Visionary Poet of the Millennium

An Indian poet Prophet

Seshendra Sharma

October 20th, 1927 - May 30th, 2007

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Rivers and poets

Are veins and arteries

Of a country.

Rivers flow like poems

For animals, for birds

And for human beings-

The dreams that rivers dream

Bear fruit in the fields

The dreams that poets dream

Bear fruit in the people-

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The sunshine of my thought fell on the word

And its long shadow fell upon the century

Sun was playing with the early morning flowers

Time was frightened at the sight of the martyr-

-Seshendra Sharma

"We are children of a century which has seen revolutions, awakenment of large masses of people over the earth and their emancipation from slavery and colonialism wresting equality from the hands of brute forces and forging links of brotherhood across mankind.

This century has seen peaks of human knowledge; unprecedented intercourse of peoples and

perhaps for the first time saw the world stand on the brink of the dilemma of one world or destruction.

It is a very inspiring century, its achievements are unique.

A poet who is not conscious of this context fails in his existence as poet."

-Seshendra Sharma

(From his introduction to his “Poet’s notebook "THE ARC OF BLOOD" )

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B.A: Andhra Christian College: Guntur: A.P: India

B.L : Madras University: Madras

Deputy Municipal Commissioner (37 Years)

Dept of Municipal Administration, Government of Andhra Pradesh

Parents: G.Subrahmanyam (Father) ,Ammayamma (Mother)

Siblings: Anasuya,Devasena (Sisters),Rajasekharam(Younger brother)

Wife: Mrs.Janaki Sharma

Children: Vasundhara , Revathi (Daughters),

Vanamaali ,Saatyaki (Sons)

Seshendra Sharma is one of the most outstanding minds of modern Asia. He is the foremost of the Telugu poets today who has turned poetry to the gigantic strides of human history and embellished literature with the thrills and triumphs of the 20th century. A revolutionary poet who spurned the pedestrian and pedantic poetry equally, a brilliant critic and a scholar of Sanskrit, this versatile poet has breathed a new vision of modernity to his vernacular.Such minds place Telugu on the world map of intellectualism. Readers conversant with names like Paul Valery, Gauguin, and Dag Hammarskjold will have to add the name of Seshendra Sharma the writer from India to that dynasty of intellectuals.

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Seshendra Sharma better known as Seshendra isa colossus of Modern Indian poetry.

His literature is a unique blend of the best of poetry and poetics.

Diversity and depth of his literary interests and his works

are perhaps hitherto unknown in Indian literature.

From poetry to poetics, from Mantra Sastra to Marxist Politics his writings bear an unnerving pprint of his rare genius.

His scholarship and command over Sanskrit , English and Telugu Languages has facilitated his emergence as a towering personality of comparative literature in the 20th century world literature.

T.S.Eliot ,ArchbaldMacleish and Seshendra Sharma are trinity of world poetry and Poetics.

His sense of dedication to the genre of art he chooses to express himself and

the determination to reach the depths of subject he undertakes to explore

place him in the galaxy of world poets / world intellectuals.

Seshendra’seBooks :http://kinige.com/author/Gunturu+Seshendra+Sharma

Seshendra Sharma’s Writings Copyright © Saatyaki S/o Seshendra Sharma

Contact :saatyaki@gmail.com+919441070985+917702964402

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Seshendra Sharma : Scholar - Poet

Seshendra Sharma, a scholar - poet was born (October 20, 1927) into a Pujari ( Priests ) family in Nellore District in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India . Seshendra’s father and his grandfather were well versed in Sanskrit Literature, Vedas and scriptures. At home itself, thus from his childhood , Seshendra got the opportunity of learning and training in Sanskrit. This was further nurtured by the Village school of Thotapalligudur, where he spent best part of his childhood.

Seshendra’s father was a well-to-do person, a Munsif ( village officer ) of the village, possessing more than Ten Acres of agricultural Wet land and own house . Father’s desire to see his son flower into a top man turned a new leaf in Seshendra’s life. Seshendra’s father admitted him for B.A. Graduation course in Andhra Christian College in Guntur. Incidentally, Seshendra’s Family Sir Name and this town’s name are one and the same. This is a turning point in the budding poet’s journey. Seshendra got significant exposure to the Western World, particularly to the Western Literature. The makings of a Visionary Poet germinated in him in this Alma Mater. His journey of poetry started with Translation of Mathew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum “ , a long poem , which Seshendra translated into Telugu in Metrical poetry with accomplished finesse . This trend eventually blossomed and Seshendra emerged as an Epic – Poet. His My Country – My People : Modern Indian Epic is observed by learned critics as a land mark in modern poetry ranking it on par with T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land . This long poem was nominated for Nobel Prize in 2004. His subsequent works Gorilla, Turned into water and fled away, Ocean is my name – long poems were reviewed in scholarly strain.

Seshendra’s desire to perform in films took him to Madras, today’s Chennai in Tamil Nadu. In Madras he formally joined B.L. Course with Madras Law College. And was developing contacts in the Telugu Cinema Circles and was working as a freelance journalist. He used to translate articles into Telugu for Janavani , a popular weekly of those times whose editor was Tapi Dharma Rao , a towering personality of Telugu Literature. This facet of journalism of his personality rose to its full heights in 90s. When Soviet Union collapsed he wrote a series of articles in Telugu as well as in English decrying the west’s sinister plot, villainous machinations to pull down Communist Regimes. He sang odes / Laurels to communism and expressed in aggressive tone and style that communism will never die. It remains in the genes of oppressed peoples of the world for ever. Perhaps Seshendra is the only poet from the Indian Subcontinent to pen Anti – Imperialist essays during those times. He completed his Law course but his desire to act in films remained unfulfilled. Seshendra’s Classmates at his Alma Mater, A.C.College, Guntur, N.T.Rama Rao and Kongara Jaggaiah became popular actors of Telugu Cinema. N.T.R became an all time super –hero. Seshendra’s father and maternal uncle forcibly brought him back from Madras, and with the good offices of native Member of Parliament put him in Government service as Deputy Panchayat Officer. In due course of time, on deputation, joined Municipal Administration Department and worked as Municipal Commissioner in all Major cities and towns of Andhra Pradesh. With the result he got wide exposure to conditions of social life of his times. He obtained personal acquaintance of Common Man’s life and his travails. This enriched his vision of life and literature a great deal.

With Seshendra Poetry and Poetics are Siamese Twins. He penned works of Literary Criticism both on classical and contemporary poetry. Sahitya Kaumudi (Telugu ) and his bi-lingual book “ the ARC of Blood : My Note Book “ illustrate this point. His Research work on Valmiki’s Ramayana , Shodasi : Secrets of The Ramayana , questions the very foundations of centuries old assumptions. Seshendra, based on scientific research citing from the original text of Valmiki and Vedas, reveals that The Ramayana is not just story of Rama told in enchanting poetry , But the Sage wrote the epic to spread Kundalini Yoga among the masses of his era. His observations that the concepts of Vishnu and Reincarnation were non –existent during Valmiki’s Epoch constitute a revolt against centuries old beliefs. Sita is the central character of The Ramayana and she is Kundalini Shakti / Adi Para Shakthi . During that era temples and prayers were nonexistent. This hits directly at the very foundation of Temple System.

His Kavisena Manifesto , is a noteworthy work on Modern Poetics. In this work, he compiles cogently definitions of poetry cutting across centuries and countries and writes scintillating commentary. This Manifesto of Modern Poetry is a sort of Wikipedia page of world poetry. Seshendra, finally concludes that poetry is emotions and feelings skilfully garbed in unusual diction, and poetry is a way of life.

Discerning scholars critics and academics are of intrinsic opinion that T.S.Eliot ,Archibald MacLeish and Seshendra Sharma are trinity of world poetry and Poetics.

But this Scholar – poet of 20th century is an unsung and unwept genius of his times.

Prime Minister of India honoured Seshendra with Gold Medal in Sahitya Akademi ( India ) Golden Jubilee celebrations and Chief Minister of AP honoured him with Hansa Literary Award on the eve of UGADI , Telugu New Year Day in 2005 .

In one of his poems he says fragrance of stars is calling me. Seshendra left this world and vanished into fragrance of galaxies on May 30, 2007.

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GunturuSeshendraSarma: an extraordinary poet-scholar

One of the ironies in literature is that

he came to be known more as a critic than a poet

HYDERABAD: An era of scholastic excellence and poetic grandeur has come to an end in the passing away of GunturuSeshendraSarma, one of the foremost poets and critics in Telugu literature. His mastery over western literature and Indian `AlankaraSastra' gave his works a stunning imagery, unparalleled in modern Indian works. One of the ironies in literature is that he came to be known more as a critic than a poet. The Central SahityaAkademi award was conferred on him for his work `KaalaRekha' and not for his poetic excellence. The genius in him made him explore `Kundalini Yoga' in his treatise on Ramayana in `Shodasi' convincingly. His intellectual quest further made him probe `NaishadhaKaavya' in the backdrop of `LalitaSahasraNaamavali', `SoundaryaLahari' and `Kama Kala Vilasam' in `SwarnaHamsa', Seshendra saw the entire universe as a storehouse of images and signs to which imagination was to make value-addition. Like Stephene Mallarme who was considered a prophet of symbolism in French literature, SeshendraSarma too believed that art alone would survive in the universe along with poetry. He believed that the main vocation of human beings was to be artists and poets. His `Kavisena Manifesto' gave a new direction to modern criticism making it a landmark work in poetics. Telugus would rue the intellectual impoverishment they suffered in maintaining a `distance' from him. Seshendra could have given us more, but we did not deserve it! The denial of the Jnanpeeth Award to him proves it

The Hindu

India's National Newspaper

Friday, Jun 01, 2007

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Pardon Me Father!

I could not rescue him from the clutches of that nymphomaniac and vampire. There may be an exception or two but an average Indian woman desires from the depths of her soul that her husband should live long and she should pass away before him. She performs prayers and fasts on auspicious days for this purpose. She in spite of being 3years elder to him did away with my father in a planned and premeditated manner and I was a silent and helpless witness to it. He suffered 1st Heart attack in November 1997. Cardiologists performed angiogram and advised open heart surgery. Because there were blocks in vessels and one valve was damaged. But she successfully thwarted it and without my knowledge or informing any one got angioplasty done in Mediciti (Hyderabad: AP; India) her plan was to do away with him and live long, and establish herself as his wife through his books. He was succumbing to her blackmail. My overwhelming hunch is that she was threatening him with social insult and humiliation if he parts ways with her.

Between 1997-2007, she played football with his body. He used to be hospitalized every now and then with swollen body and heart pain. Because of damaged valve pumping was impaired and water used to accumulate in the system. Every time I used to force her to hospitalize him. He used be in ICCU for a couple of days and recover marginally. After each visit to hospital he was getting debilitated gradually. He was put on wheel chair. He was virtually under house arrest. He was not allowed to speak to friends and family members. Visitors were kept away. He was taking Lasix (Tablet: is a diuretic that is used to treat fluid accumulation, caused by heart failure, cirrhosis, chronic kidney failure, and nephrotic syndrome.) to flush out water accumulated in his body. This creates a painful dilemma in me whether my interference in his health matters was just. As his son it was my moral duty to protect him. But I sometimes feel if I were not to interfere she would have put him to death long ago and thus he would have escaped from physical and mental torture quite early.

Towards perhaps end of the month of March she withdrew medication. He got swollen suddenly and that condition continued till the last day i.e. 30th may 2007. Each time I visited I used to tell that witch to take him to hospital. But after a couple of visits I got convinced that she made up her mind this time to do away with him. I requested a bastard who was feigning to be a friend of mine, who incidentally happens to be a legal luminary of this region to send a doctor friend to that place and ascertain the exact condition of his health. But of no avail.

I kept on telling him to come out of that place and lead a normal and healthy life. Her blackmail gained an upper hand and I lost in my efforts to restore health to him and bring him back to civilized society. O God pardon me for not being able to outmanoeuvre her machinations. Pardon me father.

* * *

Who Are The Legal Heirs of Seshendra Sharma ?

DISCLAIMER

The literary world is aware that my father Gunturu Seshendra Sharma, eminent poet, litterateur and scholar-critic, died on 30th may 2007. Ever since he expired, there has been no mention of his parents, family members and other personal details in the news and in the articles about him. Not only this, fictional lies are being spread and using money power one shady lady is being propagated as his wife and so on. This has been causing me, as his son, a great mental agony. That is why, through this article, I am revealing certain fundamental truths to the literary field of this country and the civilized society. I appeal to your conscience to uphold truth, justice and values of our composite culture.

Seshendra Sharma's family members are: Parents: Subrahmanyam Sharma, Ammaayamma- Wife: Janaki Daughters: Vasundhara, Revathi, Sons: Vanamali, Saatyaki. Only these two are legal heirs of Seshendra Sharma, socially and morally too.

Street Play and Circus: In 1972, away from the civilized society, without the knowledge of parents and near and dear, in a far flung village called Halebeed in Karnataka a circus, a street play was staged. Let me make it clear that even after this street play my father did not divorce my mother Mrs.G.Janaki legally. He never had even a faint intention of committing such an uncivilized act. On the contrary, in all crucial Government documents he nominated my mother as his legal heir from time to time. During his long career as Municipal Commissioner with The Government of Andhra Pradesh, he retired 3 times. His first retirement came in 1975 by way of compulsory retirement for his anti establishment writings during Mrs. Gandhi's' emergency. His second retirement came in 1983 when the then new chief minister N.T. Rama Rao's government reduced the age of service from 58 to 55 years. The third and final retirement in the year 1985 on attaining 58 years of age. On all these occasions, in all the government documents, my father Seshendra Sharma nominated my mother Mrs. Janaki as his legal heir. This is precisely why the self contradictory 'second marriage' is a circus enacted away from the society and Law does not recognize this type of street plays as marriage.

Lakshmi Parvathi in literature

N.T. Rama Rao, actor turned politician married Ms. Lakshimi Parvathi in 1994 and subsequently in January 1995 he came to power for the second time. She used to act as an extra constitutional power and run the matters of government and the party. She developed her own coterie of cohorts and started dominating the party. After NTR was toppled by his own son- in-law, most of them parted ways with her. And the remaining touts left her for good the day NTR breathed his last. Ms.Indira Dhanrajgir has been playing the same role in Telugu literature over a period of more than 3 decades. In the guise of literature she developed her own coterie of lumpens with extra literary and money mongering elements - Tangirala Subba Rao, Velichala Kondala RAo(Editor:Jayanthi) Cheekolu Sundarayya(A.G.'s Office, Hyderabad et al).

