Hows that for frankenkamera obfuscation. This beautiful camera was given to me by my father. Its an old family heirloom. It's still in great shape, actually almost mint, and in full working order, albeit a bit dusty on the outside as you can see from the full size. That old FD 50mm Macro readily outresolves the 42MP sensor of the Sony. I got my copy real cheap online. Its a great and plentiful lens.

After years of being dumbed down and whipped into a froth by talk radio and junk tv, the voting public of the once United States of America was simply unable to see the difference between the corporate sham and the statesman. Some were too angry, others too greedy but most of them were just taken in by the rhetoric and relentless obfuscation. They chose wrongly and allowed the short-sighted corporate puppets to finish what their genuine enemies had begun nearly 8 short years before. They forgot what their forefathers knew: that greatness is the result of hard work and luck, and never a birthright. They chose to fear their differences and listen to their darkest demons. Some, in the world, ever so briefly, grieved for the missed opportunity and the end of the great experiment. While still others, rejoiced.

 

---

 

This is one of the most terrifying things I've read lately, in part because it's not the only thing I've found on the net with these sentiments:

pointblanknews.com/artopn773.html

 

And Bush has made us safer? I think not.

 

Bigger and darker

  

Washington DC, The National Mall, July 13, 2014. Over 2,000 climate justice activists assemble for a rally and march to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in opposition to the expansion of a natural gas transfer and storage facility at Cove Point on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The looming 4+ billion dollar expansion of the Dominion Resources facility in Calvert County is largely seen by environmentalists as a dirty and dangerous enabler of the accelerated overseas export of fracked gas from nearby states and a prelude to the approval of hydraulic fracturing in western Maryland. Several speakers at the rally skewered Maryland's cowardly centrist democrat politicians who see Cove Point as a 'done deal' and have almost completely avoided taking any meaningful action for their constituents on this vital issue. Opacity, obfuscation, ass covering and capitulation to some of the very worst corporate bullies is what we've come to expect from our spineless elected officials. The marchers braved 93 degree temperatures and typically heavy DC summertime humidity. When I finally left the march at Union Station even the strap on my camera bag was soaked with sweat.

Washington DC, The National Mall, July 13, 2014. Over 2,000 climate justice activists assemble for a rally and march to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in opposition to the expansion of a natural gas transfer and storage facility at Cove Point on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The looming 4+ billion dollar expansion of the Dominion Resources facility in Calvert County is largely seen by environmentalists as a dirty and dangerous enabler of the accelerated overseas export of fracked gas from nearby states and a prelude to the approval of hydraulic fracturing in western Maryland. Several speakers at the rally skewered Maryland's cowardly centrist democrat politicians who see Cove Point as a 'done deal' and have almost completely avoided taking any meaningful action for their constituents on this vital issue. Opacity, obfuscation, ass covering and capitulation to some of the very worst corporate bullies is what we've come to expect from our spineless elected officials. The marchers braved 93 degree temperatures and typically heavy DC summertime humidity. When I finally left the march at Union Station even the strap on my camera bag was soaked with sweat.

Novavax vaccines are now available in the U.S. Go to www.vaccines.gov/ to see where you can get it.

 

www.wired.com/story/tracing-covid-pandemic-origins/

 

The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought

Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan.

 

IN OCTOBER 2014, virologist Edward Holmes took a tour of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a once relatively overlooked city of about 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The market would have presented a bewildering environment for the uninitiated: rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead and alive; cages holding hog badgers and Siberian weasels, Malayan porcupines and masked palm civets. In the southwest corner of the market, Holmes found a stall selling raccoon dogs, stacked in a cage on top of another housing a species of bird he didn’t recognize. He paused to take a photo.

 

Eight years on, that photo is a key piece of evidence in the painstaking effort to trace the coronavirus pandemic back to its origins. Of course, it’s been suspected since the early days of the pandemic—since before it was even a pandemic—that the Wuhan wet market played a role, but it’s been difficult to prove it definitively. In the meantime, other origin theories have flowered centered on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biological research lab which, it’s argued, accidentally or deliberately unleashed the virus on the city and the world.

