added, "I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with." He also refused to receive any salary for his services, but said he would keep an account of the expenses he might incur, in order that these might be paid back to him.

 

On the 21st of June Washington set out on horseback from Philadelphia, in company with a small body of horsemen, to take command of the American army[Pg 194] around Boston. Not long after starting they met a messenger bringing in haste the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Washington eagerly asked, "Did the Americans stand the fire of the regular troops?" "Yes," was the proud answer. "Then," cried Washington, gladly, "the liberties of the country are safe!"

 

Three days later, about four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, he reached New York, where he met with a royal welcome. Riding in an open carriage drawn by two white horses, he passed through the streets, escorted by nine companies of soldiers on foot. Along the route the people, old and young, received him with enthusiasm. At New Haven the Yale College students came out in a body, keeping step to the music of a band of which Noah Webster, the future lexicographer, then a freshman, was the leader. On July 2d, after arriving at the camp in Cambridge, Washington received an equally enthusiastic welcome from the soldiers.

 

Next day General Washington rode out on horseback and, under the famous elm still standing near Harvard University, drew his sword and took command of the American army. He was then forty-three years old, with a tall, manly form and a noble face. He was good to look at as he sat there, a perfect picture of manly strength and dignity, wearing an epaulet on each shoulder, a broad band of blue silk across his breast, and a three-cornered hat with the cockade of liberty in it.[Pg 195]

 

Now came the labor of getting his troops into good condition for fighting battles, for his army was one only in name. These untrained men were brave and willing, but without muskets and without powder, they were in no condition for making war on a well-equipped enemy.

 

Moreover, the army had no cannon, without which it could not hope to succeed in an attack upon the British troops in Boston. By using severe measures, however, Washington soon brought about much better discipline. But with no powder and no cannon, he had to let the autumn and the winter slip by before making any effort to drive the British army out of Boston. When cannon and other supplies were at last brought down from Ticonderoga on sledges drawn by oxen, the alert American General fortified Dorchester Heights, which overlooked the city, and forced the English commander to sail away with all his army.

 

Washington believed that the next movement of the British would be to get control of the Hudson River and the Middle States. So he went promptly to New York in order to defend it against attack. But still his army was weak in numbers as well as in provisions, equipment, and training.

 

Washington had only about 18,000 men to meet General Howe, who soon arrived off Staten Island with a large fleet and 30,000 men. Not knowing where the British General would strike first, Washington had to be on his guard at many points. He had to prepare a defence of a line of twenty miles. He[Pg 196] also built, on opposite sides of the Hudson River just above New York, Forts Lee and Washington.

 

Map Illustrating the Battle of Long

Island. Map Illustrating the Battle of Long Island.

When Brooklyn Heights, on Long Island, had been fortified, General Putnam went with half the army to occupy them. On August 27th General Howe, with something like 20,000 men, attacked a part of these forces and defeated them. If he had continued the battle by marching at once against the remainder, he might have captured all that part of Washington's army under Putnam's command. He might, also, have captured Washington himself, who, during the heat of the battle, had crossed over to Long Island.

 

If Howe had done this, he might have ended the war at one stroke. But his men had fought hard at the end of a long night-march and needed rest. Besides, he thought it would be easy enough to capture the Americans without undue haste. For how could they escape? Soon the British vessels would sail up and get between them and New York, when, of course, escape for Washington and his men would be impossible. This all seemed so clear to the easy-going General Howe that he gave his tired men a rest after the battle on the 27th. On[Pg 197] the 28th a heavy rain fell, and on the 29th a dense fog covered the island.

 

But before midday of the 29th some American officers riding down toward the shore, noticed an unusual stir in the British fleet. Boats were going to and fro, as if carrying orders. "Very likely," said these officers to Washington, "the English vessels are to sail up between New York and Long Island, to cut off our retreat." As that was also Washington's opinion, he secured all the boats he could find for the purpose of trying to make an escape during the night.

 

It was a desperate undertaking. There were 10,000 men, and the width of the river at the point of crossing was nearly a mile. It would seem hardly possible that such a movement could, in a single night, be made without discovery by the British troops, who were lying in camp but a short distance away. The night must have been a long and anxious one for Washington, who stayed at his post of duty on the Long Island shore until the last boat of the retreating army had pushed off. The escape was a brilliant achievement and saved the American cause.

 

But this was only the beginning of Washington's troubles in this memorable year, 1776. As the British now occupied Brooklyn Heights, which overlooked New York, the Americans could not hold that place, and in a short time they had to withdraw, fighting stubbornly as they slowly retreated. Washington crossed over to the Jersey side of the Hudson, and left General Charles Lee with half the army at North[Pg 198] Castle. The British captured Forts Lee and Washington, with 3,000 men, inflicting a severe loss upon the American cause. The outlook was gloomy, but more trying events were to follow.

 

In order to prevent the British from capturing Philadelphia, Washington put his army between them and that city. The British began to move upon him. Needing every soldier that he could get, he sent orders to General Lee to join him. Lee refused to move. Again and again Washington urged Lee to come to his aid. Each time Lee disobeyed. We now know that he was a traitor, secretly hoping that Washington might fail in order that he himself, who was second in command, might become Commander-in-Chief of the American army.

 

Lee's disobedience placed Washington in a critical position. In order to save his army from capture, Washington had to retreat once more, this time across New Jersey toward Philadelphia. As the British army, in every way superior to Washington's, was close upon the Americans, it was a race for life. Sometimes the rear-guard of the Americans was just leaving a burning bridge when the van of the British army could be seen approaching. But by burning bridges and destroying food supplies intended for the British, Washington so delayed them that they were nineteen days in marching about sixty miles.

 

Nevertheless the situation for the Americans was still desperate. To make matters worse, Washington saw his army gradually melting away by desertion.[Pg 199] When he reached the Delaware River it numbered barely 3,000 men.

 

WASHINGTON'S RETREAT THROUGH NEW JERSEY. WASHINGTON'S RETREAT THROUGH NEW JERSEY.

[Pg 200]

 

Having collected boats for seventy miles along the Delaware, Washington succeeded in safely crossing it a little above Trenton, on December 8th. As the British had no boats, they were obliged to wait until the river should freeze, when they intended to cross in triumph and make an easy capture of Philadelphia.

 

To most people, in England and in America alike, the early downfall of the American cause seemed certain. General Cornwallis—who in May of this year had joined the British army in America—was so sure that the war would soon come to an end, that he had already packed some of his luggage and sent it aboard ship, with the intention of returning to England at an early day.

 

But Washington had no thought of giving up the struggle. Far from being disheartened, he confronted the gloomy outlook with all his energy and courage. Fearless and full of faith in the patriot cause, he watched with vigilance for an opportunity to turn suddenly upon his over-confident enemy and strike a heavy blow.

 

[Pg 201]

 

Map Illustrating the Struggle for the Hudson River and the Middle States. Map Illustrating the Struggle for the Hudson River and the Middle States.

[Pg 202]

 

Such an opportunity shortly came to him. The British General had carelessly separated his army into several divisions and scattered them at various points in New Jersey. One of these divisions, consisting of Hessians, was stationed at Trenton. Washington's quick eye noted this blunder of the British General, and he resolved to take advantage of it by attacking the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas night. Having been re-enforced, he now had an army of 6,000 and was therefore in a better condition to risk a battle. With 2,400 picked men he got ready to cross the Delaware River at a point nine miles above Trenton. There was snow on the ground, and the weather was bitterly cold. As the soldiers marched to the place of crossing, some of them with feet almost bare left bloody footprints along the route.