There are a couple[ of dissimilarities between these two instances. After the demise of NTR, L.P's coterie of cohorts disappeared once and for all. Whereas, in Indira Dhanrajgir's case new lumpens are entering the field with the passage of time. Squandering her late father's wealth, she is roping in new touts. Since NTR's wife Basava Tarakam passed away in 1984 and since he was old and sick NTR's marriage with LP has ethical basis and is legal completely. Whereas I.D's is neither ethical nor legal. Hence it is a street play. This is the reason why after my father's death she has been spending money on a larger scale and indulging in false publicity and propaganda. Bh. Krishna Murthy, Sadasiva Sharma (The then Editor of Andhra Prabha:Telugu Daily, presently with Hindi Milap) Chandrasekhara Rao(Telugu lecturer: Methodist Degree College) etc. are indulging in all sorts of heinous acts to prop up I.D as my father's wife.

My father passed away on 30 May 2007. When our family was in grief and I was performing the 11 day ritual as per my mother's wish, the above mentioned Sadasiva Sharma went to Municipal Office on 4th June, created ruckus, played havoc telling them that he is from the Prime Minister's Office , мейд some 'senior officials' make phone calls to the officials concerned and got my father's death certificate forcibly issued. When the entire family was mourning the death of the family head, a stranger and a lumpen S.S -Why did he collect my father's death certificate forcibly from the municipal authorities? Whom did he collect it for?

THREE NAMES OF THE SAME PERSON IN 3 DECADES

This is perhaps for the first time that the name of a lady appears in 3 forms at a time. Perhaps in 1970, in my father's collection of poems"PAKSHULU her name appeared As Rajkumari Indira Devi Dhanrajgir. In 2006 she published a fake version of Kamaostav(Rewritten by a muffian Called Chandrasekhara Rao) . In this book her name appears as R.I.D.D. Prior to 1970 in Maqdoom Mohiuddeen's(Renowned Urdu Poet) anthology of poetry 'Bisath -E-Raks', in Urdu as well as Hindi , at the end of two poems her name appears as Kumari Indira Dhanrajgir. On 15th June 2007 A.P state cultural affairs department and Telugu University jointly held my father's memorial meeting. I.D hijacked this meeting by issuing her own commercial advertisements in English and Telugu dailies. In these advertisements her name appeared as Smt. Indira Devi Seshendra Sharma and again in the commercial public notices мейд by her in the month of November 2007her name appeared as Rajkumari devi etc. Why does her name appear in different forms on different occasions? Will I.D explain? Will Sadasiva Sharma clarify, who forcibly took my father's death certificate after four days of his death? Or will Bh.Krishna Murthy clarify?

If I.D has even an iota of regard, respect for or faith in love, or relation, the institution of marriage, immediately after'Halebeed Circus', she would have used my father's family sir name and her name would have appeared as Gunturu Indira. Since she was conscious of her goal during all times and conditions she did not take such a hasty and mindless step of change of her name.

WHERE DOES THE REAL SECRET LIE? Her life is totally illegal, anti-social and immoral. I.D's father performed her marriage with SRikishenSeth, Nephew of the then Prime minister to Nizam, Maharaja Kishen pershad in 1945. On the day of marriage itself I.D beat SrikeshenSeth up and ran away from him. She did not stop at that. She propagated among his friends and relatives and near and dear that he was not enough of a man and unfit for conjugal/ marital life. She filed a divorce case against him and dragged it till 1969/70. Lion's share of her husband's life got evaporated and was sapped completely by then. His parents used to approach I.D's father and plead with him to prevail upon his daughter, put sense into her head and see that she either lives with their son or dissolves the marriage legally so that they can remarry off their son. But I.D did not heed. Raja Dhanrajgir after getting disgusted with her nasty activities stipulated a mandatory condition in his will. He stated that I.D would be entitled to get a share of his property only if she is married.

This is the reason why ID who has no respect for the institution of marriage or regard or desire for marital life , in the guise of love and love poetry inflicted indelible blemish on the institution of marriage which is unprecedented in the literary history of the world. After my father's death she has been indulging in more rigorous false publicity along with her coterie of touts.

KAMOSTAV:STORY OF ID'S SOUL:

With this novel Kamostav, father's literary life came to an end for good. He did not produce literary works worth mentioning in his later phase of life. During those days he asked for my opinion on that novel. I told him clearly that it lacks the form and content of a novel- it does not have a story line, plot, sequences, characters and eventually a message which every novel gives. Hence it is a trash. Several people went to court and got its publication in a weekly stopped. ID got this very trash rewritten completely by Chandrasekhara Rao and printed it. This kind of heinous development has never taken place in the recorded history of Telugu literature till date. A writing which brought disrepute to my father in the literary field and isolated him in the society, why did she get it rewritten by somebody and publish it claiming copyright to be hers? What is her motive? What is her aim? That is why Kamotsav is ID's biography, story of her inner soul.

SESHENDRA'S COPYRIGHTS:

My father gifted away copyrights of his entire works along with their translations to me by way of birth day gift to me on 2.12.1989. Since then I have published several of his works during his lifetime itself. Kamostav, the version that is secretly мейд available is the dirty work of cheapsters and lumpens under the leadership of ID. It is much worse than violation of copyrights. That is the reason why I have been reluctant to take action so far. If she and her debased henchmen try to violate copyrights of my father's works bequeathed to me, I shall take exemplary legal action against them.

ID мейд 2 public notices to the effect that my father cancelled all his earlier transfer of copyrights and retransferred all his rights to her. This is a palace intrigue in the modern era in our civilized society.

WHAT DOES LAW SAY ABOUT COPYRIGHTS?

An author can transfer copyrights of his works to any one as per her/his wish. But the Copyrights Act 1957 and the Supreme Court in its various judgments has clearly stipulated a procedure to revoke earlier assignment and transferring of copyrights to somebody else subsequently. The author has to issue a notice to the 1st assignee, giving 6 months time for reply. Depending on the reply the author can take his next step. Where as in my father's copyrights matter he did not even inform me orally of any such cancellation. ID claims that she has a typed document of transfer of copyrights signed by my father on 5.1.2006. Between 5.1.2006 and 30.5.2007, leave alone issuing a notice, he did not even inform me orally.

My father who assigned copyrights to me in his own handwriting, when he was relatively young and physically fit did not require to cancel the 1st assignment when he was totally dilapidated, almost bedridden and was counting his days. Another important aspect of the matter is that I have printed the Xerox of my father's document in his own works as early as 1995 and have been doing so from time to time during his life time. Where as ID claims to possess a document after my father's death and she has not мейд it public so far. ID tried to get my father's complete works published in different languages by Telugu University (Hyderabad: A.P: India) by paying them Rs. 6 Lakhs. I approached Telugu University and apprised them of facts. On the advice of legal experts, they stopped this project and returned ID's money to her. It is an incontrovertible fact that ID's document is a forged and fraudulent document which does not stand scrutiny before law. Court shall certainly award her exemplary punishment. In all societies and times literature has been social wealth/public property from time immemorial. It should not be used as a mask to grab share of parental property illegally and unethically. I am committed to this cause/ ideal and appeal to the civilized society to strengthen my hands in this endeavor. ID's younger brother Sri Mahendra Pratapgir is the lone legal heir apparent of that family and keeping him in dark, she is squandering her father's wealth in Telugu literature for her nasty propaganda.

FATHER PASSED AWAY:

In 1997 when he suffered the 1st heart attack he was half-dead. Dr.Sudhakar Reddy, cardiologist of Mediciti Hospitals (Native of Warangal.A.P) performed angiogram and diagnosed that he had blocks in arteries and one valve was damaged completely. He advised open heart surgery. But ID averted it and got angioplasty performed. His health declined rapidly since then and was leading the life of virtually an invalid till he breathed his last. He suffered inexplicable mental and physical torture for about a decade. During the last leg of his journey he was isolated from his family completely. He was deserted by one and all in the literary field. When his younger brother passed away, his younger sister passed away he did not visit his ancestral home in his village and call on those families. He became target of jealousy and animosity in the society. He became a victim of false impression with the society that he was an aristocrat and rolling in luxuries. Whereas, he was deprived of even his native vegetarian food for decades together. As a silent and helpless witness to these painful happenings, I was subject to untold mental agony.

In the later half of March 2007 on one of my visits to him, I was aghast at his condition. His entire body was swollen. His appearance was like that of a stuffed gunny bag. I told him to get hospitalized. I told ID to rush him to a hospital. But of no avail. On 30th may 2007 at about 11 pm I got a phone call from her" Come soon/Serious" she said. As I entered at 11.15 pm "Go inside/he is no more' she said.

* * One day when swarms of lamps vanish, in the light of a lonely lamp I ask the dumb pillars "Can't you liberate me from the disgust of this existence? I ask those stand still forest flame trees

which blossom flowers at that very place year after year

"can't you rescue me?

I ask those high roof tops and this Venetian furniture

which every one feels are greater than me, "can't you rescue me from the disgust of this existence?" All these answer in a melancholic voice "We have been languishing since more than 100 years watching the same unchanging scenes we are older prisoners than you are" (Janavamsham: Telugu: Seshendra: Page 80-81:1993: Translated by me)

My father's first biography (in Hindi) titled "Rashtrendu Seshendra: Ashesh Aayaam" by Dr.Vishranth Vasishth appeared in 1994. Touching upon these very sensitive aspects of my father's life he commented in that book"SONE KE PINJRE ME PANCHCHI" (A bird in a golden cage). Alarmed and agonized by his rapidly declining health, as early as June 2002, in order to bring pressure on ID, I gave a 2 cassettes long interview to Vijayaviharam of Janaharsha group. Later on when I enquired about that interview they said that in the raids conducted on their premises, they got destroyed.

I wanted to rescue my father and bring him back home when he was in good health. Alas! At last, I took him to the burial ground, laid him on the funeral pyre and consigned him to flames and returned home all alone.

G.Satyaki S/o Late.G.Seshendra Sharma

Hyderabad.T.S.INDIA

saatyaki@gmail.com

+91 94410 70985, 7702964402

whether you're anti or for, it's two sides of the same thing. And I would like to be completely... nonexistent. -- Marcel Duchamp.... get rid of the "I" in "vierge" [virgin]... and you have "verge" [penis]..."before the Nude my paintings were visual. After that they were Ideatic"

When I made this image of a southbound on the CN Bessemer Subdivision in October 2012 I wasn't thrilled about the crossing gate arm being in the shot. So I never processed or posted it.

More than a decade later my opinion changed. Motive power consists of solid Bessemer & Lake Erie locomotives are rare to nonexistent now, particularly on the original B&LE. So now despite the crossing gate I've decided this photo is worthy after all.

The train is crossing KO Road north of Greenville, Pennsylvania.

Yeah... I'm not even attempting to perform any kind of test with this. I don't think you can draw a single scientific conclusion here. I can say that the Super Takumar lenses are much more pleasant to manually focus. They also appear to have terrific contrast and metering was no problem. In fact, it seems I got better exposures with the Super Takumars than with my Nikkors - strange.

Settings were identical for all these shots and these are SOOTC JPEGS resized identically and assembled in CS3 with no other adjustments. All focussing errors are my own. Also, virtually nonexistent window lighting forced slow shutter speeds. My own laziness forced them to be hand-held. ;-)

Phottix recently came out with a new remote that uses 2.4GHz wireless. The Phottix Plato. It's a little pricier (~$45) but from first glance, I can see a couple of advantages over the Cleon.

[0] Digital encoding gives you a more discrete signal and helps to avoid misfires.

[1] Smart codes rolls the codes automatically to avoid contention with other remotes or RF signals.

[2] Two-way communications between receiver and transmitter confirms you are within range or not. It also seems to have a longer range.

[3] Interchangeable end-cords allows you to use the same remote on various cameras simply by replacing the connecting cord. For instance, use the N8 cord for the D300 and the N6 cord for the D80.

[4] Uses more common batteries rather than the expensive "exotic" ones the Cleon uses.

[5] Slicker looking construction.

So... I decided to get one. Tonight I came home from a business trip and found my Plato sitting in my mailbox. There were three items in the package... well five if you count the two double-packs of AAA batteries.

[0] Transmitter

[1[ Receiver

[3] Cable

Both the transmitter and receiver take common AAA batteries. This is a great improvement over some of the older Phottix and Cactus wireless remotes that took a combination of CR2 and type-N... both of which are rather expensive. There was also a single instruction sheet which was as expected written in Engrish although admittedly it's not as bad as some other products I've seen. There was however one glaring error which I will go into about later.

After installing the batteries, both the transmitter and receivers immediately power up. Shutting each of them down requires a push of their power/select button for about 3 seconds. Both have an auto-poweroff feature that shuts them off after an hour of inactivity.

Unlike previous Phottix RF remotes, this one uses rolling codes instead of choosing from amongst preset frequencies. So instead of flipping DIP switches on each device to match one another, the transmitter and receivers must be paired like bluetooth devices. The set comes pre-synced to one another from the factory but you can reset the code by resyncing them. This is accomplished by first turning on the receiver and transmitter. The transmitters picks a code. Then on the receiver, you set it to learning mode by tapping the power button five times. On the transmitter, you push the shutter release button and the two are now synced. You can sync as many as 16 million receivers to the same transmitter. The remote uses the 2.4GHz band which can get congested so in certain environments, it may take a while for the pair to negotiate with one another. But once paired the likelihood of misfires or inadvertent triggers is nearly nonexistent. There are two status LEDs on the transmitter. Half-pressing the shutter release button will confirm that you're in range by lighting them both green as well as passing a half-press action to the camera which should respond in kind (ie. activate AF and VR) depending on how the camera is configured.

The transmitter and receiver are make and model agnostic. The vendor specific interface is handled by the cable. In my case, I am using the N8 cable for the D200 and D300. One end of the cable plugs into the camera and the other end is a simple three-contact 3.5mm "headphone" style plug which can be plugged into the receiver or the transmitter. When plugged into the receiver, the transmitter is in wireless mode. If however you wish to trigger things via a wired remote, you can plug the cable into the transmitter directly. All functions are the same in either mode. Note that the instruction sheet says that it is the receiver that can be used for wired triggering operations but this is in fact incorrect.

The transmitter has two buttons. The big button is the shutter release. The smaller button is the mode select and power button. Holding down this button for about 3 seconds powers the transmitter on or off. There is a series of LEDs that indicate which type of triggering mode you've selected. The following modes are supported:

[] Single - Pressing the shutter release acts like a single press of your camera's shutter release.