 

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that Covid originated in a similar way to related diseases such as SARS, which jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate animal. Figuring out exactly what happened with Covid-19 could prove immensely valuable both in terms of finally disproving the lab leak theory and by providing a source of information on how to stop the next pandemic. “This is not about placing blame,” says Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in California. “This is about understanding in as much detail as we can the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

 

For the last two years, an international team of scientists including Andersen and Holmes has been trying to pinpoint the epicenter of the pandemic, using methods ranging from genetic analysis to social media scraping. Their research, which attracted widespread coverage in preprint before being published in its final form last week, reads as much like a detective report as an academic study.

 

First: the scene of the crime. Where exactly in this city of 11 million people did the virus first jump from animals to humans? To find out, the team—led by University of Arizona biologist Michael Worobey—scoured a report published by the World Health Organization in the summer of 2021, which was based on a joint investigation the public health body conducted with Chinese scientists. By cross-referencing the different maps and tables within the report, the researchers obtained coordinates for 155 of the earliest Covid cases in Wuhan, people who were hospitalized from the disease in December 2019.

 

Most of those cases were clustered around central Wuhan, particularly on the west bank of the Yangtze river—the same area as the Huanan market. “There was this extraordinary pattern where the highest density of cases was both extremely near to and very centered on the market,” says Worobey, lead author on the paper, which was published in Science. Statistical analysis confirmed that it was “extremely unlikely” that the pattern of cases seen in the early days of the pandemic would have been so clustered on the market if Covid had originated anywhere else: A random selection of similar people from around Wuhan were very unlikely to have lived so close to the market.

 

Even early patients who didn’t work or shop at the market were more likely to live close to it. “This is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market, but then started to spread into the local community, as vendors went to local shops, infected people who worked in those shops, and then local community members not linked to the market started getting infected,” says Worobey.

 

But a high level of transmission centered on the market doesn’t, in and of itself, imply that the entire outbreak started there. Snapshots from later in the pandemic might have found similar patterns centered on superspreader events in Italy or Seattle, for instance. To strengthen their case beyond the WHO data, the researchers turned to the Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

 

People who posted asking for help on a Covid-19 app within Weibo in January and February 2020 were clustered not around the market, but to the west, in more densely populated areas of the city, and in areas with more older people—hinting at how the pandemic began to shift from an isolated outbreak linked to the market to one with the potential to explode around the world. A few months in, it had started to mirror the population density of the city. Historical location-based “check-ins” on Weibo also show that the Huanan market was a relatively unlikely destination for most people in the city—in other words, it was unlikely to be the location of a superspreader event unless the virus originated from there.

 

To trace the pandemic in the other direction, toward its source, the researchers turned to swab samples collected by Chinese scientists from around the Huanan market just before it was shut down by the authorities in January 2020. Those swabs returned a cluster of positives in the south-western corner of the market—on a glove found on one of the stalls, from a grate under one of the cages. Five of the positive samples came from a single stall—a stall that was known to be selling live animals in late 2019, and the same stall where Holmes had taken his photograph of the raccoon dogs five years earlier.

 

This layering of indirect evidence has helped to settle the question of where Covid jumped into humans, but the question of timing has also been a subject of fierce debate. A companion paper explores this using Covid’s molecular clock—what Joel Wertheim, a virologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the paper, calls “that steady drumbeat of mutations accumulating in SARS-CoV-2,” or how the virus shifts over time.

 

It had been assumed that a virus jumping from animals into humans was a piece of cosmic bad luck—a one-off amplified by bad decisionmaking in the days and months that followed. But the genetic data tells a different story. There were actually two strains of Covid circulating in Wuhan in late 2019: Lineage A and Lineage B, which are just two letters apart in their genetic code, according to Jonathan Pekar, a researcher at UC San Diego and another of the study’s coauthors.

 

As Pekar delved deeper into what scientists call the “phylogeny” of SARS-CoV-2—its family tree—it became clear that their understanding of how the disease had crossed over might be wrong. “We eventually figured out that it was better explained by multiple introductions than a single one,” he says. The researchers now think Lineage A—which is more genetically similar to bat coronaviruses, and so appears earlier in the virus’s family tree—was actually introduced into humans after Lineage B. Lineage B ended up becoming the dominant global variant: both persisted for a while, but Delta, Omicron, and the rest of the variants that swept the globe are descended from B, not A.

 

Pekar now thinks there were actually up to a dozen separate crossover events, because in order for a disease like Covid to “take”—to go beyond its initial human host and start an epidemic—it needs to infect someone who’s going to spread it widely, and not everyone does. “Roughly 70 percent of introductions go extinct, so you need eight introductions to have two that persist,” Pekar says.