 

At sunset the troops began to cross. It was a terrible night for such an undertaking. Angry gusts of wind, and great blocks of ice swept along by the swift current, threatened every moment to dash in pieces the frail boats. From the Trenton side of the river, General Knox, who had been sent ahead by Washington, loudly shouted to let the struggling boatmen know where to land. Ten hours were consumed in the crossing. Much longer must the time have seemed to Washington, as he stood in the midst of the wild storm, his heart full of mingled anxiety and hope.

 

It was not until four o'clock in the morning that the troops were ready to march upon Trenton, nine miles away. As they advanced, a fearful storm of snow and sleet beat upon the already weary men. But they pushed forward, and surprised the Hessians at Trenton soon after sunrise, easily capturing them after a short struggle.

 

Washington had brought hope to every patriot heart. The British were amazed at the daring feat, and Cornwallis decided to make a longer stay in[Pg 203] America. He soon advanced with a superior force against Washington, and at nightfall, January 2, 1777, took his stand on the farther side of a small creek. "At last," said Cornwallis, "we have run down the old fox, and we will bag him in the morning."

 

But Washington was too sly a fox for Cornwallis to bag. During the night he led his army around Cornwallis's camp, and pushing on to Princeton defeated the rear-guard, which had not yet joined the main body. He then retired in safety to his winter quarters among the hills about Morristown. During this fateful campaign Washington had handled his army in a masterly way. He had begun with defeat and had ended with victory.

 

In 1777 the British planned to get control of the Hudson River, and thus cut off New England from the other States. In this way they hoped so to weaken the Americans as to make their defeat easy. Burgoyne was to march from Canada, by way of Lake Champlain and Fort Edward, to Albany, where he was to meet not only a small force of British under St. Leger from the Mohawk Valley, but also the main army of 18,000 men, under General Howe, which was expected to sail up the Hudson from New York. The British believed that this plan would be easily carried out and would soon bring the war to a close.

 

[Pg 204]

 

WINTER AT VALLEY FORGE. WINTER AT VALLEY FORGE.

 

The Relief.

[Pg 205]

 

And this might have happened if General Howe had not failed to do his part. Instead of going up to meet and help Burgoyne, however, he tried first to march across New Jersey and capture Philadelphia. But when he reached Morristown, he found Washington in a stronghold where he dared not attack him. As Washington would not come out and risk an encounter in the open field, and as Howe was unwilling to continue his advance with the American army threatening his rear, he returned to New York. Still desirous of reaching Philadelphia, however, he sailed a little later, with his army, to Chesapeake Bay. The voyage took him two months.

 

When at length he advanced toward Philadelphia, he found Washington ready to dispute his progress at Brandywine Creek. There a battle was fought, resulting in the defeat of the Americans. But Washington handled his army with such skill that Howe spent two weeks in reaching Philadelphia, only twenty-six miles away.

 

When Howe arrived at the city he found out that it was too late to send aid to Burgoyne, who was now in desperate straits. Washington had spoiled the English plan, and Burgoyne, failing to get the much-needed help from Howe, had to surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777) his entire army of 6,000 regular troops. This was a great blow to England, and resulted in a treaty between France and America. After this treaty, France sent over both land and naval forces, which were of much service to the American cause.

 

At the close of 1777 Washington retired to a strong position among the hills at Valley Forge, on the Schuylkill River, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Here his army spent a winter of terrible[Pg 206] suffering. Most of the soldiers were in rags, only a few had bed-clothing, and many had not even straw to lie upon at night. Nearly 3,000 were barefoot. More than this, they were often for days at a time without bread. It makes one heartsick to read about the sufferings of these patriotic men during this miserable winter. But despite all the bitter trials of these distressing times, Washington never lost faith in the final success of the American cause.

 

A beautiful story is told of this masterful man at Valley Forge. When "Friend Potts" was near the camp one day, he heard an earnest voice. On approaching he saw Washington on his knees, his cheeks wet with tears, praying to God for help and guidance. When the farmer returned to his home he said to his wife: "George Washington will succeed! George Washington will succeed! The Americans will secure their independence!" "What makes thee think so, Isaac?" inquired his wife. "I have heard him pray, Hannah, out in the woods to-day, and the Lord will surely hear his prayer. He will, Hannah; thee may rest assured He will."

 

We may pass over without comment here the events between the winter at Valley Forge and the Yorktown campaign, which resulted in the surrender of Cornwallis with all his army. Even when not engaged in fighting battles, Washington was the soul of the American cause, which could scarcely have succeeded without his inspiring leadership. But there is yet one more military event—the hemming in of Cornwallis at York[Pg 207]town,—for us to notice briefly before we take leave of Washington.

 

When at the close of his fighting with General Greene in the South, Cornwallis marched northward to Yorktown, Washington, with an army of French and American troops, was encamped on the Hudson River. He was waiting for the coming of a French fleet to New York. On its arrival he expected to attack the British army there by land, while the fleet attacked it by sea.

 

Upon hearing that the French fleet was on its way to the Chesapeake, Washington thought out a brilliant scheme. This was to march his army as quickly and as secretly as possible to Yorktown, a distance of 400 miles, there to join Lafayette and to co-operate with the French fleet in the capture of Cornwallis. The scheme succeeded so well that Cornwallis surrendered his entire army of 8,000 men on October 19, 1781.

 

This was the last battle of the war, although the treaty of peace was not signed until 1783. By that treaty the Americans won their independence from England. The country which they could now call their own extended from Canada to Florida, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River.

 

Washington, tired of war, was glad to become a Virginia planter once more. But he was not permitted to live in quiet. After his retirement from the army his home became, as he himself said, a well-resorted tavern. Two years after the close of the Revolution he wrote in his diary: "Dined with only Mrs. Washing[Pg 208]ton, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life."

 

When, on the formation of the Constitution of the United States, the American people looked about for a President, all eyes naturally turned to George Washington. He was elected without opposition and was inaugurated at New York, then the capital of the United States, on April 30, 1789.

 

Washington's Home—Mount Vernon. Washington's Home—Mount Vernon.

His life as President was one of dignity and elegance. It was his custom to pay no calls and accept no invitations, but between three and four o'clock on every Tuesday afternoon he held a public reception. On such occasions he appeared in court-dress, with powdered hair, yellow gloves in his hand, a long sword in[Pg 209] a scabbard of white polished leather at his side, and a cocked hat under his arm. Standing with his right hand behind him, he bowed formally as each guest was presented to him.

 

After serving two terms as President with great success he again retired in 1797 to private life at Mount Vernon. Here he died on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, loved and honored by the American people.

 

illus204

 

P1270060

Followed this fella as he worked his way methodically along the Valley Oak foraging for oak worms. He finally nabbed one for a nice meal. Photos were taken along Elk Slough, Yolo County, California.