[] 2s Delay - Pressing the shutter release button invokes a 2-second delay before a single release signal is sent.

[] Continuous - Pressing the shutter release button once will cause the remote to trigger five individual releases. Holding down the button will act like holding down the shutter release on your camera. The camera's behaviour will be governed by the drive-mode in such a case.

[] Bulb - Pressing the button once is the same as holding down the shutter release on the camera. Press it again to release. This is intended to be used with the bulb shutter-speed setting but if combined with any other shutter speed will act like a press once to activate and press again to release so for instance, if you are in AF-C and don't have bulb set for the shutter-speed, your camera will continue shooting until you tap the button again.

Again, half-press operation is supported and in wireless mode, the two status LEDs at the top will turn green to confirm transmitter-to-receiver signal reception. A full press will turn the two LEDs red. In wired mode only LED #1 will show status.

The receiver has a single button for on/off and learning mode selection. There are also two LEDs. In normal operation, the left most LED will repeatedly flash red to indicate that the unit is on and ready. The right LED will turn green when it receives a trigger signal from the transmitter. Putting the receiver into learning mode causes the right LED to flash rapidly. The receiver also has a hot-shoe mount so it can be conveniently secured to the flash shoe.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this remote. It's certainly a nice improvement over the older Cleon and would highly recommend it over the Cleon line even though it's about $10 more expensive.

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, sometimes referred to as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, was erected in Fort Greene Park in 1908. Designed by Stanford White, the monument consists of a 100-foot-wide-granite staircase and a 149-foot high central Doric column. The monument, actually the third on the site, marks the site of the crypt for more than 11,500 men, women and children, known as the prison ship martyrs.

During the American Revolutionary War, the British imprisoned scores of soldiers, sailors, and private citizens--many simply because they would not swear allegiance to the Crown of England. When they ran out of jail space, they began using decommissioned ships anchored in Wallabout Bay as floating prisons. Life was unbearable on the prison ships. Disease was rampant, food and water were scarce or nonexistent, and the living conditions were overcrowded and wretched. Their bodies were thrown overboard or buried in shallow graves in the sandy marshes along the shore. In 1808 the remains of the prison ship martyrs were buried in a tomb on Jackson Street (now Hudson Avenue), near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In 1776, the construction of Fort Putnam on the high ground that now makes up Fort Greene Park was supervised by American Major General Nathanael Greene. During the Battle of Long Island, the Continental Army surrendered the fort and retreated to Manhattan. The fort was renamed for General Greene and rebuilt for the War of 1812. In 1845, the City of Brooklyn designated the site as a public park behind the support of Walt Whitman, then editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1867, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were engaged to redesign the park, and incorporate a new crypt for the remains of the prison ship martyrs.

The remains were moved to the park in 1873 into the newly created 25 by 11 foot brick vault. Twenty-two boxes, containing a mere fraction of total volume of remains, were interred. Towards the end of the 19th century, a diverse group of interests including the federal government, municipal and state governments, private societies, and donors, began a campaign for a permanent monument to the prison ship martyrs. In 1905 the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White was hired to design a new entrance to the crypt and a wide granite stairway leading to a plaza on top of the hill. From its center rose a freestanding Doric column crowned by a bronze lantern. President-elect William Howard Taft attended the monument’s dedication in 1908.

Sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman (1870–1952) created the monument’s bronze pieces -- the large urn or decorative lantern (never functioning) as well as four eagles that were once mounted to the corner granite posts. The eagles were removed to storage after being repeatedly vandalized; two of them are on public display at the Arsenal, the Parks administrative headquarters on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street in Manhattan. A tablet over the entrance to tomb, also in storage now, was donated by the Tammany Society, and was originally the cornerstone of the Navy Yard vault. An elevator and stairs for the interior were installed in 1937; both were removed in 1948 after the monument was renovated by Parks. In 1970 the elevator pit was filled in.

Presently plans are being considered for the renovation of the monument, landscaping of the apex of the park and the re-installation of the conserved eagles and plaque.

The Fort Green Historic District was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1978.

Fort Greene Historic District National Register #83001691

"my name is sizwe and i am going to make your life a beautiful day"

you will go to sleep with dirty feet

you will wake up with very many bug bites, because hey princess, this is africa

hahahahahahahahaha does he think we just got here or something

does this playa think we've never been to the eastern cape wtf

you will not wear anything clean

you will talk to me about your mommy

you will navigate this river and

a hard bed is very good for you

you will wake up at six am with the sun

and arms sore from rowing for ten kilometers yesterday

you will carry two large plastic jugs a kilometer to the water pump

and carry them both back on the ends of a long stick

and watch a boy who looks thirteen or something run faster than you have ever seen anyone run even in the nba

and then you will have a lot less respect for trained athletes though that was always dwindling very rapidly and on the verge of being nonexistent

which is probably not for the best

when people i know say "athletes" they are almost never talking about the bike messengers they know, the motherfucking ruckus they bring to the pavement

they're not talking about their friends who love moving their bodies to the same intensity

they're talking about football necked catholics and blonde spiky haired mainstream hip-hop blasting lean and awkwardly muscular b-ballin' supahstahzzzzzzzz

mmmhmm

hahahahahaha i am thinking about whether or not there is an inherent difference between spencer gutierrez and a kid i knew in high school named "jordan white" which is a very athletic name

good times

well

i will wash my muddy clothes in the sink

and then i will laugh thinking about getting stuck in the quicksand today up to my waist

and actually employing something i learned on man vs. wild in real life

and willy stared at me and said, "holy crap"

and then i laughed very hard at the idea of

actually employing something you learned from a television show

and a british man whose name is bear

an athlete!

contemplate existentially thanking man vs wild

deciding against it

and then hang those clothes on the tree in front of the hut

the european tree in front of the hut

fuck

nothing is simple

is there anywhere in the world where things can be simple

kristin says, maureen, you could never have a "good trip" (no offense)

why is that

because you think way too much, you're just going to be sad

i could probably make a powerpoint slideshow to show examples about how much i like you

it would be very funny and i would use sarcastic clip art

i would also use a pie chart to show "times when i like you in loud ways and times when i like you in quiet ways"

my favorite thing you have ever said so far in front of me is something about you and something i think is very true that i want to keep for my own body

and something i sort of want to hold you for

yes

hang up your clothes and try to sleep

nope

take three excedrin tension headache and then go to sleep

have a dream that barack obama has hiv

wake up and be like wtf

this has been on my mind nonstop for four months

quicksand tv star dreams of being in belle and sebastian

want what you can't have (at the moment)

want what you can't be (perhaps never?)

forevah

Olympus OM-1

OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.8

Fuji Pro 400H

This roll was such a flop for me-- almost nothing good on it. I'd never shot with 400H before, and it didn't behave the way I expected it to-- the colors were really thin and weak, and sometimes nonexistent. Plus I accidentally tossed it into my checked luggage on the way home from NC, so at least one shot got fogged-- maybe the others got thrown off as well? In any case, it's back to the Portras with me. They're more my speed.

Neon signs are decidedly gaudy and some people consider them sort of low class; but I like neon signs and always have.

As a preschooler I could spell LIQUOR before I knew the alphabet; because nearly every liquor store in town had a neon sign out front.

As I got older and could appreciate the science and artisanry involved in neon, I liked them even more.

Still… having five or six or more tattoo parlors mixed in amongst too many bars to count saddens me.

The city of Fullerton used to be full of churches, schools and parks while bars were less numerous and tattoo parlors were nonexistent.

Today the churches & schools are less numerous, while some of the parks tend to be run down or require paid admission. Many of the current bars and tattoo parlors have replaced artist's studios.

Never the less, I still like neon and my new camera makes it so easy to photograph that there will probably be more of it in my photostream.

We got off our coach (after a mornings tour around Seville) and headed for the Alcazar! We didn't go on the boat trip, so we followed the tour guide towards the Cathedral, before we made our own way to the Alcazar.

Near Calle Santander.

On Calle Adolfo Rodriguez Jurado. Near Av de la Constitucion. Corner of Calle Joaquin Hazanas.

Edificio Coliseo España

The Colosseum Spain, has become an icon in the new Constitution Avenue. The building has gone through many experiences throughout its history, some speak of monumentality and glamor, others neglect and contempt.

The roaring twenties, led to the arrival of new services Sevilla hitherto nonexistent, and many public and private buildings, hotels, fire stations, train stations and of course, cinemas and theaters arise. This was done the Teatro Coliseo Cinema Spain, a building that would house something as modern as the film, but without forgetting the Sevillian touch. The film would not get a plot in the Seville and Andalusian architecture well into the thirties, where Deco architecture was chosen.

Currently used as offices of the Board of Andalucia

Hand-drawn map of Schichtelo. 2011.

should i process these pictures in any order? this is from like 4 cities after mumbai.... the evening we went to old delhi with THE WONDERFUL FABULOUS BRILLIANT MATHIEU!!!!! www.flickr.com/photos/mathieujv/ which seriously, everyone with a brain should go spend at least 365 days with mathieu and his wife in delhi and you will emerge completely refreshed and happy.

old delhi is nuthouse. the alleyways shouldn't fit more the two people but as usual, squeeze 10 people, 4 vendors and 2 cycle rickshaws. haha ok maybe it's not that bad. for the record, chandni chowk is the name of the market we were in when i took this picture. minutes before we took a stroll down that insane street, i had gotten into a little tiff with a boy with limited knowledge of english and common sense at a mosque who tried to get me to pay for my camera, the camera fee, which is acceptable in some places, even there, BUT i wasn't going to be taking any pictures in his mosque. he didnt even know i had a camera, as it was hidden in my bag. i think he just thought that all the white people (there were about 2 others there) just always take pictures of mosques where ever they go. (i got tired pretty quickly taking pictures of temples and mosques and forts and palaces in india, no offence to old delhi mosque boy, but i didn't want any pictures there.)

i refused to pay for something i wasn't going to use and mathieu ended up holding my bag and camera outside the mosque. then before entering the mosque, the boy wrapped me up in this hideous red and yellow floral plastic robe that zipped from my neck/ears down to the ground, it DRAGGED because i'm like 5 inches shorter than most of the world. apparently my pants and tunic were too immodest for the mosque. excuse me, but really?? the other white people were wearing shorts and tanks in the mosque!! obviously the boy, angry with me for not giving him the camera fee for the camera i didnt have, wanted me to look ridiculous and sweat my entire body weight off, as delhi is about 97 degrees and 95% humidity. and that i did.

eric and i (wearing the screaming vinyl tablecloth) walked around the mosque for a while before i began suffocating and decided it was just a mosque and lets just go eat. upon getting back our shoes at the entrance, the same delightful boy as before unzipped me. then i realized he didnt just want me to look like a kitchen table from 1972 and drown in salty wetness, he also wanted me to be forced to pay the "coat fee" for wearing the ugly abomination.

when i refused that, saying "well you didnt let me take my bag in so i don't even have any rupees" he said "laundry fee"

and i said "no."

and he said "yes. have to."

i said "no."

he said "required."

and i said "no."

and he said "5 rupees" (which is a pointless amount of money, but it had now become about the principle of winning)

so i said loudly and slowly, right into his eyes, "I DONT HAVE MY MONEY SINCE YOU DIDNT LET ME TAKE MY BAG IN, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?"

then i walked off. i woulda given him 5 ruppes for the laundry fee if he hadnt been so insane about my nonexistent camera. then 15 minutes later i took this picture and about 108 others. notice how the memory written here has nothing to do with this staring bald baby.

View On Black

After photographing CPKC train 248 with a KCS Southern Bell leading (flic.kr/p/2pZZn3e) at Kellogg, I continued my trip north checking out more possible locations to shoot CP 2816.

As I headed north on US-61 the rain subsided, and eventually came to a end as I approached Red Wing and eventually Hastings, MN. Other then what I believe was the I70 out of Wabasha switching in Hastings, CPKC trains were nonexistent, and I eventually arrived in St. Paul.

Having never been to the area before, trains were plenty, but I was lost. In the two and a half hours in the area between St. Paul Union Depot and Newport, I must have seen 15 to 20 trains. I unsuccessfully tried to find the view looking over Pig's Eye Yard from Dayton's Bluff. Eventually settling on parking in the cement plant lot, along with other "fan's".

After the fustrutation of watching multiple trains pass by and not knowing where to be, I decided to head back towards Red Wing, where I had my hotel booked for the night. As I headed south, the clouds compleatly disappeared and plentiful sunshine came out.

After arriving in Red Wing, I checked into the hotel and decided to cross over the river to Wisconsin with hopes that the BNSF St. Croix Subdivision, would be hopping more than CPKC's River Sub was, and get me out of my St. Paul funk.

I have always loved mountain railroading with the mountain tops in the background, and massive rock cuts. I knew through the years and the drive up, that the bluffs along the Mississippi River definitely gave the impression of "mountain" railroading.

With that in mind I started driving north from Hagar City, on Wisconsin St. Rt. 35, and did not have to go very far to find the location I was looking for with sandstone bluffs in the background. Just two miles north of town I found Trenton Bluffs just across St. Rt. 35 from C.P. 3929 on the St. Croix Sub.

With the scanner listening for trains heading my way, the wait began around 16:00 CST. Around a hour later and my stomach telling me that it's been awhile since the last time I ate, I kept the watch. Around the hour mark, the scanner picked up a broken conservation about some train waiting at the end of double track for a train heading the way of La Crosse.

Not long after hearing this conservation the eastbound signal on main two popped up with a clear signal for a eastbound at C.P. 3929. The wait for the train was broke up with a visit from a carload of railfans also out checking out the action. Forty-five minutes, later the other "fans" had left, and about this time with long shadows encroaching on the right of way, and my stomach reminding me more and more it was time to go find food, I found BNSF was calling my bluff.

Thankfully two hours after parking, and a hour after the signal appeared off in the distance from the west a headlight approached my location and autorack train VPTSLAW passed by. Unfortunately I needed a westbound train for the good light shining on the bluffs.

Finally 15 minutes after the passing of the autorack train, the westbound I had heard a hour ago waiting that was waiting at the end of double track appeared in the distance. Coming through the interlocking at C.P. 3929 and passing in front of the bluffs BNSF 6692 and 5178 lead a unknown double stack train into the setting sun, allowing me to photograph what I had been waiting for.

After the passing of the double stack train I headed back to Red Wing and grabbed some food at a great mexican restaurant, next to my hotel called Rancho Loco Grill & Bar. After the short walk back to the hotel room, I sat down and deciphered the info I gathered from the day to put together what I thought was my final game plan, for the start of the chase the following morning.