 

It might seem unlikely that a once-in-a-generation event happened twice within the space of a couple of weeks, but actually, says Wertheim, once all the conditions were in place—a zoonotic virus capable of human infection in close proximity to humans—it would have been surprising if it had only happened once. The barriers to spillover had been lowered. “We failed to climb Mount Everest for thousands of years, and then in one day two people did,” says Andersen.

 

The fact that the virus likely crossed over twice in quick succession is significant for two reasons: first, because multiple introductions damage the lab leak hypothesis—although like all conspiracy theories, it will likely contort itself into some new variant that hand-waves this away; and secondly, because it rules out Covid being introduced into the market from a human who caught it elsewhere. “This is so concordant with what we’ve seen with other epidemics that it makes any other scenario implausible, because you’d have to have an introduction of one virus and then we’d have to wait a week or two and have an introduction of another virus that is kind of similar but not the same,” Pekar says.

 

There’s been a narrative throughout the pandemic of Chinese obfuscation making matters worse—fueled by the same political tensions and mistrust that have made the lab leak theory so compelling to some. And while Chinese authorities undoubtedly made mistakes and obstructed access to information at times, it’s only the data collected by Chinese scientists that has made such detailed analysis of the origins of Covid possible at all. If, as these papers indicate, SARS-CoV-2 first crossed over in late November 2019, it took just a matter of weeks for doctors to figure out there was an epidemic, compared to several months for the 2014 Ebola outbreak and a year and a half for Zika. “The fact is we have an unprecedented view of the early picture of this pandemic compared to any pandemic in human history,” says Worobey. “There’s nothing like it.”

 

It means we have environmental sampling data that can place the spillover event precisely in the southwestern corner of the Huanan market, and genetic testing of virus samples from the first patients to give us a date: around November 18, 2019, for the introduction of Lineage B, with Lineage A following a week or so later. After that, though, the trail runs cold.

 

The researchers know which animals were being sold in the market in late 2019, and which ones were susceptible to coronaviruses, but they don’t have the smoking gun. “They don’t have samples from animals that had the virus. That’s what they’d like to have, and they’d like to be able to trace those animals back to the farms from which they came and see whether people in those farms had been exposed to the virus or viruses,” says Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, who was not involved in the research.

 

That’s unlikely to be possible. There are theories on how infected animals may have reached the market: Wuhan is in Hubei province, and to the west of the region there are caves that are home to horseshoe bats, close to farms that once housed millions of raccoon dogs and civets. The most likely course of events is something like: A bat infected with a novel coronavirus flies over a farm where animals are being reared for meat. It poops, and viral particles infect one of the animals below, sparking an unseen wave of infections at the farm. Maybe the virus crosses over to the farmworkers but fizzles out because there’s not enough population density to sustain a human epidemic. Days or weeks later, in November 2019, some of the infected animals are shipped to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where they’re sold at stalls in the southwestern corner. The virus crosses over to humans at least eight times, maybe more. The majority of those infections fizzle out without spreading to anyone else, but two take hold, start to spread. Not long after that, dozens of people in the area start to come down with a mysterious viral pneumonia.

 

But the animal or animals that carried coronavirus are almost certainly long dead: shipped off and sold for meat, or killed in one of the mass culls that took place in early 2020 as the Chinese authorities clamped down on the live animal trade. “It is very possible that we will never have that sample, that we may have missed our opportunity,” says Worobey.

 

But there are still leads to follow: tracing the supply chains for the stalls in the southwestern corner of Huanan market and finding out which farms supplied them; poring over the paperwork from the culls to find out where the animals from that farm were buried; exhuming the animals and sequencing their DNA to look for remnants of a coronavirus that looks almost identical to SARS-CoV-2.

 

It will need patient work and international cooperation in a difficult environment—but it could be the only way to stop the next pandemic. “These things are not impossible,” Worobey says. “So let’s look at all the options. Let’s connect every single possible dot that we can.”

Steam rises from the Hess Oil refinery in Port Reading, New Jersey, partially obfuscating the multistory sign. Together with a light, misty rain, the whole scene had a nice ethereal glow.

 

Taken on a little jaunt where I took the wrong exit trying to get gas in New Jersey before I crossed the Outerbridge Crossing to Staten Island.

 

Processed in Adobe Photoshop CS2. Contact me for high resolution versions for nonpersonal use. DSC_6682 mc lr.