Schweiz / Berner Oberland - Jungfrau

 

seen on the way from Männlichen to Kleine Scheidegg

 

gesehen auf dem Weg vom Männlichen zur Kleinen Scheidegg

 

(Wikipedia)

 

The Jungfrau (YOONG-frow[c], German pronunciation: [ˈjʊŋˌfʁaʊ̯], transl. "maiden, virgin"), at 4,158 meters (13,642 ft) is one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps, located between the northern canton of Bern and the southern canton of Valais, halfway between Interlaken and Fiesch. Together with the Eiger and Mönch, the Jungfrau forms a massive wall of mountains overlooking the Bernese Oberland and the Swiss Plateau, one of the most distinctive sights of the Swiss Alps.

 

The summit was first reached on August 3, 1811, by the Meyer brothers of Aarau and two chamois hunters from Valais. The ascent followed a long expedition over the glaciers and high passes of the Bernese Alps. It was not until 1865 that a more direct route on the northern side was opened.

 

The construction of the Jungfrau Railway in the early 20th century, which connects Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, made the area one of the most-visited places in the Alps. Along with the Aletsch Glacier to the south, the Jungfrau is part of the Jungfrau-Aletsch area, which was declared a World Heritage Site in 2001.

 

Etymology

 

The name Jungfrau ("maiden, virgin"), which refers to the highest of the three prominent mountains overlooking the Interlaken region, along with the Mönch ("monk") and the Eiger ("ogre"), is most likely derived from the name Jungfrauenberg given to Wengernalp, the alpine meadow directly facing the huge northern side of the Jungfrau, across the Trummelbach gorge. Wengernalp was so named for the nuns of Interlaken Monastery, its historical owner. Contrary to popular belief, the name did not originate from the appearance of the snow-covered mountain, the latter looking like a veiled woman.

 

The "virgin" peak was heavily romanticized as "goddess" or "priestess" in late 18th to 19th century Romanticism. Its summit, considered inaccessible, remained untouched until the 19th century. After the first ascent in 1811 by Swiss alpinist Johann Rudolf Meyer, the peak was jokingly referred to as "Mme Meyer" (Mrs. Meyer).

 

Geographic setting

 

Politically, the Jungfrau (and its massif) is split between the municipalities of Lauterbrunnen (Bern) and Fieschertal (Valais). It is the third-highest mountain of the Bernese Alps after the nearby Finsteraarhorn and Aletschhorn, respectively 12 and 8 km (7.5 and 5 mi) away. But from Lake Thun, and the greater part of the canton of Bern, it is the most conspicuous and the nearest of the Bernese Oberland peaks; with a height difference of 3,600 m (11,800 ft) between the summit and the town of Interlaken. This, and the extreme steepness of the north face, secured for it an early reputation for inaccessibility.

 

The Jungfrau is the westernmost and highest point of a gigantic 10 km (6.2 mi) wall dominating the valleys of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. The wall is formed by the alignment of some of the biggest north faces in the Alps, with the Mönch (4,107 m or 13,474 ft) and Eiger (3,967 m or 13,015 ft) to the east of the Jungfrau, and overlooks the valleys to its north by a height of up to 3 km (1.9 mi). The Jungfrau is approximately 6 km (3.7 mi) from the Eiger; with the summit of the Mönch between the two mountains, 3.5 km (2.2 mi) from the Jungfrau. The Jungfraujoch is the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch and the Eigerjoch is the saddle between the Mönch and the Eiger. The wall is extended to the east by the Fiescherwand and to the west by the Lauterbrunnen Wall, although it follows different directions from the Jungfrau and the Eiger.

 

The difference of altitude between the deep valley of Lauterbrunnen (800 m or 2,600 ft) and the summit is particularly visible from the area of Mürren. From the valley floor, west of the massif, the altitude gain is more than 3 km (1.9 mi) for a horizontal distance of 4 km (2.5 mi).

 

The landscapes around the Jungfrau are extremely contrasted. In contrast to the vertiginous precipices of its northwest, the mountain's southeastern side emerges from the upper snows of the Jungfraufirn, one of the main feeders of the Aletsch Glacier, at around 3,500 meters (11,500 ft). The 20-kilometer-long (12 mi) valley of Aletsch on the southeast is completely uninhabited, and is surrounded by neighboring valleys with similar landscapes. The area as a whole constitutes the largest glaciated area not just in the Alps, but in Europe as well.

 

Climbing history

 

In 1811, the brothers Johann Rudolf (1768–1825) and Hieronymus Meyer, sons of Johann Rudolf Meyer (1739–1813), the head of a rich merchant family of Aarau, along with several servants and a porter picked up at Guttannen, first reached the Valais by way of the Grimsel, and crossed the Beich Pass, a glacier pass over the Oberaletsch Glacier, to the head of the Lötschen valley. There, they added two local chamois hunters, Alois Volken and Joseph Bortis, to their party and traversed the Lötschenlücke before reaching the Aletschfirn (the west branch of the Aletsch Glacier), where they established the base camp, north of the Aletschhorn. After the Guttannen porter was sent back alone over the Lötschenlücke, the party finally reached the summit of the Jungfrau by the Rottalsattel on August 3. They then recrossed the two passes named to their point of departure in Valais, and went home again over the Grimsel.

 

The journey was a most extraordinary one for the time, and some persons threw doubts at its complete success. To settle these, another expedition was undertaken in 1812. In this the two sons, Rudolf (1791–1833) and Gottlieb (1793–1829), of Johann Rudolf Meyer, played the chief parts. After an unsuccessful attempt, defeated by bad weather, in the course of which the Oberaarjoch was crossed twice (this route being much more direct than the long detour through the Lötschental), Rudolf, with the two Valais hunters (Alois Volker and Joseph Bortis), a Guttannen porter named Arnold Abbühl, and a Hasle man, bivouacked on a depression on the southeast ridge of the Finsteraarhorn. Next day (August 16) the whole party attempted the ascent of the Finsteraarhorn from the Studer névé on the east by way of the southeast ridge, but Meyer, exhausted, remained behind. The following day the party crossed the Grünhornlücke to the Aletsch Glacier, but bad weather then put an end to further projects. At a bivouac, probably just opposite the present Konkordia Hut, the rest of the party, having come over the Oberaarjoch and the Grünhornlücke, joined the Finsteraarhorn party. Gottlieb, Rudolf's younger brother, had more patience than the rest and remained longer at the huts near the Märjelensee, where the adventurers had taken refuge. He could make the second ascent (September 3) of the Jungfrau, the Rottalsattel being reached from the east side as is now usual, and his companions being the two Valais hunters.

 

The third ascent dates from 1828, when several men from Grindelwald, headed by Peter Baumann, planted their flag upon the summit. Next came the ascent by Louis Agassiz, James David Forbes, Heath, Desor, and Duchatelier in 1841, recounted by Desor in his Excursions et Séjours dans les Glaciers. Gottlieb Samuel Studer published an account of the next ascent made by himself and Bürki in 1842.

 

In 1863, a party consisting of three young Oxford University graduates and three Swiss guides successfully reached the summit and returned to the base camp of the Faulberg (located near the present position of the Konkordia Hut) in less than 11 hours (see the section below, The 1863 Ascent). In the same year Mrs Stephen Winkworth became the first woman to climb the Jungfrau. She also slept overnight in the Faulberg cave prior to the ascent as there was no hut at that time.