As most people know though, the best laid plans of mice and men, it almost blew up in my face.

Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

They combine before nonexistent a kind of relation.

She hopes it, it hopes her, of the thing and thing is to exist so.

This was taken on our second day in Zion near the Emerald Pools section. I think we were on the trail to the Grotto when I shot this photo. The thing April and I like about this photo is that there is a little bit of everything here. Starting with the awesome waterfalls that were nonexistent the day before, leafy green trees, pine trees, and cacti all in one area..... So a little bit of everything.

Southwest Sunday

Check me out on 500px

Brandon Q Morris "The Dark Origin"

[...] She´s accelerated.This does not correspond to the specification. She has to brake to reach the lower orbit her target is traveling on. DosRios 19/2 increases the performance of her engine. It fires in the opposite direction of movement. She gives a status report. The approach to the target is not going according to plan. DosRios 19/2 is not afraid. Her engine still has reserves. But a rendezvous course like the one she was ordered to take seems increasingly unlikely. The target object is constantly increasing in mass, but it still has too little gravitational pull. She hase to brake, not accelerate. DosRios 19/2 calculates several course variants. Most will become a hyperbole that will throw her out of the solar system. However, the curve always ends in the same place: at the core of its destination. The impact will destroy her. So she has try to prevent it. DosRios 19/2 sends another status message to Earth. Whoever programmed her might still have a chance to intervene. If DosRios 19/2 could understand herself, she would no longer have this hope. There is no power that can stop this flight. But she still does her job. The target is smeared. It looks as if a bird fell into a dog poop while landing and slithered along in it further. This is what Adam Smith will later tell his superior. DosRios 19/2 knows nothing about it. She only sees the measurement data that creates this image in a human consciousness. The matter thrown from its target appears viscous. It sticks like honey to the track that follows its destination. And she exerts powers that DosRios 19/2 doesn't know anything about, because she doesn't have a gravimeter on board. No one thought that you might need a gravimeter to study an interstellar visitor. Because gravitation, the pull of mass, seems hardly able to cause any surprises. DosRios 19/2 has to manage with a radar and various spectrometers. At least the radar shows that her target still exists. It's located right where the other probe is broadcasting from. Perhaps she will meet her at the end of her journey. It would mean death for both of them. DosRios 19/2 is not shocked. It is a simple fact that all existence is finite. Herr speed keeps increasing. Now the first temperature measurements are coming in. But they don't get through the input control. Some programmer has built in plausibility checks. Anything too low or too high is discarded. First, only every tenth value is discarded, then every third, then every second. DosRios 19/2 runs out of values. She decides there is a mistake. She always has that option. A very clever programmer gave her something like a superego that oversees the functioning of all components. It cannot manipulate them. But it can intervene and then forward the data unprocessed. Better the earth gets raw data than no data at all. She's getting faster. The engine doesn't stand a chance now. Her orbit is definitely a hyperbola. There is something in her path that is like her. DosRios 19/2 defines two tasks. First: collect data as long as possible. Second: increase the probability of the further existence of the sending object. DosRios 19/2 doesn't really know why she's making her decisions. Her superego is responsible for this. It has its own efficiency algorithms from the Alpha-Omega autonomous vehicle kit, adapted to robotic probes. DosRios 19/2 sends an emergency call. She doesn't call for help. It's too late for that. But she warns. A short time later she encounters her own reputation. The other object must have caught it and passed it on. DosRios 19/2 doesn't know if that's a good sign or a bad sign. She has no unit of evaluation because she was never meant to deal with humans. But there are leftovers. Some program parts are left over from the Alpha-Omega kit for autonomous vehicles. The responsible programmer did not consider it necessary to remove them. A vehicle on the road must be able to assess the reactions of a human opposite. DosRios 19/2 estimates that the other object will take her warning seriously. She also coded her nonexistent options in it. She can't dodge, so all she can do is hope that the other object dodges. DosRios 19/2 switches the engine to stand-by mode. She will use it at the last moment. Maybe she can still avoid the ricochet on the comet, her goal, and save her life. The superego empties its memory. On the final approach, there should be no additional risk of memory overflow. It sends a farewell signal to its parent probe. It's a simple unsubscribe. DosRios 19 no longer has to reserve resources for it. Then she folds the antenna in to reduce its cross-section. She receives a position report. The message must come from very close by. Only the other object is suitable for this. DosRios 19/2 calculates the position. The object is exactly in her trajectory. Apparently it can't move. DosRios 19/2 calculates three alternatives. Option 1, she does not ignite her engine at all. Both objects have an 80 percent chance of being destroyed. Option 2, she turns on the engine as planned. That gives her a 40 percent chance of surviving and the other object has a 5 percent chance of surviving. Option 3 contains full engine boost and an oxygen tank bleed. This will make her spin. DosRios 19/2 will then hit well above the core, for sure. The other object has an 80 percent chance of surviving. 64 versus 2 versus 80 percent. The efficiency algorithm has an easy game. DosRios 19/2 sends a logout confirmation to the foreign object. The folded antenna is also sufficient over the short distance. It's a gesture. Even a primitive controller should be able to do something with it. Then DosRios 19/2 starts its engine. It burns out within 12 seconds. She vents the oxygen tank. Suddenly she turns. She drifts along the comet's nucleus. Something silver flashes beneath her. Her folded antenna registers a logout confirmation. Then DosRios 19/2 crashes into a black rock. [...]

***

Brandon Q. Morris "Die dunkle Quelle"

[...] Ihre Bewegung beschleunigt sich. Das entspricht nicht der Vorgabe. Sie muss bremsen, um den niedrigeren Orbit zu erreichen, auf dem ihr Ziel unterwegs ist. DosRios 19/2 steigert die Leistung ihres Triebwerks. Es feuert entgegen ihrer Bewegungsrichtung. Sie gibt eine Statusmeldung ab. Die Annäherung an das Ziel läuft nicht plangemäß. DosRios 19/2 hat keine Angst. Ihr Triebwerk besitzt noch Reserven. Aber ein Rendezvous-Kurs, wie er ihr befohlen wurde, wird immer unwahrscheinlicher. Das Zielobjekt nimmt zwar dauernd an Masse zu, es hat aber immer noch zu wenig Anziehungskraft. Sie muss bremsen, nicht beschleunigen. DosRios 19/2 berechnet mehrere Kursvarianten. Aus den meisten wird eine Hyperbel, die sie aus dem Sonnensystem schleudern wird. Allerdings endet die Kurve stets an derselben Stelle: am Kern ihres Ziels. Der Aufprall wird sie zerstören. Also muss sie versuchen, ihn zu verhindern. DosRios 19/2 sendet eine weitere Statusnachricht an die Erde. Wer immer sie programmiert hat, besitzt jetzt vielleicht noch die Chance zum Eingreifen. Könnte DosRios 19/2 sich selbst verstehen, hätte sie diese Hoffnung nicht mehr. Es gibt keine Macht, die diesen Flug aufhalten kann. Aber noch erfüllt sie ihre Aufgabe. Das Ziel ist verschmiert. Es sieht aus, als wäre ein Vogel beim Landen in einen Hundehaufen gestürzt und darin noch ewig weitergeschlittert. So wird später Adam Smith es seinem Vorgesetzten erzählen. DosRios 19/2 ahnt nichts davon. Sie sieht nur die Messdaten, die in einem menschlichen Bewusstsein dieses Bild entstehen lassen. Die Materie, die aus ihrem Ziel geschleudert wird, scheint zähflüssig. Sie bleibt wie Honig an der Bahn kleben, der ihr Ziel folgt. Und sie übt Kräfte aus, von denen DosRios 19/2 nichts ahnt, denn sie hat kein Gravimeter an Bord. Niemand hat daran gedacht, dass man zur Erforschung eines interstellaren Besuchers ein Gravimeter benötigen könnte. Denn die Gravitation, die Anziehungskraft der Masse, scheint kaum in der Lage, irgendwelche Überraschungen zu verursachen. DosRios 19/2 muss sich mit einem Radar und verschiedenen Spektrometern behelfen. Das Radar zeigt immerhin, dass ihr Ziel noch existiert. Es befindet sich genau dort, woher die andere Sonde sendet. Vielleicht trifft sie sie am Ende ihrer Reise. Es würde ihrer beider Tod bedeuten. DosRios 19/2 ist nicht schockiert. Es ist eine simple Tatsache, dass jede Existenz begrenzt ist. Ihre Geschwindigkeit steigt weiter. Jetzt kommen die ersten Temperaturmessungen herein. Aber sie gelangen nicht durch die Eingabe-Kontrolle. Irgendein Programmierer hat Plausibilität-Checks eingebaut. Was zu tief oder zu hoch ist, wird verworfen. Zunächst wird nur jeder zehnte Wert verworfen, dann jeder dritte, dann jeder zweite. DosRios 19/2 gehen die Werte aus. Sie entscheidet, dass ein Fehler vorliegt. Diese Option hat sie immer. Ein sehr schlauer Programmierer hat ihr so etwas wie ein Über-Ich eingesetzt, das die Funktion aller Komponenten überwacht. Es kann diese zwar nicht manipulieren. Aber es kann eingreifen und die Daten dann unverarbeitet weiterleiten. Besser, die Erde erhält Rohdaten als gar keine Daten. Sie wird schneller. Das Triebwerk hat jetzt keine Chance mehr. Ihre Bahn ist auf jeden Fall eine Hyperbel. Auf ihrem Weg liegt etwas, das so ist wie sie. DosRios 19/2 definiert zwei Aufgaben. Erstens: Daten zu sammeln, so lange das möglich ist. Zweitens: die Wahrscheinlichkeit der weiteren Existenz des sendenden Objekts erhöhen. DosRios 19/2 weiß nicht so richtig, warum sie ihre Entschlüsse fasst. Ihr Über-Ich ist dafür zuständig. Es besitzt eigene Effizienz-Algorithmen aus dem Alpha-Omega-Bausatz für autonome Fahrzeuge, angepasst an robotische Sonden. DosRios 19/2 sendet einen Notruf. Sie ruft nicht um Hilfe. Dafür ist es zu spät. Aber sie warnt. Kurze Zeit später begegnet ihr der eigene Ruf. Das andere Objekt muss ihn aufgefangen und weitergeleitet haben. DosRios 19/2 weiß nicht, ob das ein gutes oder ein schlechtes Zeichen ist. Sie besitzt keine Bewertungseinheit, denn sie war nie dazu bestimmt, mit Menschen zu tun zu haben. Aber es gibt Reste. Einige Programmteile sind aus dem Alpha-Omega-Bausatz für autonome Fahrzeuge übrig geblieben. Der zuständige Programmierer hat es nicht für nötig gehalten, sie zu entfernen. Ein Fahrzeug im Straßenverkehr muss in der Lage sein, Reaktionen eines menschlichen Gegenübers einzuschätzen. DosRios 19/2 schätzt ein, dass das andere Objekt ihre Warnung ernst nehmen wird. Sie hat darin auch ihre nicht vorhandenen Optionen kodiert. Sie kann nicht ausweichen, also kann sie nur hoffen, dass das andere Objekt ausweicht. DosRios 19/2 schaltet das Triebwerk in den Stand-by-Modus. Sie wird es im letzten Moment verwenden. Vielleicht kann sie dem Kometen, ihrem Ziel, damit noch ausweichen und so ihr Leben retten. Das Über-Ich leert ihre Speicher. Im Endanflug soll sie kein Speicherüberlauf zusätzlich in Gefahr bringen. Sie sendet ein Abschiedssignal an ihre Muttersonde. Es ist eine simple Abmeldung. DosRios 19 muss erst einmal keine Ressourcen mehr für sie freihalten. Dann klappt sie die Antenne ein, um ihren Querschnitt zu verringern. Sie empfängt eine Positionsmeldung. Die Nachricht muss ganz aus der Nähe kommen. Nur das andere Objekt kommt dafür in Frage. DosRios 19/2 berechnet die Position. Das Objekt liegt genau in ihrer Flugbahn. Offenbar kann es sich nicht bewegen. DosRios 19/2 berechnet drei Alternativen. Auf Bahn 1 zündet sie ihr Triebwerk gar nicht. Beide Objekte werden zu 80 Prozent Wahrscheinlichkeit zerstört. Auf Bahn 2 schaltet sie das Triebwerk wie geplant ein. Das ergibt für sie selbst eine Überlebenschance von 40 Prozent, für das andere Objekt von 5 Prozent. Bahn 3 enthält einen Triebwerksschub in voller Stärke und eine Entlüftung des Sauerstofftanks. Das wird sie zum Trudeln bringen. DosRios 19/2 wird dann weit oberhalb des Kerns einschlagen, und zwar sicher. Das andere Objekt hat eine Überlebenschance von 80 Prozent. 64 versus 2 versus 80 Prozent. Der Effizienzalgorithmus hat leichtes Spiel. DosRios 19/2 schickt eine Abmelde-Bestätigung an das fremde Objekt. Über die kurze Distanz reicht auch die eingeklappte Antenne. Es ist eine Geste. Selbst eine primitive Steuerung sollte damit etwas anfangen können. Dann startet DosRios 19/2 ihr Triebwerk. Es brennt binnen 12 Sekunden aus. Sie entlüftet den Sauerstofftank. Plötzlich dreht sie sich. Sie treibt den Kometenkern entlang. Unter ihr blitzt etwas silbern auf. Ihre eingeklappte Antenne registriert eine Abmelde-Bestätigung. Dann prallt DosRios 19/2 gegen einen schwarzen Felsen. [...]

Grainger Market is a Grade I listed covered market, constructed as part of the 19th-century urban renewal replacing markets on the site of Grey Street. Designed by John Dobson, it opened in 1835. The market has two sections: The Eastern, which was a meat market laid out in a series of aisles; and the Western, which was a vegetable market with a large open hall. The vegetable market's roof was in ill-repair by 1898, and the current roof was installed in 1901. While the principal uses of the market have since changed, it still houses a number of butchers' stalls.

The market is home to a small branch of Marks & Spencer, a market stall known as Marks and Spencer's Original Penny Bazaar

Art is a diverse range of human activity and its resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent generally expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.

There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art, and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures. In the Western tradition, the three classical branches of visual art are painting, sculpture, and architecture. Theatre, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, music, film and other media such as interactive media, are included in a broader definition of the arts. Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. In modern usage after the 17th century, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, the fine arts are separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general, such as the decorative or applied arts.

The nature of art and related concepts, such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics. The resulting artworks are studied in the professional fields of art criticism and the history of art.