 

See where this picture was taken from. [?]

Potently built, the might that it vaunts

perniciously deft, loftily it flaunts.

 

repose, for now the beast supines.

 

listless and serene, the obfuscated prime.

voliant clouds, a glib passage of time.

 

.......

 

Long exposure shot of the the arm of a tractor/bulldozer.

Infra-red Coyote Capture

These guys are ghosts anyway. At 2 PM on a moonless overcast night, this Coyote was prowling around one of the ranches well treed washes. Several miles into the backcountry my Trail Camera String of 29 rigs (as of spring 2020) has a great capture every now and then. This pregnant female is a good indicator that the species will survive way up here on the high ridges of the MT/WY borderlands.

If I am smarter than the Wiley Coyote caught here, I anticipate where they will walk, place my Trail Camera at 18 inches (hopefully above the flat snow level). I find 18 inches is about perfect for most work. Putting these cameras in the perfect place is a matter of looking for and finding signs of animal heavy use. The cattle pressure up here obliterates or obfuscates a lot of subtle animal sign. I also try to figure out where I’d go if I were a Coyote . I’m not aware of ANY dens ON the ranch. Surrounding ranches I’ve generally been on but haven’t searched as well as I’ve looked about my ground. This is BIG country with lots o’ hidy-holes.

According to the camera, it was 5 degrees F with a new moon when this image was taken. Game Trail Camera Captures using Infrared vision/flash are ALL grainy and lumpy. This is because there is literally no light at this capture. It was likely black as pitch in a box on the top shelf of the basement closet.😜

The 200 dollar game trail camera does a lot better in this environment than any several thousand dollar pro camera lolol…

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Infra-red Coyote Capture

  

blissphotographics.com/infra-red-coyote-capture/

An excellent hunk of equipment from Sumner, WA1JOS. It uses the Jackson Harbor Press PK4 chip, apparently "proprietized" here by Sumner-san himself. As many other OPs have noted before me--this is about as much fun as a fella can get with a 20-dollar bill.

I'm quite new to PIC-based technology, so please bear with my pedestrian description: There are two of the 12F683 chips in this kit. Picture and datasheet here.

It would be really fun to get into PIC programming. I've noticed Bre Pettis doing it over on MakeMagazine.com and it's piqued my interest plenty.

Anyway, when I saw the tops of these chips "blackboxed" I instantly felt like I had to dig up the poop on these chips.

 

UPDATE: I received a comment on a popular QRP radio reflector in regard to these interestingly obfuscated chips from a prominent programmer ham in Prague: The chips are not PICs, but QT-113H. I have little doubts about it, even though

the touchkeyer seller insists it is a custom programmed PIC. I even asked him

directly and he repeats his truth. If it was a custom programmed PIC, then he

will not need to file out the chip label. I built mine with two SMD QT-113H

chips, that I bought from Farnell.

 

You did a fancy job, but the keyer is very insensitive, if you glue the

electrodes directly to the tin. You found it already by trial and error. The

capacitance of the electrodes against the tin is too high. It helps a lot to

elevate them. I placed a piece of plastic ruler between the electrodes and tin.

 

You could find more info on electrodes and sensitivity in QT-113H datasheet.

 

Fair enough. -Jonathan

Angel of History. . .SyphonServerAnnounceNotification / ping /

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .SyphonServerUpdateNotification / ping /

Angel! Only a Mobius strip could describe the frequency of my phase to connect to you, since my suspended ser- vices in 2009 how to transmit this Is this what they mean by a new Line”

Angel of History. . .It’s un-syncable! While I am still progressing backwards into a future, constantly upgrad-

ing to more complex levels of encryption, I can Syphon you! I do understand what you mean with a new Line.” But our connection no longer involves just the transmission of 625 Lines over the air or through a wire. In order to connect, your signal is now transmitted to a local Syphon server, from where it is broadcast as a multiverse of lines, kludged in and pushed through the channels of newer technologies the upgrades.

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .That sounds complex. For some years you still reached out to me, in a broadcast that I could not receive, titled The Collapse of PAL. Would you transmit it to me now

Angel of History. . .The Collapse of PAL broadcast consists of a triptych of obsequies. The first part, Obituary, positions you in what historians call Media Archeology. It reads PAL. Offspring of Walter Bruch—Survived by DVB (MPEG2),” however, the signal is obfuscated through chromatic aberrations, as a result of channels that got misaligned due to our growing anachronisms.