 

Before the construction of the Jungfraujoch railway tunnel, the approach from the glaciers on the south side was very long. The first direct route from the valley of Lauterbrunnen was opened in 1865 by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, H. Brooke George with the guide Christian Almer. They had to carry ladders with them in order to cross the many crevasses on the north flank. Having spent the night on the rocks of the Schneehorn (3,402 m or 11,161 ft) they gained next morning the Silberlücke, the depression between the Jungfrau and Silberhorn, and thence in little more than three hours reached the summit. Descending to the Aletsch Glacier they crossed the Mönchsjoch, and passed a second night on the rocks, reaching Grindelwald next day. This route became a usual until the opening of the Jungfraujoch.

 

The first winter ascent was made on 23 January 1874, by Meta Brevoort and W. A. B. Coolidge with guides Christian and Ulrich Almer. They used a sled to reach the upper Aletsch Glacier, and were accompanied by Miss Brevoort's favorite dog, Tschingel.

 

The Jungfrau was climbed via the west side for the first time in 1885 by Fritz and Heinrich von Allmen, Ulrich Brunner, Fritz Graf, Karl Schlunegger and Johann Stäger—all from Wengen. They ascended the Rottal ridge (Innere Rottalgrat) and reached the summit on 21 September. The more difficult and dangerous northeast ridge that connects the summit from the Jungfraujoch was first climbed on 30 July 1911 by Albert Weber and Hans Schlunegger.

 

In July 2007, six Swiss Army recruits, part of the Mountain Specialists Division 1, died in an accident on the normal route. Although the causes of the deaths was not immediately clear, a report by the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research concluded that the avalanche risk was unusually high due to recent snowfall, and that there was "no other reasonable explanation" other than an avalanche for the incident.

 

The 1863 Ascent

 

The Führerbuch of the Alpine guide Peter Baumann records an ascent of the Jungfrau made by himself with three men from England in July 1863. The foreign climbers were long thought to have been John Tyndall, J.J. Hornby and T.H. Philpott, until in 1958 the records were checked by the Alpine Club and the following conclusion was reached:

 

On July 23, 1963, Phillpotts, with James Robertson and H.J. Chaytor, climbed the Jungfrau (the entry shown in A.J. 32. 227 was wrongly transcribed by Montagnier, who says ‘T.H. Philpott’ for J.S. Phillpotts). The entry in Peter Baumann’s Führerbuch (facsimile in A.C. archives) says that the trio crossed the Strahlegg Pass and the Oberaarjoch, and then climbed the Jungfrau from the Eggishorn.

 

Tyndall, Hornby and Philpott were well-known Alpinists, but there is no record of their having attempted the Jungfrau in 1863. Robertson, Chaytor and Phillpotts were novices; they had recently graduated from Oxford University where they had all been keen members of the Oxford University Boat Club.

 

William Robertson (1839–1892), the leader of the expedition (wrongly called ‘James’ in the Note quoted above), was an Australian by birth, and the first non-British national to take part in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. He later became a barrister and member of parliament in Australia. He and H.J. Chaytor (possibly the father of the medievalist Henry John Chaytor) were both members of the victorious Oxford team in the 1861 Boat Race. James Surtees Phillpotts (1839–1930) was the third member of the team; he would later become headmaster of Bedford School. The trio had three Swiss guides, Peter Baumann, Peter Kaufmann ("Grabipeter", father of Peter Kaufmann the younger) and Rubi.

 

A description of the ascent of the Jungfrau is contained in a letter dated Sunday 26 July which Phillpotts wrote to his friend Alexander Potts (later to become the first headmaster of Fettes College). The letter is now in the possession of the Alpine Club. The following extracts are from that letter.

 

The Virgin certainly did not smile on the poor "fools who rushed in" on her sacred heights, i.e. in plain British, we had the treadmill slog, the biting wind, the half frost-bitten feet and the flayed faces that generally attend an Alpine ascent.

 

We got to the Faulberg hole about dark, and enjoyed the coffee the longman (Kauffmann) made, as one would in a hole in a rock in a cold evening. The "Faulberg Nachtlager" consists of two holes and a vestibule to the upper hole. The Upper Hole in which we lodged just contained Chay[tor], the Guv [Robertson] and myself, stretched at full length on a little hay over a hard rock mattress, convex instead of concave at the point where one likes to rest one's weight. Chaytor was in the middle, and as we were very close was warm and slept. The Guv and I courted Nature's soft nurse in vain. At two we got up and methodically put our feet into the stocks, i.e. our boots, breakfasted and shivered, then started (unwashed of course, as the cold gave us malignant hydrophobia) a little after 3:30.

 

The hole was about 150 feet [46 m] up one of the loose stone cliffs one now knows so well. So we groped our way down it and over the moraine – the stars still lingering, as day was just dawning. We could not start at 1:30, the proper time, as there was no moon and we wanted light as we had to tramp the glacier at once. Rubi led, and off we went, roped and in Indian file, in the old treadmill way over the slippery plowed-field-like snow that lay on the upper glacier, for a pull without a check of one or two hours.

 

At last we came to the region of bergschrunds and crevasses. They seemed to form at first an impassable labyrinth, but gradually the guides wound in and out between the large rifts, which were exquisitely lovely with their overhanging banks of snow and glittering icicles, and then trod as on pins and needles over a snowbridge here and there, or had to take a jump over the more feasible ones – and we found ourselves at the foot of the mountain; trudged up on the snow which ought to have been crisp but was even then more or less fresh fallen and sloppy; had to creep over about three crevasses, and after a tiresome pull, dragging one leg after another out of ankle or knee deep snow, we got on a crest of snow at right angles to the slope we had just come up. That slope with its crevasses on one side, and on the other a shorter and much steeper one which led in a few steps to a precipice.

 

All along this crest went a snakelike long crevasse, for which we had continually to sound, and go first one side and then the other; then we got to the foot of the saddle. Some twenty or thirty steps, some cut, some uncut, soon took us up a kind of hollow, and we got on a little sloping plateau of some six feet [1.8 m] large, where we left the grub and the knapsack, keeping my small flask of cognac only. Then up a steep ice slope, very steep I should say, down which the bits of ice cut out of the steps hopped and jumped at full gallop and then bounded over to some bottomless place which we could not see down. Their pace gave one an unpleasant idea of the possible consequence of a slip.

 

Here we encountered a biting bitter wind. Peter Baumann cut magnificent steps, at least he and Rubi did between them, the one improving on the other's first rough blows. After Rubi came Chaytor with Kauffmann behind him, then the Guv, and then myself, the tail of the string. Each step was a long lift from the last one, and as the snow was shallow they had to be cut in the ice which was like rock on this last slope.

 

Suddenly there burst upon us, on lifting our heads over the ridge, the green and cheerful valleys of Lauterbrunnen and Interlaken, of Grindelwald and a distant view of others equally beautiful stretching on for ever in one vast panorama. On the other side in grim contrast there was a wild and even awful scene. One gazed about one and tried in vain to see to the bottom of dark yawning abysses and sheer cliffs of ice or rock.

 

Tourism

 

Named after the Jungfrau, the Jungfrau Region of the Bernese Oberland is a major tourist destination in the Alps and includes a large number of railways and other facilities. While the mountain peak was once difficult to access, the Jungfrau Railway, a rack railway, now goes to the Jungfraujoch railway station at 3,454 m (11,332 ft), therefore providing an easy access to the upper Aletsch Glacier and a relatively short access to the Jungfrau itself, the height difference between the station and the summit being only 704 metres and the horizontal distance being slightly less than 2 kilometres. As a result, in the popular mind, the Jungfrau has become a mountain associated with the Bernese Oberland and Interlaken, rather than with Upper Valais and Fiesch.