In the perspective of the history of art, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early prehistoric art to contemporary art; however, some theorists think that the typical concept of "artistic works" does not fit well outside modern Western societies. One early sense of the definition of art is closely related to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft", as associated with words such as "artisan". English words derived from this meaning include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.

Over time, philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Immanuel Kant, among others, questioned the meaning of art. Several dialogues in Plato tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetic art, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the Bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literary art that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.

With regards to the literary art and the musical arts, Aristotle considered epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, Dithyrambic poetry and music to be mimetic or imitative art, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation—through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Aristotle believed that imitation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankind's advantages over animals.

The more recent and specific sense of the word art as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art emerged in the early 17th century. Fine art refers to a skill used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of more refined or finer works of art.

Within this latter sense, the word art may refer to several things: (i) a study of a creative skill, (ii) a process of using the creative skill, (iii) a product of the creative skill, or (iv) the audience's experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines which produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and convey a message, mood, or symbolism for the perceiver to interpret (art as experience). Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. Works of art can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. For some scholars, such as Kant, the sciences and the arts could be distinguished by taking science as representing the domain of knowledge and the arts as representing the domain of the freedom of artistic expression.

Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it may be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.

The nature of art has been described by philosopher Richard Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture". Art has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Art as mimesis has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator. The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Kant, and was developed in the early 20th century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation. George Dickie has offered an institutional theory of art that defines a work of art as any artifact upon which a qualified person or persons acting on behalf of the social institution commonly referred to as "the art world" has conferred "the status of candidate for appreciation". Larry Shiner has described fine art as "not an essence or a fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old."

Art may be characterized in terms of mimesis (its representation of reality), narrative (storytelling), expression, communication of emotion, or other qualities. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".

A shell engraved by Homo erectus was determined to be between 430,000 and 540,000 years old. A set of eight 130,000 years old white-tailed eagle talons bear cut marks and abrasion that indicate manipulation by neanderthals, possibly for using it as jewelry. A series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave. Containers that may have been used to hold paints have been found dating as far back as 100,000 years.

The oldest piece of art found in Europe is the Riesenhirschknochen der Einhornhöhle, dating back 51,000 years and made by Neanderthals.

Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them.

The first undisputed sculptures and similar art pieces, like the Venus of Hohle Fels, are the numerous objects found at the Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the oldest non-stationary works of human art yet discovered were found, in the form of carved animal and humanoid figurines, in addition to the oldest musical instruments unearthed so far, with the artifacts dating between 43,000 and 35,000 BC, so being the first centre of human art.

Cave paintings, Lascaux, France, c. 17,000 BCE

Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.

In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of subjects about biblical and religious culture, and used styles that showed the higher glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless, a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.

Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.

In the east, Islamic art's rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.

The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake's portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David's propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.

The history of 20th-century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art. Thus, Japanese woodblock prints (themselves influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, in the 19th and 20th centuries the West has had huge impacts on Eastern art with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence.

Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Theodor W. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with skepticism and irony. Furthermore, the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than of regional ones.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher and seminal thinker, describes the essence of art in terms of the concepts of being and truth. He argues that art is not only a way of expressing the element of truth in a culture, but the means of creating it and providing a springboard from which "that which is" can be revealed. Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are, but actually produce a community's shared understanding. Each time a new artwork is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist is inherently changed.

Historically, art and artistic skills and ideas have often been spread through trade. An example of this is the Silk Road, where Hellenistic, Iranian, Indian and Chinese influences could mix. Greco Buddhist art is one of the most vivid examples of this interaction. The meeting of different cultures and worldviews also influenced artistic creation. An example of this is the multicultural port metropolis of Trieste at the beginning of the 20th century, where James Joyce met writers from Central Europe and the artistic development of New York City as a cultural melting pot.

By mid-1945, three nuclear bombs were developed by the Manhattan Project: two plutonium bombs, and an older uranium bomb. On July 16, 1945, one of the bombs was secretly tested at Los Alamos in New Mexico (Trinity). The residents of Oak Ridge learned about the nuclear bombs with the entire world on August 6, 1945, when the uranium bomb (Little Boy) exploded over Hiroshima Japan, obliterating the city and killing some 70,000 Japanese civilians instantly. As the country was preparing for the Invasion of Japan, the residents of Oak Ridge felt an enormous surge of pride in finally knowing about what they had been developing for three years, and its role in ending WWII. The final bomb (Fat Man) was dropped over Nagasaki on August 9. Officially nonexistent by the US government until the dropping of the nuclear bombs, Oak Ridge is still known as the "Secret City".

American Museum of Science and Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

ABSOLUTELY BETTER ON BLACK

Uno stemma tra due lembi d'un ampio manto drappeggiato, e dentro lo stemma s'aprivano altri due lembi di manto con in mezzo uno stemma più piccolo, [...] e in mezzo ci doveva essere chissà che cosa, ma non si riusciva a scorgere.

da Il cavaliere inesistente di Italo Calvino

from The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino

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This photos been taken during the last Christmas (25th december 2011) in Capracotta (Molise), Italy. At that time it was a very cold snow storm in the little village at 1421 m (A.M.S.L). My cousin (that you see in this photos) was wearing a traditional cloak from Capracotta called "Cuappot a Rota", so I could not resist to ask him to go out in the snow storm with this scenic and traditional cloak! :) It was very cold and windy so I was compleatily freezing, but I'm pretty satisfied with the result! :)

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Posters and Art Prints are now available @ ArtFlakes

Copyright © Francesca Alviani All rights reserved

Thanks for visiting!

finance.yahoo.com/news/damage-done-don-t-know-090000717.html

‘Was damage done? I don’t know’: Health experts are slow to criticize Fauci but quick to correct his claim that we are ‘out of the pandemic’

This week, COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci took the medical community aback when he announced that the U.S. is “out of the pandemic phase.” He said it as the U.S. neared its millionth COVID death, and cases are once again on the rise.

“We are certainly, right now, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci told PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff on Tuesday. “We don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.

“So if you say, ‘Are we out of the pandemic phase in this country?’ We are.”

Fauci later repeated the sentiment, telling Woodruff “right now we are not in the pandemic phase in this country,” though he ended the interview by saying the world is still in a pandemic.

On Wednesday he clarified his statements, telling NPR, "What I'm referring to is that we are no longer in the acute fulminant accelerated phase of the outbreak. We're in a somewhat of a transitional phase where the cases' numbers have decelerated—and hopefully we're getting to a phase of somewhat better control, where we can begin to start to resuming more easily normal activities

The health experts Fortune spoke to were slow to criticize Fauci, saying it’s been a long and arduous two years, and that his initial statements, while incorrect, were perhaps well-intentioned slips of the tongue.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, thinks Fauci was “just being inartful,” and that an attempt at cautious optimism backfired.

But he cautioned that COVID “has continued to fool us every single time we thought we knew where it was going,” he said. “The one thing predictable is that it’s unpredictable.”

Society has the tools to ensure COVID is no longer as disruptive as it initially was, said Dr. Panagis Galiasatos, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins’ Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine who treats long COVID patients.

“Masks work, stay at home [when you’re sick], quarantine as you see fit—these are weapons that [can] keep COVID from being life-threatening. I think that’s what he’s trying to get at. The pandemic is here, but we should take into account that many countries are in a different place.”

Still, public health officials need to be “careful with wording what we say,” he said.

“Was damage done? I don’t know. I do view it as a potential miscommunication. We’re all guilty of it. We’ve all probably said something we wish we could take back.”

Dr. Phoebe Lostroh, a Harvard-trained microbiology professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., said she respects Fauci, who has been a “voice of reason in this outbreak.” But she questions even his revised statement.

“I think he made a faux pas even saying the acute phase is over,” Lostroh said. “It’s over for those of us who have been vaccinated and boosted, and those of us who have enough money to get anything delivered to our homes so we don’t have to go out in high density areas, who don’t have young children exposed over and over again, who can afford masks.”

She wishes Fauci would have been more clear on those at highest risk of death and severe illness from COVID, including those who aren’t vaccinated and boosted, those who are immunocompromised, and children 5 and under who aren’t yet eligible for the vaccine.

“It would be better to convey to the public that we still need to make progress on these goals, need to make progress on providing clean and healthy air in workplaces, places of business, schools,” she said.

Lostroh’s best guess is that “Fauci was trying to say that medicine has learned a lot—he was trying to put out a vote of confidence,” she said. “He could have been more nuanced about the level of investment we still need as a society to keep everyone safe.”

Arijit Chakravarty a COVID researcher and CEO of Fractal Therapeutics, a drug development firm, said he believes debate about what phase of the pandemic we’re in is a distraction.

“The situation is the virus is spreading uncontrolled, more or less,” he said, a reference to relaxed or nonexistent restrictions in most parts of the country. “We don’t have any tools at this point to really dampen down the spread.”

Vaccines, while offering protection from death and severe illness requiring hospitalization, are “remarkably degraded in their ability to prevent infection or transmission,” he said. The Washington Post reported last week that 42% of those who died of COVID in the U.S. in January and February had been vaccinated, citing U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

“If you look at the interventions we have today, the actual things in your control, probably the single most effective intervention, two years in, is an N95 mask,” he said. “I wish I didn’t live in a world where that was the state of the art, where we had to figure out our own strategy to avoid being infected.”

As for Fauci, he’s “done the best he could in a difficult situation,” Chakravarty said.

But wishing the pandemic is over “doesn’t make it so.”

“I remember him saying a long time ago, ‘You don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.’ Unfortunately, two years into this, we’re all human.”

---

Dr. Fauci made this comment on an interview with 60 Minutes on March 8, 2020, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

--- He was wrong then and he's wrong now. Surgical masks and N95 masks work.

"Preventing coronavirus: Should you wear a face mask? - 60 Minutes - CBS News" www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/preventing-coronavirus-facemask-...

www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/02/medical-professionals-are-ske...

Medical professionals are skeptical on a fourth Covid vaccine dose

KEY POINTS

▫️Countries are beginning to offer a fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to vulnerable groups, but medical professionals are undecided on whether it would benefit the wider population.

▫️Questions are being raised over the need for more booster shots as the emergence of more Covid variants may require more targeted vaccines.

▫️The World Health Organization hasn't given an official recommendation on a fourth dose, and "there isn't any good evidence at this point of time," said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.

Countries are beginning to offer a fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to vulnerable groups, but medical professionals are undecided on whether it would benefit the wider population.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has so far authorized a fourth shot only for those aged 50 and above, as well as those who are immunocompromised. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was skeptical of the need for a fourth dose for healthy adults in the absence of a clearer public health strategy.

Those decisions came as a study from Israel found that although a fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers protection against serious illness for at least six weeks after the shot, it provides only short-lived protection against infection, which wanes after just four weeks.

No 'good evidence' yet

The medical consensus so far is that there hasn't been enough research on how much protection a fourth dose can offer.

The World Health Organization hasn't given an official recommendation on a fourth dose, and "there isn't any good evidence at this point of time" that it will be beneficial, said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.

"What we know from immunology is that if you give another booster, you will see a temporary increase in the neutralizing antibodies. But what we've also seen is that these neutralizing antibodies will wane quite rapidly," Swaminathan told CNBC in an interview.

"This happened after the third dose. And it's happened again after the fourth dose," she added.

Paul Goepfert, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama, shared that view, saying that "a fourth dose doesn't really do much of anything ... I'm not sure we need to get out and just jump up and down screaming that everybody needs to get aboard."

Since the study from Israel shows the fourth dose can provide protection against serious disease, countries such as Israel, Denmark and Singapore have made a second booster shot available to high-risk groups.

"Rather than saying that the protection wanes, I would say that this boost effect is strongest shortly after the vaccine was administered, but that it remains protective overall," said Ashley St. John, an associate professor at Duke-NUS Medical School.

"Importantly there was no waning of protection against severe disease, which is the most key effect of vaccination we aim to achieve," she added.

Annual booster shots?

Questions are being raised over the need for more booster shots as the emergence of more Covid variants may require more targeted vaccines.

Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, told NBC News in January that people may need to get booster shots every year or two.

However, blanket vaccine approaches may not continue to work.

It is possible that high-risk groups — such as the elderly — may need an annual vaccine, said Swaminathan. But "it's not clear whether a healthy adult is going to need a regular annual shot."

It's also important to note that the current vaccines being administered may not work for future variants of Covid-19, she said.

If the virus "changes so much that you need to change your vaccine composition, then you won't need another shot," Swaminathan added. "The challenge of changing the vaccine composition is that you're always playing catch-up."

Goepfert said "only time will tell" how long more the population has to take booster shots, but the safest approach would be to "plan on a booster every year, and maybe combine it with the flu vaccine."

Omicron subvariant

The WHO announced on Tuesday that weekly new Covid deaths had fallen to the lowest level since March 2020.

But the more contagious omicron BA.2 subvariant remains the dominant strain in the United States, making up 68.1% of all cases in the country during the week that ended on April 23, according to data from the CDC.

Although experts predict that the BA.2 subvariant is unlikely to be more severe than the original omicron strain, it should remain a concern.

"I do think infections are going to continue ... it's taken over most parts of the country, said Goepfert. "But in terms of severe infections, I think that's going to continue to be less and less."

Patients from locations with adequate vaccination coverage would experience only "mild or manageable disease" and this would reduce "burden on the healthcare system compared to waves of Covid pre-vaccines," St. John said.

"Just like studying for an exam, a vaccine booster can trigger immune system memories and increase performance during the real test," she added.

I love bringing my Sphero along on my explorations! :D

The second stop on the way home from my college visit was in Richmond!

The Richmond Kmart appears to be a former Grants (and thus reminded me of the Erie Kmart that I visited last summer). It is very noticeably bigger than Anderson; it is also very nice; it has a Kmart Express gas station and it has a former Kmart Cafe (that still has the counter/displays, the full menu board and even the register! Looks like a more recent KCafe closure from what I've seen; if anybody else here has any more information I would like to know more about it!). This store appears to be doing fairly well for one of the last remaining stores in/near the Miami Valley.

Of course, I had to check out the Kmart Express after my main store rounds were complete, so I headed over there and looked around. This is the second Kmart Express I've seen, but the first one I have actually visited, as the other one (at the now nonexistent Brooklyn Super Kmart) had already closed. I didn't buy anything at this KExpress though, as I had spent my money in the main store. Hopefully next time I can buy some coffee or donuts from Kmart Express while going to/from Anderson (if I plan another college visit to Anderson U, which is likely)!

Hopefully the Richmond Kmart will still be able to remain "normal" for a good time longer...I like this store! :D

Kmart #7246 - 3150 National Road West - Richmond, Indiana

This young lady is holding a sign that states the issue perfectly !!!