In the second part, Eulogy, I describe my experience of your suspension, while the Horsemen of Progress are pulling me into the realm of DVB.

In the third chapter, Requiem for the Planes of Phosphor, I write that you still exist as a trace left upon newer, better” digital technologies. Even though your technologies are obsolete, I can still render you as a historical form, from which newer technologies are built, inherited, and appropriated.

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .So did you still use Lines for every iteration of The Collapse of PAL

Angel of History. . .No. The Obituary and Eulogy used the signal PAL, but the third part, Requiem for the Planes of Phosphor, involved an array of digital compression technologies, some of which don’t use any kind of line-based encoding system. Besides that, after its inauguration on tv-tv, The Collapse of PAL was broadcast a few dozen times within different frameworks, formats, and nations most of these shows took place in PAL but sometimes they used NTSC. Moreover, The Collapse ran as a recording and as live performance solo or in collaboration. One of my favorite Collapses happened at the Cinemateca Brasileira, Sao Paulo, in 2011. This Brazilian fork of the Col- lapse was a collaboration between Rosa Menkman, Bernhard Fleischmann, the Optical Machines (a Dutch group that performs MIDI-synced shadow-play), and Defi, a graffiti artist from Argentina, and it involved, among an array of analog synthesizers and computers, unprocessed light and paint. I believe these different iterations, the last of which took place in 2012, illustrate that your lines can now exist on a multiverse of vectors.

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .Vectors Do you broadcast vectors How do I process that

Angel of History. . .Think about vectors as objects—in this case visual objects—with a value, a magnitude, and di- rection. You see, I run signals from a future other technologies that introduce new logical systems, frameworks, bandwidths, and formats. I encode and decode these vectors, which evolve over time and are written within a media ecology.

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .Ah, I render that!

Angel of History. . .I am a slave to all of these vectors and I can only re-image these lines, while being dragged along them. It’s the Four White Horsemen who move this carriage.

But let’s be clear since your suspension, none of these better” lines—or new broadcast technologies—have been flawless the DVB signal that replaced you is different, but also inherently flawed. Even the newest and most ad- vanced broadcast technologies possess their inherent flaws.

But I also I decode that these imperfections obtain values within themselves they grow hyperstacks of expres- sions, falling in and out of semantics, as a lexicon of un-phased encodings. Burst! Since we can again broadcast and connect, we can actually create an image together. We can rewrite, fork we can create a daemon!

PAL. . . . . . . . . . . . .We may re-render The Collapse of PAL a love letter!

Angel of History. . . /br , you’re clipping! — ///

SyphonServerRetireNotification

 

Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses various drawing instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium. Instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, various kinds of erasers, markers, styluses, various metals (such as silverpoint), and electronic drawing.

 

An artist who practices or works in technical drawing may be called a drafter, draftsman, or draughtsman.[1]

 

A drawing instrument releases small amount of material onto a surface, leaving a visible mark. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials, such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas, and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard or indeed almost anything. The medium has been a popular and fundamental means of public expression throughout human history. It is one of the simplest and most efficient means of communicating visual ideas.[2] The wide availability of drawing instruments makes drawing one of the most common artistic activities.

Drawing is one of the major forms of expression within the visual arts. It is generally concerned with the marking of lines and areas of tone onto paper, where the accurate representation of the visual world is expressed upon a plane surface.[3] Traditional drawings were monochrome, or at least had little colour,[4] while modern colored-pencil drawings may approach or cross a boundary between drawing and painting. In Western terminology, drawing is distinct from painting, even though similar media often are employed in both tasks. Dry media, normally associated with drawing, such as chalk, may be used in pastel paintings. Drawing may be done with a liquid medium, applied with brushes or pens. Similar supports likewise can serve both: painting generally involves the application of liquid paint onto prepared canvas or panels, but sometimes an underdrawing is drawn first on that same support.

Drawing is often exploratory, with considerable emphasis on observation, problem-solving and composition. Drawing is also regularly used in preparation for a painting, further obfuscating their distinction. Drawings created for these purposes are called studies.

 

There are several categories of drawing, including figure drawing, cartooning, doodling and shading. There are also many drawing methods, such as line drawing, stippling, shading, the surrealist method of entopic graphomania (in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots), and tracing (drawing on a translucent paper, such as tracing paper, around the outline of preexisting shapes that show through the paper).