 

In 1893, Adolf Guyer-Zeller conceived of the idea of a railway tunnel to the Jungfraujoch to make the glaciated areas on its south side more accessible. The building of the tunnel took 16 years and the summit station was not opened before 1912. The goal was in fact to reach the summit of the Jungfrau with an elevator from the highest railway station, located inside the mountain. The complete project was not realized because of the outbreak of the World War I. Nevertheless, it was at the time one of the highest railways in the world and remains today the highest in Europe and the only (non-cable) railway on Earth going well past the perennial snow-line.

 

The Jungfrau Railway leaves from Kleine Scheidegg, which can be reached from both sides by trains from Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen via Wengen. The train enters the Jungfrau Tunnel running eastward through the Eiger just above Eigergletscher, which is, since 2020, also accessible by aerial tramway from Grindelwald. Before arriving at the Jungfraujoch, it stops for a few minutes at two other stations, Eigerwand (on the north face of the Eiger) and Eismeer (on the south side), where passengers can see through the holes excavated from the mountain. The journey from Kleine Scheidegg to Jungfraujoch takes approximately 50 minutes including the stops; the downhill return journey taking only 35 minutes.

 

A large complex of tunnels and buildings has been constructed at the Jungfraujoch, referred to as the "Top of Europe". There are several restaurants and bars, shops, multimedia exhibitions, a post office, and a research station with dedicated accommodation facilities. An elevator enables access to the top of the Sphinx and its observatory, at 3,571 m (11,716 ft), the highest viewing platform of the area. Outside, at the level of the Jungfraujoch, there is a ski school, and the "Ice Palace", a collection of elaborate ice sculptures displayed inside the Aletsch Glacier. Another tunnel leads to the east side of the Sphinx, where one can walk on the glacier up to the Mönchsjoch Hut, the only hotel infrastructure in the area.

 

Apart from the Jungfraujoch, many facilities have been built in the Jungfrau Region, including numerous mountain railways. In 1908, the first public cable car in the world, the Wetterhorn Elevator, opened at the foot of the Wetterhorn, but was closed seven years later. The Schilthorn above Mürren, the Männlichen above Wengen, and the Schynige Platte above Wilderswil, offer good views of the Jungfrau and the Lauterbrunnen valley. On the south side, the Eggishorn above Fiesch also offers views of the Jungfrau, across the Aletsch Glacier.

 

Climbing routes

 

The normal route follows the traces of the first climbers, but the long approach on the Aletsch Glacier is no longer necessary. From the area of the Jungfraujoch the route to the summit takes only a few hours. Most climbers start from the Mönchsjoch Hut. After a traverse of the Jungfraufirn the route heads to the Rottalsattel (3,885 m or 12,746 ft), from where the southern ridge leads to the Jungfrau. It is not considered a very difficult climb but it can be dangerous on the upper section above the Rottalsattel, where most accidents happen. The use of the Jungfrau Railway instead of the much more gradual approach from Fiesch (or Fieschertal), via the Konkordia Hut, can cause some acclimatization troubles as the difference of altitude between the railway stations of Interlaken and Jungfraujoch is almost 3 km (1.9 mi).

 

(Wikipedia)

 

The Schwarzmönch (German for "black monk") (2,649 m) is a mountain of the Bernese Alps, overlooking Lauterbrunnen in the Bernese Oberland. It forms a huge buttress on the north-west side of the Jungfrau, to which it is connected by the ridge named Ufem Schwarzen Grat.

 

East the summit is located the Silberhorn Hut.

 

(Wikipedia)

 

Die Jungfrau ist ein Berg in der Schweiz. Sie ist mit 4158 m ü. M. der dritthöchste Berg der Berner Alpen und bildet zusammen mit Eiger und Mönch eine markante Dreiergruppe, ein sogenanntes «Dreigestirn».

 

Am 13. Dezember 2001 wurde die Jungfrau zusammen mit südlich angrenzenden Gebieten als Schweizer Alpen Jungfrau-Aletsch in die Liste als UNESCO-Weltnaturerbe aufgenommen.

 

Lage und Umgebung

 

Über den Jungfrau-Gipfel verläuft die Grenze zwischen den Kantonen Bern und Wallis. Der Berg ist ausserordentlich vielgestaltig. Im Norden und Nordwesten, auf ihrer „weiblichen“ Schauseite (vgl. Foto) sind ihr Wengen-Jungfrau, Schneehorn, das Silberhorn, das Chly Silberhoren und der „Schwarzmönch“ vorgelagert sowie die zerrissenen Kühlauenen- und Giessengletscher. Im Westen erhebt sie sich fast eisfrei volle 3250 Meter über dem hinteren Lauterbrunnental. Es ist dies (nach dem Mont Blanc) der zweithöchste direkte Abhang in den Alpen. Ihre Südwand erhebt sich über dem versteckten Rottalgletscher und ihre Ostwand über den Firnen am Jungfraujoch.

 

Die Pläne, auf die Jungfrau eine Bergbahn zu bauen, wurden aufgrund finanzieller Schwierigkeiten nicht realisiert. Die ursprünglich bis unter den Gipfel geplante Jungfraubahn wurde bis 1912 mit Endstation Jungfraujoch fertiggestellt.

 

Auf dem untersten Absatz des Nordostgrats haben die PTT einen Funk-Umsetzer auf 3777 m ü. M. installiert.

 

Geologie

 

Die Jungfrau liegt im nördlichen Randbereich des Aarmassivs, eines der sogenannten Zentralmassive der Schweizer Alpen. Ihre höheren Lagen (Silberhorn, Wengen-Jungfrau und Hauptgipfel) sowie ihre Westflanke bis hinunter zum oberen Ende des Lauterbrunnentals sind weit überwiegend aus kristallinem Grundgebirge (prä-triassische Gneise, Glimmerschiefer u. ä.) der Helvetischen Zone aufgebaut. Die Nordwestflanke hingegen, der ganze «Vorbau» (Schwarzmönch, Rotbrett und Schneehorn) besteht aus sedimentärem, überwiegend jurassischem und kretazischem Deckgebirge des Helvetikums. Eine Besonderheit der Jungfrau ist, dass dort zwischen dem prinzipiell autochthonen Gipfel-Kristallin und dessen Deckschichten ein Überschiebungs-kontakt besteht; somit ist das Grundgebirge geringfügig auf sein Deckgebirge überschoben worden.

 

Name

 

Der Name Jungfrau dürfte sich von der Wengernalp am Fusse des Berges ableiten, die – nach den Besitzerinnen, den Nonnen vom Kloster Interlaken – früher Jungfrauenberg genannt wurde. Einer anderen Quelle zufolge leitet sich der Name vom Aussehen des Nordhanges des Berges ab, der aus der Ferne dem Schleier eines Mädchens ähneln soll.

 

Nach dem Berg ist die Jungfrau-Region benannt, die Tourismusorganisation der Orte Grindelwald, Wengen, Mürren und Lauterbrunnen, ausserdem die Jungfraubahn Holding AG, die neben der Jungfraubahn selbst auch die anderen Bergbahnen in der Region betreibt.