Those who are the white-collar criminals in the economic crisis should be jailed - for the reason her sign states!

"Help they stole our future"

Yes they did.

They drank champagne and ate steak and lobster while stealing our children future both economically and environmentally.

These greedy jerks are the same as mass murders but don't have the blood stains on their hands.

occupyaugusta.org/occupy/wp-content/lg-gallery/October%20...

The kids were great - and I think they really understand the importance of the movement.

The children understand because it's their future that had been hocked by the greedy elite power structure between bankers, traders, agents, politicians and others who created the economic crisis then jumped out with millions of dollars in golden parachutes.

Check out this OccupyAugusta video by Jane Pietkivitch

She shot and edited video from the Occupy Augusta march on downtown on Saturday (10-15-11).

The OccupyAugusta movement is doing a fantastic job coordinating and the enthusiasm is no less that in New York

www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=302389719777944

OccupyAugusta did an impressive job on Sat., Oct. 15, 2011 as they marched on downtown Augusta protesting the evil greed that created the current economic crisis.

The bankers, Wall Street traders, insurance industry, politicians proved they cannot be trusted when left to their own devices when the Bush administration made oversight almost nonexistent.

And sure enough when the foxes were in charge of the hen-house it was a slaughter of American jobs, the evaporation of retirement funds, a flood of home foreclosures, sending the world economy into crisis.

See the photos at these links!

occupyaugusta.org/occupy/wp-content/lg-gallery/October%20...

occupyaugusta.org/occupy/gallery?file=October%2015%202011/

Occupy Augusta, GA: Occupy Wall Street Pages:

Occupy Augusta, GA on Facebook:

www.facebook.com/pages/OCCUPY-AUGUSTA/178325418914632

Occupy Augusta, GA on Twitter:

twitter.com/#!/OWSaugustaGA

Occupy Augusta, GA on WordPress.org:

occupyaugusta.org/occupy

Occupy Augusta, GA on discussion page of WordPress.org (#OccupyAugusta ) in Solidarity with #OWS and #OccupyTogether:

occupyaugusta.org/discuss/index.php

Occupy Augusta, GA on MeetUp:

www.meetup.com/occupytogether/Augusta-GA/382952

Occupy Augusta, GA on Tumblr:

occupyaugustaga.tumblr.com

Occupy Wall Street Movement in other Georgia cities:

www.facebook.com/northganow

www.child-adolescent-adult-development.info/playtime-for-...

Playtime for Grown Ups

By Calvin A. Colarusso, M.D.

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,

University of California at San Diego

(12/07/2011)

Parents always tell kids to go out and play. But did you ever think that an adult, an adult and child psychiatrist no less, would tell YOU, the adult, to go out and play?

Well, Dr. Colarusso is doing just that. In this book he explains both the nature of play and the dynamics which make play such an essential part of human experience throughout the life cycle.

The message is get off that coach, get out of that rocking chair, and go and play. Adults need to play, maybe not as much as children do, but for the same reasons. Play is a way of mastering stress and trauma. It serves the same purpose for children and adults. The stresses of adulthood are in their own way more daunting than those of childhood. And we all have a need to master the traumatic overstimulation that characterizes our busy lives, to say nothing of the internal pressures that continually force us to deal with issues, relationships and experiences from the past and present.

Go and hit that great golf shot, watch an action movie, or see a good romance film and relive a youthful love affair. Join the Monday night football crowd. Reread Portnoy's Complaint. Take in your son's, daughter's or grandchild's soccer game. Buy some new sexual toys. They're all examples of how adults can and should play. Whatever you do, remember that play should be fun. But it's also a marvelous way to master the stresses of life. Just do it!

Playtime for Adults gives a clear understanding of the various forms of play available to adults and the reasons why play is important to mental and physical health, throughout adulthood.

This book includes:

An understanding of what motivates play

The role of thought and action in play

The different levels of play in childhood and adulthood

The relationships between creativity and play

The organizers of play in adulthood.

Sexual play

Understanding the nature of play and doing more of it will lead to a happier life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Calvin A. Colarusso, M.D. is a board-certified Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, where he served for two decades as Director of the Child Psychiatry Residency Training Program.

He is also a Training and Supervising Analyst in child and adult psychoanalysis at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute and an internationally known lecturer to students, professionals, and the general public on many aspects of normal and pathologic development.

His books have been published in English, Korean, and Spanish. See amzn.to/calcolarusso.

Amazon Review

5.0 out of 5 stars hepful and practical, great info!, December 11, 2011

By Angela Johnson - See all my reviewsThis review is from: Playtime for Grown Ups (Kindle Edition)

"As a mother a of three active children, this was a book that I desperately needed to read. My life has been about them and only them since my oldest was born and although I don't regret anything for even a second, I have neglected myself for quite some time. This has led to me and the hubby not really connecting and enjoying each other like we had in the past. Of course if you ask him he won't admit it, but "play-time" for us has been nonexistent in our lives."

"The advice in this book has been wonderful and just by reading it, I've already started to feel better and more care-free. The author has a very friendly and uplifting style of writing, and his insights and ideas on adding creativity and play-time into the adults life are both practical and realistic. His intelligent thoughts on sexual play were probably my favorite part of the book, great ideas for keeping Mom emotionally and physically balanced ; )"

"Great book, I can't begin to recommend it enough. My husband has already agreed to read it too, I got him very interested with some of the ideas I told him about."

I'm gobsmacked by several things here. First, the light was nonexistent. Yet the Sony A7RII performed extremely well at incredibly high ISO. Second, using knowledge developed around a digital Zone System, I knew precisely where I wanted the tonal values and was able to place them accordingly. Third, I am happy to confirm the dynamic range of the sensor extends usefully to below Zone 0 (Zone -2!), even at such high ISO settings. Fourth, 1950s German optics can do the trick. These images were made using a triplet wide angle. Who would design such a thing and make it work? Micro-contrast is something to be seen, otherwise you wouldn't believe it.

Qingdao is China’s premier “beer” city, as the country’s most famous brew – Tsingtao – was founded and continues to be brewed here. (For those who do come to the city, Tsingtao makes a decent dark beer – Yuan Jiang – that is quite hard to get outside of the city.) I guess the easiest comparison I can make would be to say that Qingdao is the same to beer culture here as St. Louis and Milwaukee are in the United States; a town famous for a mass-produced beer.

The Tsingtao brewery and museum (slightly underwhelming, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook) is located on Dengzhou Lu a bit north of Zhongshan Park. Dengzhou Lu is also famously known as Pijiu Jie (Beer Street). During the day, it’s easy to see the nightlife potential. At night, almost every establishment along this stretch of Dengzhou Lu (probably about a half kilometer to a one kilometer long) is a restaurant that opens up with the focus on drinking beer – almost always Tsingtao. (Curiously, in coming by here at night, the taxi took me past Hongjiu Jie – Red Wine Street. It looked quite a bit less subdued as wine culture here is, well, nonexistent. I didn’t have a chance to get back and look around there. Having drunk Chinese wine before…I don’t think I’m missing too much.)

I’ve lived in China for almost three years now; about two years in Shanghai and one year in Tianjin. Shandong province is the province that’s on the sea between the two cities. (From Shanghai to Tianjin by train is around 5 hours; by plane, 2 hours.) Qingdao, probably the most well-known city in Shandong, is a charming city, to say the least. In my opinion, it’s exceptionally photogenic – with very nice beaches, great architecture, good geography/topography, and terrific food.

Qingdao also happens to be known for the most famous of Chinese beers (Tsingtao), which is actually a company started by the Germans. (For what it’s worth, Chinese beers are quite watery and Tsingtao is somewhat like the Budweiser of Chinese beers. That being said, I’m happy to drink an ice cold Tsingtao on a hot summer day whereas I wouldn’t say the same thing about a Budweiser.

So what to make of Qingdao then? Before colonial powers swept in and started chopping up China piecemeal, Qingdao was basically a sleepy fishing village. During the Ming dynasty, a battery was built here. In 1898, the Germans seized control of Qingdao when two missionaries were killed. (Personally, it seems alarming to me that a country could lose a city because two foreigners happened to be killed – and China sure lost a lot that way during the 19th century. I guess that’s the downside to outmoded military technology; the Europeans and Americans basically plundered China…) At any rate, Qingdao was ceded to the Germans for 99 years, but that didn’t last long, thanks to World War I.

During the 15-20 years that the Germans did have control of the town, they managed to build a handful of churches (still standing) and missionaries, in addition to the aforementioned Qingdao brewery. Because of that, a lot of the European architecture has a heavy German influence and there are still a few random signs of German heritage around town.

From the Germans, Qingdao didn’t land directly with the Chinese. It spent 8 years under Japanese control (1914-1922) before being returned to the Kuomintang (aka General Chiang Kai-Shek’s clan). The Japanese took control once again in 1938 (as they swept through northeast China and across half the country) before losing it for the last time in 1945 at the end of World War II. Since then, it’s been in Chinese hands. (Brief history courtesy of Lonely Planet.)

Contemporary Qingdao certainly makes its way as a tourist destination – and it’s a fine one at that. The population (per my LP from 2011) lists it at 1.73 million. The city has a few areas that are quite appealing to tourists: the Old Town (the heart of the city) off the beach and just east of the railway station downtown, Badaguan (which means “eight passes”) is a hilly area with a lot of nice residential architecture to the east of the Old Town. Other than that, there are a lot of parks, a beer street, churches, and a 40 km. scenic walk (which, obviously, most people do not cover from end to end) along the shore which goes by all of the beaches in the area.

All in all, Qingdao is the type of town that, if you get the chance to visit, I think you would find yourself thinking it would be great to return again and again.

So as a dyed-in-the-wool iPhone fanboy, I've been wanting to pick up an Android handset for a while now to see how the other half lives. It's taken a while for decent Android phones to start getting to the point where they're affordable as on-a-whim buys on the used market without a contract, but they're finally there now, so I picked up a Motorola Droid. Here, have some first impressions.

Pros:

* The screen is a lot nicer than I was expecting. I was assuming that a phone of this vintage would have a screen more like my old iPhone 3Gs, where it was visibly pixelly, but it's a lot closer to the iPhone 4's retina display. So, good job, Motorola.

* Being able to go to market.android.com/ and pick out apps and have them magically appear on my phone? Sweet. Sign me up for more of that.

* It's also a lot more responsive than I had feared it would be. The only other times I'd really played with Android had been in stores and everything just seemed super slow. This isn't as fast as my iPhone, but it's also a couple of generations behind it, and it's actually pretty zippy given that caveat.

* Notifications are less intrusive than iOS 4.x and below, although that's likely to change in 5.

Cons: Just about everything else

* Okay, yes, the Android notification center is nicer than iOS's popups, but it means they can't do the little tap-the-top-to-scroll-up trick that iOS does in scroll views which is something I really miss.

* It's bulky as shit and feels really fragile, especially with the sliding keyboard mechanism. This is more a Motorola Droid problem than an Android In General problem, though

* The whole interface just looks... amateurish. Everything's square and blocky in most of the apps, but the launcher's got shading and 3D effects and whatnot, which makes it feel like the interface design as a whole is very disjoint.

* Little things like the way it handles gestures and scrolling make it feel very much like you're interacting with a tiny computer using gestures rather than that you're interacting with actual objects like on the iPhone.

* I still hate the Android way of zooming in web pages where it resizes everything and rerenders. On the iPhone it just zooms. I find the Android way to be very disorienting. This might be something I could learn to prefer over time, though, since there are some definite advantages to it with page readability on ill-designed websites.

* There is a dearth of apps. Yeah, they both have huge app stores, and it's rare for there to be something you can do on an iPhone that you just flat out can't do on Android, but I've yet to find any Android apps that are better designed than the iPhone counterpart I use. My HP48 calculator emulator is a perfect example--on the iPhone, it's so nice that it made me want to take another math class; on Android, it made me glad again that I never have to take a math class again. I also still haven't found a Flickr client that doesn't make me want to throw the Droid across the room.

* Every time I've asked anyone for suggestions on interesting apps to download, they've recommend... launcher replacements. So I have a shitload of choices for the ways in which I want to launch the nonexistent or shabbily-written apps. Hurray for Android?

* Honestly, I'm faster typing on the iPhone's virtual keyboard than I am on the Droid's physical keyboard. Might change if I get more used to it.

* The screen is 3.7" vs. the iPhone's 3.5". Somehow it feels smaller. I don't really understand it. Maybe because it's taller? Maybe just because Android draws all of the onscreen widgets a bit smaller and nobody can really optimize for this specific screen size because there are so many different resolutions and sizes to support.

* The Unix underpinnings are really close to the surface. Don't get me wrong, I love my Unix, but I don't want to have to think about how most of my storage is in /mnt/sdcard and some things need to store apps in the internal memory and data on the SD card and such. I just want shit to work.

* The big list of alphabetical apps with home screen aliases. This is another one of those "I'm interacting with a computer that has a touchscreen interface" vs "I'm interacting with physical objects" visual metaphor breakdown things, and it's very much evidence of a design-by-programmer vs. design-by-human-computer-interaction-specialist philosophy. On the iPhone, the app icon *is* the app. If you want to organize it differently, you just move it somewhere else. That being said, I really wish the iPhone would let me position my icons arbitrarily in the grid on each page rather than forcing them to close up any gaps.

So. Anyone got any suggestions for apps I should try out? Apps that aren't home screen replacements, ideally?

(This picture was taken with my iPhone for maximum iRony)

Tried to capture most of my friends here. Miles kindly chaperoned my wife onto the dance floor, as his wife was unable to attend, and me on the dance floor is like a unicorn on steroids in a china shop - both nonexistent and potentially quite destructive.

Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

via Instagram ift.tt/21HWRVs

30 Likes on Instagram

5 Comments on Instagram:

thighigh412: #me #boylondon #ootd

thighigh412: #converse #bobmarley #tea #pittsburgh #me #girl #blonde

brennaninstagrams: Boy is lame

thighigh412: @brennaninstagrams hmm ill take that into consideration when dressin myself yung messiah

thighigh412: @brennaninstagrams u use a ouija board to write ur comments for u oooh I'm so swayed by the thoughts of nonexistent spirits

View Large On Black

Bufflehead duck (female) with Canada Goose

Muriel Hepner Park

Denville, New Jersey

Thanks to Tom for the tipoff about activity on the pond. No Kingfisher or Mergansers today, just this little quacker mixed in with small #s of mute swans, mallards, and canada geese. There was a large raptor that passed over the back of the pond, only caught a glimpse... looked like a red-tailed hawk.