 

A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch.

 

In fields outside art, technical drawings or plans of buildings, machinery, circuitry and other things are often called "drawings" even when they have been transferred to another medium by printing.

Drawing as a Form of Communication Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression, with evidence for its existence preceding that of written communication.[5] It is believed that drawing was used as a specialised form of communication before the invent of the written language,[5][6] demonstrated by the production of cave and rock paintings created by Homo sapiens sapiens around 30,000 years ago.[7] These drawings, known as pictograms, depicted objects and abstract concepts.[8] The sketches and paintings produced in prehistoric times were eventually stylised and simplified, leading to the development of the written language as we know it today.

 

Drawing in the Arts Drawing is used to express one's creativity, and therefore has been prominent in the world of art. Throughout much of history, drawing was regarded as the foundation for artistic practise.[9] Initially, artists used and reused wooden tablets for the production of their drawings.[10] Following the widespread availability of paper in the 14th century, the use of drawing in the arts increased. At this point, drawing was commonly used as a tool for thought and investigation, acting as a study medium whilst artists were preparing for their final pieces of work.[11][12] In a period of artistic flourish, the Renaissance brought about drawings exhibiting realistic representational qualities,[13] where there was a lot of influence from geometry and philosophy.[14]

 

The invention of the first widely available form of photography led to a shift in the use of drawing in the arts.[15] Photography took over from drawing as a more superior method for accurately representing visual phenomena, and artists began to abandon traditional drawing practises.[16] Modernism in the arts encouraged "imaginative originality"[17] and artists' approach to drawing became more abstract.

 

Drawing Outside of the Arts Although the use of drawing is extensive in the arts, its practice is not confined purely to this field. Before the widespread availability of paper, 12th century monks in European monasteries used intricate drawings to prepare illustrated, illuminated manuscripts on vellum and parchment. Drawing has also been used extensively in the field of science, as a method of discovery, understanding and explanation. In 1616, astronomer Galileo Galilei explained the changing phases of the moon through his observational telescopic drawings.[16] Additionally, in 1924, geophysicist Alfred Wegener used illustrations to visually demonstrate the origin of the continents.[16]

 

Notable draftsmen[edit]

Since the 14th century, each century has produced artists who have created great drawings.

 

Notable draftsmen of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries include Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Notable draftsmen of the 17th century include Claude, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Guercino, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Notable draftsmen of the 18th century include Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Antoine Watteau.

Notable draftsmen of the 19th century include Paul Cézanne, Aubrey Beardsley, Jacques-Louis David, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Edgar Degas, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean Ingres, Odilon Redon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honoré Daumier, and Vincent van Gogh.

Notable draftsmen of the 20th century include Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Arshile Gorky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Alphonse Mucha, M. C. Escher, André Masson, Jules Pascin, and Pablo Picasso.

The medium is the means by which ink, pigment or color are delivered onto the drawing surface. Most drawing media are either dry (e.g. graphite, charcoal, pastels, Conté, silverpoint), or use a fluid solvent or carrier (marker, pen and ink). Watercolor pencils can be used dry like ordinary pencils, then moistened with a wet brush to get various painterly effects. Very rarely, artists have drawn with (usually decoded) invisible ink. Metalpoint drawing usually employs either of two metals: silver or lead.[18] More rarely used are gold, platinum, copper, brass, bronze, and tinpoint.

 

Paper comes in a variety of different sizes and qualities, ranging from newspaper grade up to high quality and relatively expensive paper sold as individual sheets.[19] Papers can vary in texture, hue, acidity, and strength when wet. Smooth paper is good for rendering fine detail, but a more "toothy" paper holds the drawing material better. Thus a coarser material is useful for producing deeper contrast.

 

Newsprint and typing paper may be useful for practice and rough sketches. Tracing paper is used to experiment over a half-finished drawing, and to transfer a design from one sheet to another. Cartridge paper is the basic type of drawing paper sold in pads. Bristol board and even heavier acid-free boards, frequently with smooth finishes, are used for drawing fine detail and do not distort when wet media (ink, washes) are applied. Vellum is extremely smooth and suitable for very fine detail. Coldpressed watercolor paper may be favored for ink drawing due to its texture.

 

Acid-free, archival quality paper keeps its color and texture far longer than wood pulp based paper such as newsprint, which turns yellow and become brittle much sooner.