 

Besteigungsgeschichte

 

Bergsteiger auf dem Gipfel im Jahr 1878

Erstbesteiger waren Johann Rudolf Meyer und sein Bruder Hieronymus mit den Führern Joseph Bortis und Alois Volken, die am 3. August 1811 vom Lötschental her den Berg von Süden erklommen hatten. Sie folgten ungefähr der heutigen Normalroute. Der Volksmund taufte daraufhin die bis dahin unberührte Jungfrau «Madame Meyer».

 

1874 erfolgte die Winter-Erstbesteigung durch die Alpinistin Margaret Claudia Brevoort.

 

Die Jungfrau gilt, obwohl leicht erreichbar, als unfallträchtiger Berg. Bei einem der schwersten Unglücke stürzten am 12. Juli 2007 sechs Rekruten der Gebirgsspezialisten-Rekrutenschule Andermatt vom Rottalsattel 1000 Meter auf den darunterliegenden Rottalgletscher in den Tod, nachdem sie eine Lawine ausgelöst hatten. Das urteilende Militärgericht ging von einem falsch eingeschätzten, heimtückischen Lawinenrisiko aus und sprach in der Folge die verantwortlichen Bergführer frei.

 

Routen

 

Rottalsattel und Südostgrat (Normalroute)

 

Schwierigkeit: ZS-

Zeitaufwand: 4–5 Std. von der Mönchsjochhütte, 3½–4½ Std. vom Jungfraujoch

Ausgangspunkt: Mönchsjochhütte (3657 m)

Talort: Grindelwald (1034 m)

 

Innere Rottalgrat

 

Schwierigkeit: ZS

Zeitaufwand: 6–7 Stunden

Ausgangspunkt: Rottalhütte (2755 m)

Talort: Stechelberg (919 m)

 

Nordwestgrat oder „Rotbrettgrat“

 

Schwierigkeit: S

Zeitaufwand: 8–12 Stunden

Ausgangspunkt: Silberhornhütte (2663 m)

Talort: Stechelberg (919 m)

 

Nordostgrat

 

Schwierigkeit: S+, mit IV. UIAA-Grad Felskletterei

Zeitaufwand: 8–10 Stunden

Ausgangspunkt: Jungfraujoch (3454 m)

Talort: Grindelwald (1034 m)

 

Kunst

 

Erwähnt ist die Jungfrau unter anderem bei Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, Vers 628 (1804). Lord Byrons Drama Manfred (1817) spielt am Fuss und auf dem Gipfel des Massivs. Ferdinand Hodler hat die Jungfrau mehrfach gemalt, darunter die perspektivisch verfremdete «Jungfrau über dem Nebelmeer». Alex Diggelmann gab 1958 eine Lithographienmappe unter dem Titel Die Jungfrau, mein Berg heraus. Stephan Bundi gestaltete 2005 eine Schweizer Gedenkmünze mit dem Bergmotiv.

 

Im Januar 2012 wurde zum 100-jährigen bestehen der Jungfraubahn eine übergrosse Schweizer Flagge vom Lichtkünstler Gerry Hofstetter an den Gipfel projiziert. Zeitweise waren neben dem Schweizer Kreuz auch ein Porträt des Zürcher Unternehmers Adolf Guyer-Zeller sowie ein Bild von einem der Züge zu sehen.

 

(Wikipedia)

Zane, the Ice Ninja: Part boy, part Nindroid, this ninja is super cool. Freon literally cools his fuel cells and he shoots down his opponents with an icy blast. Logical and methodical, Zane is guided by his programming and sensors – but don’t call him a robot! Zane is quick to remind everyone that he’s just a normal.

(The LEGO Ninjago Movie is in theaters September 22, 2017)

Indian Cuckoo (Cuculus micropterus)

 

The generic name derives from the onomatopoeic name for a cuckoo, based on the bird's call, in Old English = coccou or cukkow, in French = coucou and in Greek = kokkux or kokkyx. The specific name results from a combination of two Greek words: micro = little or very small and ptero = wing. Together, the name literally means "small winged cuckoo" which is reflected in an early common name.

 

Other common names: Short-winged Cuckoo, Indian Hawk-Cuckoo.

 

Taxonomy: Cuculus micropterus Gould 1837, Himalayas.

 

Sub-species & Distribution: Two races are recognised, both of which are found in this region:

 

micropterus Gould 1837, Himalayas. Ranges from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, east to E China, Mongolia, Korea and E Russia. It winters south to the Andamans and Nicobars, West Malaysia, Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and the Philippines.

 

concretus S. Müller 1845, Borneo. This smaller resident form is found in Borneo, Sumatra and Java. It is also found from Phattalung, in S Thailand, south to Johore (Medway & Wells 1976).

 

Similar species: It is very similar to two other Cuculus species. The Common Cuckoo C. canorus does not occur in this region. The Oriental Cuckoo C. saturatus is a rare winter visitor and passage migrant. Both these birds do not have a broad black sub-terminal band, tipped with white, on the tail.

 

Size: 12½ to 13" (31 to 33 cm). Sexes differ slightly.

 

Description: Male: Head and neck dark ashy-grey tinged with brown, paler on the lores, chin, throat and upper breast. Remaining upperparts, scapulars and wing coverts dark ashy-brown, the primaries and secondaries similar but barred with white along the inner webs. Tail dark ashy-brown with a broad black sub-terminal band and tipped with white. Basally, the tail feathers have a series of alternating white and black bands, more on the outer feathers than the inner ones, often with white or rufous notches along both edges. Lower breast and abdomen creamy-white, boldly barred with dark blackish-brown bars, the vent, axillaries, undertail and underwing coverts more narrowly barred with blackish-brown.

 

Female: Very like the male, with the throat and breast tinged with rufous.

 

Immature birds: Juvenile birds appear largely white to rufous-white with dark brown bars on the head, nape, upper back, chin, throat, sides of neck and breast, the face and ear coverts less heavily marked. Remaining upperparts, including wing coverts more rufous, the feathers broadly edged with rufous-buff and tipped with white. Lower breast, belly and vent pale buffy-white, broadly barred with blackish-brown, more so on the flanks. The tail appears largely to be barred with rufous and black, with more numerous bars than adult have. They, too, like the adults, have a broad black sub-terminal tail band.

 

Gradually, the white and rufous edges on the upperparts disappear, the throat and upper breast turn ashy, and the bars on the underparts become more defined. Within five months of leaving the nest, the young are almost in adult plumage, the rufous band across the upper breast being ultimately lost except in females. However, they often have rufous or whitish tips to the flight feathers and upperwing coverts (Oates & Blanford 1895).

 

Soft parts: Iris dark yellowish-brown, orbital ring orange-yellow. Upper mandible black, lower mandible greenish-horn tipped with black, gape orange-yellow. Legs and feet orange-yellow, claws black.

 

Status, Habitat & Behaviour: A common winter visitor and passage migrant, is found throughout Singapore, the earliest date being 14th September, the latest date 19th May (Wang & Hails 2007). Between these two dates, this bird has not been recorded in Singapore, which suggests that C. m. concretus, the resident form found south to Johore in west Malaysia, does not occur in Singapore.

 

The nominate form is a vagrant to Borneo where C. m. concretus, a smaller and darker form, is also the resident race (Smythies & Davison 1999), up to 1100 m (3300 feet) in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak. In Sabah, it is found in primary, peatswamp and logged forests (Sheldon et. al. 2001).