This photo desperately needs more depth of field, but lighting was nonexistent, and I didn't expect to catch the bufflehead mid-quack!

ISO 1600, 1/125s, wide open @ f/5.6

I had to run noise reduction twice on this photo because it was extremely grainy. I did a lower pass on the full photo, and a high strength pass on just the background. Still noisy!

© DRB 2008 all rights reserved

Unauthorized use or reproduction for any reason is prohibited

Seriously.

Or

Two Woman Agree to Split the Difference

Breasts aside, black cast statue and silvery metallic balloon were antagonizingly high contrast, so I pre-exposed the film against a neutral coloured wall before taking this shot to try to get some more detail out of Naked Lady. I think it worked pretty well, considering how I've been too lazy (I mean, have been practicing not using) to use a light meter, so all the exposure values and settings were made up on the spot, not the spot meter.

It is a good reminder that although some skills are like riding a bike, doing them well again after a long hiatus is another matter entirely. Twenty miles around a lake and then attempting a mountain (hill) after not riding (or even moving much) for three years is (wasn't) not a very good idea.

When FP100c and 3000b were my mediums of choice I was really good at over or under exposing and making up preflash levels, developing times, and temperatures so I could move the film's shadow and highlight sensitivity curves and dynamic range around. I don't think I could do it again so intuitively nowadays without burning through way too much near-nonexistent film first. This is probably a good argument for me to switch between formats either much more or much less often.

Now that I think about it, I actually had two light meters on my person when I took this shot. One old selenium meter that is on its last legs, and one super calibrated spot meter that I normally don't use in New York because it is vaguely gun-shaped.

Whatever, it's good practice, and this is already at the limits of this film's latitude.

Super square framing and shift correction takes practice too.

Wat Ong Teu Mahawihan (Temple of the Heavy Buddha) is one of many Buddhist Monasteries that are present in the city of Vientiane in Laos. This name is given to the temple due to the large, bronze Phra Ong Teu Buddha image that is present within the temple: the largest Buddha in Vientiane. This temple was initially constructed by King Settathirat I in the 16th century (known as the golden age of Buddhism in Laos) when Laos was being bombarded by the Burmese, but was later demolished during a foreign invasion. Thus, it may have gone through many reconstructions during the 19th or 20th century to attain the appearance it has today.

Though this temple is created in Vientiane, it has the basic shape for what is known as the ‘Luang Prabang I style’ with its scare use of brickwork and rectangular-like body.

Wat Ong Teu is said to have been placed along a cardinal point in accordance with three other temples, but that may just be coincidental.

ORIGIN

After commanding for the relocation of the capital of Laos from the city of Luang Prabang to Vientiane, King Setthathirat I produced many monasteries such as Wat That Luang and Wat Phra Kaew. The reason this particular wat (Lao for temple) was built was because Setthathirat I desired to create the Phra Ong Teu image that would be placed within it, and to have it as his person living quarters. There would be six other sculptures of this image present in other monasteries, but Wat Ong Teu Mahawihan contains the first of them. Since this time period is known as the golden age, the wat would evolve into a complex with a sim (ordination hall), a ho rackhang (bell tower), a ho kong (drum tower), a that (stupa), and a kuti (monks’ living quarters). Each of these parts of the complex all share the similar artistic motif of the architecture of the central wat, which is discussed later.

The original use of this wat was for ceremonies of allegiance to the king. However, in the 17th century, Souligna Vongsa as king transformed this temple into a Buddhist learning center in order to ‘teach, enlighten and inspire worshippers.’ In other words, it has become a school for monks coming from around Southeast Asia to study the dhamma. This becomes apparent because surrounding countries of Laos sent their monks to Vientiane to study this religion. Such a function is more understandable of Wat Ong Teu since there are many details that give the suggestion of a learning center.

RECONSTRUCTION

When Siam sacked Laos in 1827-28 as a punishment for almost all of the monasteries in Laos, including Wat Ong Teu, were destroyed. This was only made worse afterwards when the Ho bandits tried sack Vientiane again to take gold from Wat Ong Teu and others. In 1900, following the establishment of the Franco-Siamese treaty in 1843, the French chose Vientiane as their capital and started the reconstruction of its monasteries including Wat Ong Teu. As an addition, the French may have also created a school, in the same format and appearance as the rest of the complex to further exemplify the function of Wat Ong Teu as a place of study. The Lao Buddhist Institute was made in 1929 and still functions today as a school for the Theravada Buddhist religion.

ARCHITECTURE

In retrospect, the influence on the style of the original temple can be traced predominantly to India, though not directly. Indochina was part of the sphere of influence of India, known by George Coedès as the ‘Indianization of Southeast Asia.’ The religion and customs of Indian civilization came ‘thoroughly yet peacefully’ to the people of this region, especially due to marriage between Indian men and local women. Laos however, was a nonexistent country during this time. The kingdom of Lan Xang (‘Land of a million elephants’) wasn’t established until the mid-13th century of the common era just years after all direct contact with India was completely diminished. Instead, the original Wat Ong Teu took its traits from other mixed ideas of architecture from surrounding countries that were established earlier than the 13th century. In essence, the variant notions of these Southeastern Asian countries on the Theravada Buddhist architecture of India, such as Cambodia and Siam (present day Thailand), influenced the ideas of how Wat Ong Teu would be depicted. However, even though Laos borrowed traditions from these other cultures, the 16th century turned a new leaf for the Lao people in the form of a golden age. Thus, Wat Ong Teu has most of its own Lao Buddhist features and only minor details of surrounding influences.

After the temple’s destruction, some of the techniques used to create it were lost, but much of it wasn’t forgotten. Instead, modern techniques were blended in with the old during the temple’s reconstruction, especially in what was used to fortify the walls and roof. The result became a rich new style that is exclusive to Lao architecture. This primarily is because the modern reconstruction completed by the French kept sincere adherence to these Lao notions already established on temple aesthetics, with some artistic liberties since Laos at this time was only a protectorate of France.

ENTRY GATE

This multi-tiered archway serves as the entrance into the complex where the temple is located. It is miniature compared to that of Pha That Luang. The functionality of this seemingly simple archway is similar to that of the torana, or gateway, of Indian culture. The torana served as the passageway from secular ground to sacred ground. The only difference is that this archway does not have any images for which a person can meditate and it doesn’t involve circumambulating a stupa. This characteristic may be present in all the temples and stupas that exist in Laos, especially at King Setthathirat’s more famous architectural creation, Pha That Luang.

MAIN ENTRANCE

The entrance to Wat Ong Teu is known to have a good amount of eccentricities that are indigenous only to Laos and no other Buddhist temple in Asia. Just before going up the stairs at the front of the temple, one can find the frieze that is exceedingly baroque in detail, highlighting this Lao style. The green backdrop shimmers as many carved and gilded vine leaves curve in no apparent order or pattern. This motif is repeated throughout the whole front part of the temple, even surrounding the six small Buddhas that are just below the frieze. This foliage may be an allusion to the lotus flower which is an aniconic symbol of the Buddha. Another Lao characteristic of monasteries is the pointed double archway that flanks the six Buddhas. There are many variations of this characteristic, but the archway of Wat Ong Teu is the most simplistic aesthetically.

One of the most native features to Laos is the Naga, or mythical water serpent, that serves as the guardian of the entrance. The Naga was widely known in Southeast Asia before Buddhism arrived. They would symbolize the Hindu god Shiva in which they represented destruction and renewal. How they relate to the Buddha lies in the story of Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree.

This could also be the second area for which one would pass from less secular ground to completely sacred ground. Though Nagas are usually seen with multiple heads, Wat Ong Teu’s version of the Naga has a single head with a its bright green body stretched out. There are three sets of these Nagas that all give access to the same patio-type area in front the temple. This aspect is interesting because there is only one door that gives an entrance into the temple. It may be a reference to the original function of this wat as the king’s temple, with the front stairs only being walk on by the king while the others were reserved for normal patrons. The posts perpendicular to these Naga resemble the sort of pagoda or tower one would see in Laos.

The doors and windows are made of wood and are also decorated with many leaves and stems that spiral sporadically. These images are all carved, painted red and gilded to make the door and windows look as if they were made of metal. Each of the windows and the door have different images of the Buddha either directly or by aniconic representation. Some of them may evidently portray a Jataka, or story given of one of the Buddha’s past incarnations.

ROOF

Seemingly the most intricate part of the exterior of Wat Ong Teu is its roof. It illustrates a myriad of different styles from around Asia that blend in an extraordinarily harmonious way.

A commonly used feature in Asia for the roof is the utilization of a curved roof. This non-linear approach was originated by the Chinese. In China, architects thought that evil spirits despised curved lines, therefore giving an apotropaic effect to the temple. Lao ideas of the curved roof should have been similar to China’s as well. This aspect is especially important when the principal function of this temple is to teach the Buddhist religion. Students learning the Buddhist religion should especially be protected from the evils of the outside world.

What is particularly interesting is the feature of multiple roofs that descend past the boundaries of the wall at a slope. This aspect is exclusive to Laos. Specifically, there are three or four superimposed roofs, with the two bottom roofs being supported by columns from within the temple. It is unknown as to the reason for this intricate design, but it may be another aspect of protection because multiple roofs could cause confusion among evil spirits.

The stone spire decoration with stacked superimposed, decreasingly sized disks in the center of the keel is definitively a Buddhist element. It is known that before the Buddha went through enlightenment, he was always covered by parasols to indicate his royalty as a prince. Therefore, it is not unusual to see a parasol-like spire atop this temple. The other flame-like decorations, called chaw faa (sky clusters), lining the edges and vertices of the roof are frequently used in Laos. This may also be another quality that emphasizes the apotropaic effect of the roof.

The exterior may have a lot detail that is used for protection and attraction, but the interior does not mirror the same intricacy. Within the temple, the floors are glossed and the walls and ceiling are painted with the same colors as the exterior. There is a red mat that is lined perfectly from the middle to the back of the sim where the Phra Ong Teu image resides. The most intricate objects within the temple are the columns that hold up the roof. They may have been made to look like oversized lotus flowers that have grown from the ground to support the roof of the temple. This may illustrate the natural world for which the Buddha himself would have liked to teach his followers.

MODERN TECHNIQUES

Once Laos became a French protectorate and reconstruction began, there may have been many liberties made to some of the minute details of the temple, but most of the essential attributes of the temple remain similar to the original construction. A very important change is in the stone and well-kept wood that fortifies the structure of the temple. The brackets are included in this use of preserved timber. Not only are there brackets on the outside, but in the inside as well. However, the columns are the objects that provide the most support for the 3 or 4 tiered roofs, so they are treated with more care than the brackets. Therefore, in essence, the modern approach is more of a post and lintel technique rather than the use of brackets. The lack of non-perishable material before French rule over Laos is indicative of their weak government.

Some details that are usually seen in developed countries in Europe and North America include small, hanging chandeliers as well as fans placed on each column that lines the sim. These simple touches do seem to emit a sort of waning of sacredness for which the temple was originally created, but it may not be complete departure from belief.

Most of the modern techniques may have been meant for the surrounding complex rather than the monastery itself, but the central theme of all these buildings and towers remain faithful to that of Wat Ong Teu.

ART

´HEAVY BUDDHA`

ACCOMPANIED BY TWO STANDING BUDDHAS

These original sculptures reside within the sim of the temple towards the furthest wall from the entrance. The Phra Ong Teu is made of a mix of metals, predominately bronze, and is seated atop a golden pedestal that was cast separate from the Buddha. The head may have been cast separately as well from the body and put together by the ‘tonged and grooved joint techniques’ showing the skill of Lao craftsmanship. The two standing Buddhas are connected to their own respective platforms. These sculptures are raised on top of a platform with a color scheme similar to the rest of the temple. More recently, these sculptures are draped in linen or silk cloth, depicting the saffron clothing monks usually wear in Laos, with neon-colored halos place on the wall behind them. This may just add an artistic effect to the Buddhas so that a more prestigious role could be emphasized of them. However, Lao artists of this time never thought of these or other Buddha images as art, only as a means to ‘educate and enlighten.’ Therefore, later use of this temple as a place for further learning of the Hinayana Buddhist religion would be the exact purpose for which the artists intended.

It is usual to see the Enlightened One alone or accompanied by bodhisattvas in a triad, but here all three of these sculptures depict the Phra Ong Teu Buddha. A strong indication that these sculptures are Buddhas is the parasols that are suspended over them. Each of the smaller Buddhas have a parasol above them that is attached to a post protruding out from behind them, but the main Buddha has a distinctively rectangular parasol that is fastened to the ceiling. These parasols act in the same way as the parasol located on the keel of the wat, but the parasols that hang over the Buddhas are more decorative. What is interesting is that the rectangular parasol hanging over the Phra Ong Teu is more of a Japanese trait than anything Laos. The only record of any Japanese interaction with Laos would be during a five-year period in WWII. The only action caused by them was the nationalistic passion that the Lao people had in opposition to them. Not enough time was put into having any influence on their art of this Buddha or the temple that it is in.

There are many other features of Phra Ong Teu Buddha that are common in relation to the codified Buddha, but it still has its Lao differences. The earliest image of the Buddha in Laos was influenced by the ‘Pha Bang Khmer style,’ but started to become more distinctive in the 16th century along with the golden age. For example, the tightly curled hair that is displayed on the main Buddha is strongly reminiscent of the Gandhara Style of India during the Gupta period, which is mirrored by the Pha Bang. However, the pointed swelling coming out of the top of the image’s head, signifying ‘transcendent knowledge,’ expresses an exclusively Lao idea. This type of swell may even be a facet solely of the Phra Ong Teu image that King Setthathirat created. Some other modified aspects of the image are the sharp ear rims with long lobes, the equal, extended length of the fingers and toes, and the sharp wide nose.

There are a few different mudras, or hand gestures, that these Buddhas portray. These gestures illustrate the Indian influence that is present in Laos. Both of the smaller standing Buddhas have their hands up with palms facing outward, meaning fearlessness. Their mudra differs from the main Phra Ong Teu Buddha. He instead adopts two different mudras that allude to the moments just before Siddhartha’s Enlightenment. Specifically, the left hand is placed in the lap with the palm facing up towards the face which represents the idea of meditation. The greater gesture that captures the Enlightenment within this image comes from his right hand. His hand is rested over his knee with fingers extended toward the earth. This symbolizes the calling of the Earth to protect the Buddha from Mara, India’s interpretation of the devil. This can then be connected to the Naga that was conjured up to help Siddhartha in his path for Enlightenment. In creating this image, King Setthathirat I proved his adherence to the Theravada Buddhism that has always been present in Laos since Lan Xang.