 

The basic tools are a drawing board or table, pencil sharpener and eraser, and for ink drawing, blotting paper. Other tools used are circle compass, ruler, and set square. Fixative is used to prevent pencil and crayon marks from smudging. Drafting tape is used to secure paper to drawing surface, and also to mask an area to keep it free of accidental marks sprayed or spattered materials and washes. An easel or slanted table is used to keep the drawing surface in a suitable position, which is generally more horizontal than the position used in painting.

Almost all draftsmen use their hands and fingers to apply the media, with the exception of some handicapped individuals who draw with their mouth or feet.[20]

 

Prior to working on an image, the artist typically explores how various media work. They may try different drawing implements on practice sheets to determine value and texture, and how to apply the implement to produce various effects.

 

The artist's choice of drawing strokes affects the appearance of the image. Pen and ink drawings often use hatching—groups of parallel lines.[21] Cross-hatching uses hatching in two or more different directions to create a darker tone. Broken hatching, or lines with intermittent breaks, form lighter tones—and controlling the density of the breaks achieves a gradation of tone. Stippling, uses dots to produce tone, texture or shade. Different textures can be achieved depending on the method used to build tone.[22]

 

Drawings in dry media often use similar techniques, though pencils and drawing sticks can achieve continuous variations in tone. Typically a drawing is filled in based on which hand the artist favors. A right-handed artist draws from left to right to avoid smearing the image. Erasers can remove unwanted lines, lighten tones, and clean up stray marks. In a sketch or outline drawing, lines drawn often follow the contour of the subject, creating depth by looking like shadows cast from a light in the artist's position.

 

Sometimes the artist leaves a section of the image untouched while filling in the remainder. The shape of the area to preserve can be painted with masking fluid or cut out of a frisket and applied to the drawing surface, protecting the surface from stray marks until the mask is removed.

 

Another method to preserve a section of the image is to apply a spray-on fixative to the surface. This holds loose material more firmly to the sheet and prevents it from smearing. However the fixative spray typically uses chemicals that can harm the respiratory system, so it should be employed in a well-ventilated area such as outdoors.

 

Another technique is subtractive drawing in which the drawing surface is covered with graphite or charcoal and then erased to make the image.[23]

Shading is the technique of varying the tonal values on the paper to represent the shade of the material as well as the placement of the shadows. Careful attention to reflected light, shadows and highlights can result in a very realistic rendition of the image.

 

Blending uses an implement to soften or spread the original drawing strokes. Blending is most easily done with a medium that does not immediately fix itself, such as graphite, chalk, or charcoal, although freshly applied ink can be smudged, wet or dry, for some effects. For shading and blending, the artist can use a blending stump, tissue, a kneaded eraser, a fingertip, or any combination of them. A piece of chamois is useful for creating smooth textures, and for removing material to lighten the tone. Continuous tone can be achieved with graphite on a smooth surface without blending, but the technique is laborious, involving small circular or oval strokes with a somewhat blunt point.

 

Shading techniques that also introduce texture to the drawing include hatching and stippling. A number of other methods produce texture. In addition to the choice of paper, drawing material and technique affect texture. Texture can be made to appear more realistic when it is drawn next to a contrasting texture; a coarse texture is more obvious when placed next to a smoothly blended area. A similar effect can be achieved by drawing different tones close together. A light edge next to a dark background stands out to the eye, and almost appears to float above the surface.

 

Form and proportion[edit]Measuring the dimensions of a subject while blocking in the drawing is an important step in producing a realistic rendition of the subject. Tools such as a compass can be used to measure the angles of different sides. These angles can be reproduced on the drawing surface and then rechecked to make sure they are accurate. Another form of measurement is to compare the relative sizes of different parts of the subject with each other. A finger placed at a point along the drawing implement can be used to compare that dimension with other parts of the image. A ruler can be used both as a straightedge and a device to compute proportions.

 

When attempting to draw a complicated shape such as a human figure, it is helpful at first to represent the form with a set of primitive shapes. Almost any form can be represented by some combination of the cube, sphere, cylinder, and cone. Once these basic shapes have been assembled into a likeness, then the drawing can be refined into a more accurate and polished form. The lines of the primitive shapes are removed and replaced by the final likeness. Drawing the underlying construction is a fundamental skill for representational art, and is taught in many books and schools. Its correct application resolves most uncertainties about smaller details, and makes the final image look consistent.[24]

 

A more refined art of figure drawing relies upon the artist possessing a deep understanding of anatomy and the human proportions. A trained artist is familiar with the skeleton structure, joint location, muscle placement, tendon movement, and how the different parts work together during movement. This allows the artist to render more natural poses that do not appear artificially stiff. The artist is also familiar with how the proportions vary depending on the age of the subject, particularly when drawing a portrait.