 

In Singapore, it is more usually found in forests, along forest edges, in mangroves, secondary scrub and, occasionally, in gardens and parks (Wang & Hails 2007). In West Malaysia, both resident and migrant forms are found to 760 m (2500 feet), in the canopy of lowland and hill forests, as well as on offshore islands (Medway & Wells 1976). In India and Nepal, where it is very common in summer, it can be found in fairly wooded country to 2300 m, even up to 3700 m (Baker 1927).

 

A solitary and shy bird, it is generally found singly and easily overlooked, keeping to the treetops or flying hawk-like over the forest canopy. During the breeding season, however, it becomes very vocal, calling incessantly during the early hours of dawn and again at dusk, far into the night, especially on moonlit nights, even calling on the wing during courtship chases (Ali & Ripley 1969).

 

Food: It mainly eats caterpillars, ants, locustids, fruit, butterflies and grasshoppers (Smythies 1968), sometimes coming down to the ground, hopping about awkwardly to pick up insects from within the leaf litter (Ali & Ripley 1969). In Singapore, it was found feeding at a termite hatch (Subaraj 2008).

 

Voice and Calls: In India, its most common four-note call is a fine melodious pleasing whistle from which evolved some of its popular local names, Bo-kota-ko in Bengali (Jerdon 1862), Kyphulpakka (Oates & Blanford 1895), and the "Broken Pekoe" bird in English (Baker & Inglis 1930). The call has also been variously annotated by several other authors: as "crossword puzzle" (Ali & Ripley 1969), a far-carrying wa-wa-wa-wu (Medway & Wells 1976), a flute-like ko-ko-ta-ko (King, Woodcock & Dickinson 1975), as reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's 5th symphony (Sheldon et. al. 2001). There are several other interpretations of its call (Tsang 2010).

 

In the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, its call was continuously heard in late February over sub-montane forest at 900 m (3000 feet). The loud four-note call was fairly musical, koh-koh-koh-kok, the first three syllables on the same pitch, the third sometimes higher, the last note always lower. It was persistently uttered for several minutes at a time, each burst of four-note lasting slightly over one second with about two seconds between each burst, occasional with a fifteen to thirty seconds break between each set of notes. Once or twice, it made a more rounded fluting and musical variation of the same four notes. Most of the time, the call was echoed, almost synchronously, by a four-note squeaking call, much more shrill and softer, sometimes in a lower key (Sreedharan 2005).

 

It usually calls from the tops of tall trees or when flying from tree to tree (Jerdon 1862), and much more persistently during breeding season, often calling all night long (Smythies 1968). The call is uttered intermittently for hours on end, for more than five minutes at a stretch, at about 23 calls per minute, and, while courting a nearby female, the wings are dropped, the tail spread wide and erected, the bird pivoting from side to side (Ali & Ripley 1969).

 

Breeding: Very little is known of the breeding of this Cuckoo. It is brood parasitic and, instead of building its own nest, it surreptitiously lays eggs in the nests of several host species, its choice of victim varying from location to location. The nominate form, C. m. micropterus, does not breed in our area. The local form, C. m. concretus breeds in peninsular Malaysia.

 

The breeding season varies from May to July in northern China, March to August in India, January to June in Burma and January to August in the Malay Peninsula.

 

In India, the host species are said to be Streaked Laughing-Thrush Garrulax lineatus, White-bellied Redstart Hodgsonius phoenicuroides, Indian Bush-Chat Saxicola torquata and Indian Blue Robin Luscinia brunnea, all of which lay blue or bluish eggs, similar to those of this Cuckoo (Baker 1927).

 

Additionally, it is said to victimise species such as Fork-tailed Drongo Dicrurus adsimilis, Ashy Drongo Dicrurus leucophaeus but other species, "in whose nests putative eggs of this cuckoo are claimed to have been found, or have been observed feeding its young", include the Asian Paradise-flycatcher Terpsiphone paradisi, the Streaked Spiderhunter Arachnothera magna and, in Sri Lanka, the Black-hooded Oriole Oriolus xanthornus (Ali & Ripley 1969).

 

Given the difficulty in determining the identity of young cuckoos, it is hardly surprising that these two authors have included a caveat, stating that the available data on the breeding biology of this bird, indeed, of all parasitic cuckoos are, "by and large, meagre, and of dubious authenticity. Most accounts are vague, largely conjectural and often contradictory. The whole subject calls for a more methodical de novo re-investigation".

 

Currently, this picture (Ong 2008), of a juvenile Indian Cuckoo fostered by a Black-and-yellow Broadbill Eurylaimus ochromalus provides the only incontrovertible evidence of a confirmed host in Malaysia. In Amurland, Siberia, its main host is the Brown Shrike Lanius cristatus, the cuckoo's eggs hatching in about 12 days, two to three days sooner than that of the shrike (Ali & Ripley 1969).

 

Oviduct eggs from females are said to be of two types: whitish with small reddish-brown dots, closely matching drongo eggs, or pale greyish-blue, like those of the Turdinae, the eggs c. 25 x 19 mm in size (Ali & Ripley 1969).

 

Migration: Seventeen night-flying migrants, attributed to C. m. micropterus, were caught at Fraser's Hill from 10th October to 27th November and 7th to 14th April between 1966 and 1969. Birds on passage were also collected in November at One Fathom Bank Lighthouse and on Rembia and Pisang islands. None of these belonged to the resident races have been handled (Medway & Wells 1976).

 

Moult: In the Family Cuculidae, moult strategy is quite complex, occasionally suspended. The primaries moult from two centres, P1 to P4 descendantly, P5 to P10 ascendantly. The secondaries, too, have two centres, S1 to S5 centripetally, S6 to S9 ascendant and alternate. Tail moult is irregular. They moult twice annually, undergoing a partial summer moult and a complete winter moult which finishes in early spring (Baker 1993).

 

None of the migrant birds from the off-shore sources were in moult. The migrants caught at Fraser's Hill in autumn were all in post-juvenile or adult plumage, indicating that the annual moult is completed in the breeding grounds, before they reach winter quarters (Medway & Wells 1976).

Teotihuacán [teotiwa'kan] was, at its height in the first half of the 1st millennium CE, the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas. The name Teotihuacán is also used to refer to the civilization or culture that this city was the center of, which at its greatest extent included much of central Mexico. Its influence spread throughout Mesoamerica; evidence of Teotihuacano presence, if not outright political and economic control, can be seen at numerous sites in Veracruz and the Maya region.

 

The city was located in what is now the San Juan Teotihuacán municipality in the State of México, Mexico, approximately 40 km (about 24.8 miles) northeast of Mexico City. It covers a total surface area of 83 km² and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

 

The name Teotihuacán was given by the Nahuatl-speaking Aztec centuries after the fall of the city. The term has been glossed as 'birthplace of the gods,' reflecting Nahua creation myths that took place in Teotihuacán. Another translation was offered by Thelma Sullivan, who interprets the name as "place of those who have the road of the gods."