CONCLUSION

Of the many temples that are present in Vientiane, Laos today, Wat Ong Teu Mahawihan is one of the more undervalued temples. Every detail that makes up this composition of this monastery has some sort of allusion to the teachings or image of the Buddha. From the Nagas guarding the entrance of the temple to the fastidiously heavy Buddha at the back of the sim within the temple, from the carved windows and doors to the lotus columns supporting the roof, Wat Ong Teu is a complete illustration of the story of Siddhartha meditating under the Bodhi tree. No area of the temple is left untouched which results in a sense of sacred ground.

Though it may not be an international symbol, Wat Ong Teu is more widely known as an educational institute that provides widespread teaching of the Theravada Buddhism that originated in India. That belief hasn’t meandered to this day. As a center for learning, Wat Ong Teu still continues to house the teachings of the beginning of Buddhism straight from the Buddha, though the two parties live centuries apart. With respect to Laos, education of this religion is what allowed France to be interesting in them even though France’s main focus was Vietnam. From to the French came Lao nationalism in opposition to the Japanese. All of this sparked from monasteries in Laos, Wat Ong Teu included.

WIKIPEDIA

Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

I talked with a groundskeeper at Brookgreen Gardens about the moss, which isn't a moss but rather an airborne plant that lives on the nutrients it derives from the air. My specific question was as to why there is Spanish Moss hanging from nearly every tree in Brookgreen, in copious amounts, and yet right across Highway 17 in Huntington Beach State Park the plant is nonexistent. His best answer was that the State Park probably removes the plant, but this was clearly impossible given the hundreds of acres of maritime forest I hiked through the day before.

So if anybody out there has any ideas on why an airborne plant grows very successfully on one side of the road, yet does not exist on the other side of the road, feel free to give a response.

By the way, best viewed large for the full effect of the rays through the moss-covered limbs. Its quite lovely.

Just in case you forgot that my cat is cute, here is a reminder for you. Please feel free to subscribe to her nonexistent newsletter.

The silhouette is a shadow, a shadow is nonexistent, shadow is the absence of light. The shadow is our part most primitive, that can walk to the light or to the darkness.

A silhueta é uma sombra, uma sombra é algo inexistente, sombra é ausência de luz. A sombra é a nossa parte mais primitiva, que pode caminhar para a luz ou para a escuridão.

The Roman Bridge crosses the old course of the Jarama River This 148-meter-long civil construction, composed of five arches (four small and one large) nestled among poplars and other deciduous trees that lend it an evocative image each autumn, is called a Roman bridge. But only the foundations and some studies of the ashlar blocks remain from Roman times because, in reality, it dates from the Middle Ages with significant additions during the 16th century that gave it its current appearance.

Visitors who arrive at this point always ask themselves the same question: But where is the Jarama River? Is this thin trickle of water? It is indeed surprising to find such a large bridge supporting an almost nonexistent flow of water. But the answer lies in the fact that, as has happened so many times throughout history, the riverbed was displaced for various reasns, in this case by almost half a kilometer. Therefore, the Jarama River should be sought further west because what flows there (when it does) is a meager irrigation canal, the Caz stream, which carries less water than a canteen with holes in it.

Nearby, there is a recreational area, right next to the actual Jarama, known as "La Chopera" (The Poplar Grove), where families come "with their picnic blankets and Tupperware" to spend the morning or afternoon in the shade and sit down to eat at one of the tables while the children play.

*April Fool's Day

This custom is thought to have started in France during the 16th century but the British are credited with bringing it to the United States. The commonly accepted origin of April Fool's Day involves changes in the calendar. At one time, the New Year celebration began on March 25 and ended on April 1. However, in 1582, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar and accepted the beginning of the new year as January 1. Those who refused to acknowledge the new date or simply forgot received foolish gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties. The butt of such a prank was known as a "poisson d'avril" or "April fish."

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Sunset was nonexistent tonight, but looking across the lake we could see flames leaping into the air, so my volunteer fireman and I jumped in the car to investigate. The lake reeds were burning at Çakırca (site of most of my sunset shots).

These hardy reeds will actually just grow back next year stronger and healthier - and with the shrinking of the lake the reeds are not as waterlogged as they once were - and, of course, there is a tremendous amount of trash in the weeds so I suspect that helped to fuel the fire which was probably started by young kids smoking.

It was actually quite a community event with the entire village watching - including the local fire department and the jandarma - I, of course, was the only female in sight, but I was serenaded by an adorable young kid (about 11 years old) who wanted to sing me a song - a wonderful Azerbaijani song that is one of my favorites - so we crooned together while the fires burned.

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Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

colinhuggins.bandcamp.com/track/beethoven-piano-sonata-no...

NY Times, Dec. 4 2011

Colin Huggins was there with his baby grand, the one he wheels into Washington Square Park for his al fresco concerts. So were Tic and Tac, a street-performing duo, who held court in the fountain — dry for the winter. And Joe Mangrum was pouring his elaborate sand paintings on the ground near the Washington Arch.

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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Kareem Barnes of Tic and Tac collected donations on Sunday.

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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Joe Mangrum showed his sand paintings on Sunday.

In other words, it was a typical Sunday afternoon in the Greenwich Village park, where generations of visitors have mingled with musicians, artists, activists, poets and buskers.

Yet this fall, that urban harmony has grown dissonant as the city’s parks department has slapped summonses on the four men and other performers who put out hats or buckets, for vending in an unauthorized location — specifically, within 50 feet of a monument.

The department’s rule, one of many put in place a year ago, was intended to control commerce in the busiest parks. Under the city’s definition, vending covers not only those peddling photographs and ankle bracelets, but also performers who solicit donations.

The rule attracted little notice at first. But the enforcement in Washington Square Park in the past two months has generated summonses ranging from $250 to $1,000. And it has started a debate about the rights of parkgoers seeking refuge from the bustle of the streets versus those looking for entertainment.

At a news conference in the park on Sunday organized by NYC Park Advocates, the artists waved fistfuls of pink summonses while their advocates, including civil rights lawyers, called on the city to stop what they called harassment of the performers.

“This is a heavy-handed solution to a nonexistent problem,” said Ronald L. Kuby, one of the lawyers.

The rule is especially problematic in Washington Square Park, performers say, because there are few locations across its 10 acres that are beyond 50 feet from a memorial or fountain — whether the bust of Alexander Lyman Holley, who introduced the Bessemer steel process to this country, or the statue of the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Then there is the park’s international reputation as a gathering place for folk music pioneers and the Beats.

“Washington Square is the live-music park of New York City, and it would be close to impossible for any one of us to follow these regulations,” said Mr. Huggins, who has received nine summonses with fines totaling $2,250.

But Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, argues that there is ample room for performers away from the monuments. And, he added, a musician who is not putting out a tin cup is welcome to sit on the edge of the fountain or under a monument.

“It’s the whole issue of the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ ” he said. “If you allow all the performers and all the vendors to do whatever they want to do, pretty soon there’s no park left for people who want to use them for quiet enjoyment. This is a way of having some control and not 18 hours of carnival-like atmosphere.”

Gary Behrens, an amateur photographer visiting from New Jersey, applauded the city’s efforts to rein in the performers. “I’m O.K. with the guitar, but the loud instruments have taken over the park,” he said.

The lawyers and advocates, however, challenged the idea that street performers were selling a product as a vendor does. And threatening a lawsuit, they faulted the city for creating what they called “First Amendment zones” through the rules.

“Is this place zany?” asked Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “You bet. Public parks are quintessential public forums. Zaniness is something we should cherish and protect.”

Park visitation has soared along with the rise of tourism in the last 15 years, and with it vendors and artists interested in a lucrative market.

Mr. Benepe insisted that the rules would not scare off future music legends.

“If Bob Dylan wanted to come play there tomorrow, he could,” he said, “although he might have to move away from the fountain.”

Oddly, the dispute coincided with the 50th anniversary of the so-called Folk Riot in Washington Square Park, when the parks commissioner tried to squelch Sunday folk performances. Hundreds of musicians gathered in protest, the police were called in and a melee ensued.

In April, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wrote a letter commemorating the Folk Riot, saying he applauded “the folk performers who changed music, our city and our world beginning half a century ago.”

The American experience in Vietnam and that of the Egyptians in the Arab-Israeli Wars brought home to the Soviet Union that its current fleet of ground-attack aircraft, such as the Su-7 Fitter series and MiG-23BN Flogger, would not survive in a modern combat environment. In both Vietnam and the Sinai, low-flying aircraft had proved themselves especially vulnerable to ground fire, and with the increasing lethality of surface-to-air missiles, the Soviet Union needed an armored aircraft that could survive in this environment. Two other factors also influenced Soviet thinking: the knowledge that the United States was working on just such an aircraft (the A-10 Thunderbolt II) and that the Il-2 Shturmovik, which had proven so valuable to the Soviet war effort in World War II, had never truly been replaced.

Unusually for the Soviet Union, the requirement for an armored ground-attack fighter was made a competition between the design bureaus then in operation. It came down to a competition between Sukhoi’s T-8 design and Ilyushin’s Il-102, which was essentially a jet-powered Il-2 (complete with rear gunner); the T-8, which showed more than a little inspiration from the Northrop A-9 (which had been the loser of the competition with the A-10), won the competition in 1975. Development was relatively smooth—to be expected from an aircraft that was meant to be simple to maintain and operate in forward areas, and had no “new” technology involved—and the first Su-25 regiment was operational by May 1981.

Like the A-10, survivalbility was paramount in the design. The twin engines were spaced far apart to avoid losing both to a single hit, though the Su-25 differed from its Western counterpart in having a single tail and engines set low in the fuselage. It also differed by not being designed around its gun armament: though the Su-25 was equipped with a powerful 30mm cannon, its main armament would be conventional rockets and bombs, carried on no less than ten hardpoints. Like the A-10, the pilot sat in a thickly armored titanium “bathtub,” though with much less visibility; Su-25 pilots complained of the nonexistent visibility to the rear and not much better vision to the front. A laser designator was mounted in the nose rather than radar.

The Su-25 was committed to combat immediately, as it was desperately needed in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Despite never having more than fifty Su-25s at any one time in theater, these regiments flew twice as many sorties as any other Soviet unit, using a combination of rockets, bombs, and guided missiles against mujahedeen positions. Losses were also comparatively low, as the Su-25 could absorb damage from the light weapons used by the Afghanis; only when American-supplied Stinger missiles reached the mujahedeen did the Su-25 face a genuine ground threat, and its loss rate was still much lower than the catastrophic losses taken by Mi-24 helicopter gunship crews. This reliability and ability to carry large amounts of ordnance earned it the nickname “Rook” and “Comb” (due to the plethora of hardpoints) from grateful Soviet ground troops. NATO gave it the reporting name of Frogfoot. The Su-25 had proved its worth, and units were given the revived designation of Shturmovik.

Production continued, and the 1990s were to see the Su-25 used in many of the small “brushfire” wars of the last decade of the 20th Century. Frogfoots were used by the Iraqis extensively first in the Iran-Iraq War, suffering the least amount of losses of any Iraqi type in service; their luck was not as good in the First Gulf War, where most of the Iraqi fleet was destroyed on the ground, with two also shot down in the air. Russia itself has used their Frogfoots twice, most extensively in the Chechnya Wars of the 1990s, where Su-25s took heavier losses due to outdated tactics and more sophisticated shoulder-fired missiles of the Chechen rebels; in the South Ossetian War of 2008, fought against Georgia, Su-25s fought each other.

The Su-25 remains in large numbers and has been extensively exported to 25 nations, and remains in production after over a thousand have been built. A modest upgrade is being done to Russian Su-25s, though a more extensive and ambitious upgrade, the Su-25KM Scorpion, has been done with Georgian aircraft: this upgrade uses Israeli technology and allows the Scorpion to carry Western ordnance. Like the A-10, the Su-25 has no real replacement on the horizon and will likely remain in service for some years to come.

This Su-25K is a Soviet aircraft belonging to the 200th Independent Shturmovik Regiment over Afghanistan in the 1980s. This aircraft wears standard Su-25 camouflage of two shades of green over brown uppersurfaces and light blue undersurfaces. Like most Su-25s, it carries a heavy amount of armament in the form of two Kh-29 (AS-14 Kedge) guided missiles, two UBL rocket pods, four FAB-1000 general purpose bombs, two R-60 (AA-8 Aphid) self-defense missiles, and two external fuel tanks.

The theory behind this toy is specatularly cool: a micro-magnifying device which hooks to a television screen to display enormous close-up images of teeny tiny things.

The implementation of the concept, however, leaves much to be desired. Specifically, the focus distance is extremely short; essentially, the device must be in physical contact with the object being examined. Thus, it works for flat, static objects like cloth, paper, or leaves, but is almost useless for really cool things like insects, worms, or fish.

Additionally, the focusing technique is extremely fussy, and the depth of field, as is to be expected with what is essentially a microscope, is nonexistent; thus, getting an object, even a static, flat object, in focus is difficult, and keeping the object in focus is even more of a challenge since the Eyeclops is a hand-held device.

This one was donated to the classroom by a student who, while fascinated by anything science-related, had quickly become disenchanted with this toy.

I, too, found the results with the Eyeclops extremely discouraging. As a teaching tool in a classroom full of fidgety kids, the Eyeclops is basically worthless. Even as a "here, go play with this" time-filler, the Eyeclops is more trouble than it is worth.

Great concept, lousy execution.

Day 291, The 365 Toy Project

18 October 2010

This was my first time actually plane watching at Miami International Airport (MIA). I checked some spotter websites to find some good locations. They recommended The Holes as being an "official" site so we checked it out. I was pretty disappointed; there was a lot of construction going on and parking was nonexistent. My wife dropped me off. The area is totally exposed. Even though it was December it was pretty hot - no shade, no place to sit, no other people around. The holes are actually pretty small so it's hard to get a lens through the hole. Arrivals were almost impossible to shoot but you could see planes taxiing by for takeoff. After an hour I was cooking so we bagged it. We then went to the area close to the El Dorado furniture store. Much better. There were a bunch of spotters from around the world there. It was a great atmosphere. Nicely shaded, safe, close to some stores and a lot of good traffic to watch. I saw a bunch of planes from airlines I had not seen before, including some airlines I had not heard of. Some of the planes didn't show up on Flight Radar 24 so they were very pleasant surprises. All in all a very good day and I'd love to go back there!

I took these photos in December 2019.