 

The original name of the city is unknown, but it appears in hieroglyphic texts from the Maya region as 'puh', or Place of Reeds. This suggests that the Maya understood Teotihuacán as a 'Place of Reeds' similar to other Central Mexican settlements that took the name 'Tollan,' such as Tula-Hidalgo and Cholula. This naming convention led to much confusion in the early 20th century as scholars debated whether Teotihuacán or Tula-Hidalgo was the Tollan described by 16th century chronicles. It now seems clear that 'Tollan' may be understood as a generic term applied to any large settlement, rather like the modern expression "the Big Smoke". In the Mesoamerican concept of urbanism, Tollan and other language equivalents serve as a metaphor, linking the bundles of reeds and rushes that formed part of the lacustrine environment of the Valley of Mexico and the large gathering of people in a city

 

Origins and foundation

 

The early history of Teotihuacán is quite mysterious, and the origin of its founders is debated. For many years, archaeologists believed it was built by the Toltec people, an early Mexican civilization. This belief was based on Aztec writings which attributed the site to the Toltecs. However, the Nahuatl word "Toltec" means "great craftsman" and may not always refer to the Toltec civilization. Also, Teotihuacán predates the Toltec civilization, ruling them out as the city's founders. Other scholars have put forth the Totonac people as the founders of Teotihuacán, and the debate continues to this day. There is evidence that at least some of the people living in Teotihuacán came from areas influenced by the Teotihuacano civilization, including the Zapotec, Mixtec and Maya peoples. The culture and architecture of Teotihuacán was influenced by the Olmec people, who are considered to be the "mother civilization" of Mesoamerica. The earliest buildings at Teotihuacán date to about 200 BC, and the largest pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun, was completed by 100 AD.

 

Zenith

 

The city reached its zenith between 150 and 450 CE, when it was the center of a powerful culture that dominated Mesoamerica, wielding power and influence comparable to ancient Rome. At its height the city covered over 30 km² (over 11½ square miles), and probably housed a population of over 150,000 people, possibly as many as 250,000. Various districts in the city housed people from across the Teotihuacano empire that spread south as far as Guatemala. Notably absent from the city are fortifications and military structures. Teotihuacán had a major influence on the Preclassic and Classic Maya, conquering several Maya centers including Tikal and influencing Maya culture. The Teotihuacano style of architecture was a major contribution to Mesoamerican culture. The stepped pyramids that were quite prominent in Maya and Aztec architecture came from Teotihuacán.[citation needed] This style of building was called "talud-tablero", where a rectangular panel (tablero) was placed over a sloping side (talud). The city was a center of industry, home to many potters, jewelers and craftsmen. Teotihuacán is known for producing a great number of obsidian artifacts. Unfortunately no ancient Teotihuacano non-ideographic texts are known to exist (or known to have existed), but mentions of the city in inscriptions from Maya cities show that Teotihuacán nobility travelled to and perhaps conquered local rulers as far away as Honduras. Maya inscriptions mention an individual nicknamed by scholars as "Spearthrower Owl", apparently ruler of Teotihuacán, who reigned for over 60 years and installed his relatives as rulers of Tikal and Uaxactún in Guatemala. Most of what we infer about the culture at Teotihuacán comes from the murals that adorn the site and others, like the Wagner Murals, found in private collections, and from hieroglyphic inscriptions made by the Maya describing their encounters with Teotihuacano conquerors.

 

Collapse

 

It was previously believed that sometime during the 7th or 8th centuries, the city was sacked and burned by invaders, possibly the Toltecs. More recent evidence, however, seems to indicate that the burning was limited to the structures and dwellings associated primarily with the elite class. Some see this as evidence that the burning was from an internal uprising and that the invasion theory is flawed due to the fact that early archaeological work on the city was focused exclusively on the palaces and temples, places used by the elites, and because all of these sites showed burning, archaeologists concluded that the whole city was burned. Instead, it is now known that the destruction in the city was focused on major civic structures along the Avenue of the Dead. Some statues seem to have been destroyed in a methodical way, their fragments dispersed. The fact that population began to decline around 500-600 AD also supports the internal unrest hypothesis. The decline of Teotihucán has been correlated with the droughts related to the Climate changes of 535–536. This theory is supported by the archeological remains that show a rise in the percentage of juvenile skeletons with evidence of malnutrition during the 6th century. This does not conflict with either of the above theories however since both increased warfare and internal unrest can also be effects of a general period of drought and famine. Other nearby centers like Cholula, Xochicalco, and Cacaxtla attempted to fill the powerful vacuum left by Teotihuacán's decline. They may have aligned themselves against Teotihuacán in an attempt to reduce its influence and power. The art and architecture at these sites shows an interest in emulating Teotihuacán forms, but also a more eclectic mix of motifs and iconography from other parts of Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya region.

 

People

 

There is archaeological evidence that Teotihuacán was a multi-ethnic city, with distinct Zapotec, Mixtec, Maya and what seem to be Nahua quarters. The Totonacs have always maintained that they were the ones who built it, a story that was corroborated later by the Aztecs.

 

Language

In his 2001 paper,Terrence Kaufman presents linguistic evidence suggesting that an important ethnic group in Teotihuacán was of Totonacan and/or Mixe-Zoquean linguistic affiliation. He uses this to explain general influences from Totonacan and Mixe-Zoquean languages in many other Mesoamerican languages many of which do not have any known history of contact with either of the above mentioned groups.

  

Religion

 

The religion of Teotihuacán is similar to those of other Mesoamerican cultures. Many of the same gods were worshiped, including the Feathered Serpent and The Rain god. Teotihuacán was a major religious center, and the priests probably had a great deal of political power. As with other Mesoamerican cultures, Teotihuacános practiced human sacrifice. Human bodies and animal sacrifices have been found during excavations of the pyramids at Teotihuacán; it is believed that when the buildings were expanded, sacrifices were made to dedicate the new building. The victims were probably enemy warriors captured in battle and then brought to the city to be ritually sacrificed so the city could prosper. Some were decapitated, some had their hearts removed, others were killed by being hit several times over the head and some were even buried alive. Animals that were considered sacred and represented mythical powers and military might were also buried alive but imprisoned in cages: cougars, a wolf, eagles, a falcon, an owl, and even venomous snakes.

 

The city's broad central avenue, called "Avenue of the Dead" (a translation from its Nahuatl name Miccaotli), is flanked by impressive ceremonial architecture, including the immense Pyramid of the Sun (second largest in the New World after the Great Pyramid of Cholula) and the Pyramid of the Moon. Along the Avenue of the Dead are many smaller talud-tablero platforms. The Aztecs believed they were tombs, inspiring the name of the avenue. Now they are known to be ceremonial platforms that were topped with temples. Further down the Avenue of the Dead is the area known as the Citadel, containing the ruined Temple of the Feathered Serpent. This area was a large plaza surrounded by temples that formed the religious and political center of the city. The name "Citadel" was given to it by the Spanish, who believed it was a fort. Many of the rich and powerful Teotihuacanos lived in Palaces near the temples. The largest of these cover more than 3300 sq. meters. Most of the common people lived in large apartment buildings spread across the city. Many of the buildings contained workshops that produced pottery and other goods.

 

The geographical layout of Teotihuacán is a good example of the Mesoamerican tradition of planning cities, settlements and buildings as a representation of the Teotihuacano view of the Universe. Its urban grid is aligned to precisely 15.5º east of north. The Street of the Dead, in particular, seems to line up with Cerro Gordo to the north of the Pyramid of the Moon. Pecked-cross circles throughout the city and in the surrounding regions indicate how the grid was managed over long distances