 

Perspective[edit]

Linear perspective is a method of portraying objects on a flat surface so that the dimensions shrink with distance. Each set of parallel, straight edges of any object, whether a building or a table, follows lines that eventually converge at a vanishing point. Typically this convergence point is somewhere along the horizon, as buildings are built level with the flat surface. When multiple structures are aligned with each other, such as buildings along a street, the horizontal tops and bottoms of the structures typically converge at a vanishing point.When both the fronts and sides of a building are drawn, then the parallel lines forming a side converge at a second point along the horizon (which may be off the drawing paper.) This is a two-point perspective.[25] Converging the vertical lines to a third point above or below the horizon then produces a three-point perspective.

 

Depth can also be portrayed by several techniques in addition to the perspective approach above. Objects of similar size should appear ever smaller the further they are from the viewer. Thus the back wheel of a cart appears slightly smaller than the front wheel. Depth can be portrayed through the use of texture. As the texture of an object gets further away it becomes more compressed and busy, taking on an entirely different character than if it was close. Depth can also be portrayed by reducing the contrast in more distant objects, and by making their colors less saturated. This reproduces the effect of atmospheric haze, and cause the eye to focus primarily on objects drawn in the foreground.

 

The door for one of my son's classess

institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD]

Even though the iRD mimics an institute, in reality it is not a classic, institutional organ. Instead, the iRD multiplexes the term institution, by revisiting its usage in the late 1970s. Back then, Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall formulated the term institution as a ‘more compound framework’, that dealt with the growing complexities at stake when connecting different logical systems (such as databases and programming languages) within computer sciences. While these institutions were put in place to connect different logical systems, they were not logical themselves.

Inspired by the idea of hyper functional, yet illogical frameworks, the iRD is dedicated to researching the interests of anti-utopic, obfuscated, lost and unseen, or simply ‘too good to be implemented’ resolutions.

  

The institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD] call attention to media resolutions.

While ‘the resolution’ generally simply refers to a determination of functional settings in the technological domain, the iRD stresses that a resolution is indeed an overall agreed upon settlement (solution). However, the iRD believes that a resolution also entails a space of compromise between different actors (objects, materialities, and protocols) in dispute over norms (frame rate, number of pixels etc.). Generally, settings either ossify as requirements and de facto standards, or are notated as norms by standardizing organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization. We call this progress*.

However, resolutions are non-neutral standard settings that involve political, economical, technological and cultural values and ideologies, embedded in the genealogies and ecologies of our media. In an uncompromising fashion, quality (fidelity) speed (governed by efficiency) volume (generally encapsulated in tiny-ness for hardware and big when it comes to data) and profit (economic or ownership) have been responsible for plotting this vector of progress. This dogmatic configuration of belief x action has made upgrade culture a great legitimizer of violence, putting many insufficient technological resolutions to rest. While a resolution can thus be understood as a manifold assemblage of common - but contestable - standards, it should also be considered in terms of other options; those that are unknown and unseen, obsolete and unsupported within a time and (technological) space.

 

Resolutions inform both machine vision and human ways of perception. They shape the material of everyday life in a pervasive fashion.

As the media landscape becomes more and more compound, or in other words, an heterogenous assemblage in which one technology never functions on its own, its complexities have moved beyond a fold of everyday settings. Technological standards have compiled into resolution clusters; media platforms that form resolutions like tablelands, flanked by steep cliffs and precipices looking out over obscure, incremental abysses that seem to harbor a mist of unsupported, obsolete norms.

The platforms of resolution now organize perspective. They are the legitimizers of both inclusion and exclusion of what can not be seen or what should be done, while ‘other’ possible resolutions become more and more obscure.

It is important to realize that the platforms of resolutions are not inherently Evil*. They can be impartial. We need to unpack these resolutions and note that they are conditioning our perception. A culture that adheres to only one or a few platforms of resolutions supports nepotism amongst standards. These clusters actively engage simpleness and mask the issues at stake, savoring stupidity, and are finally bound to escalate into glutinous tech-fascism.

 

The question is, have we become unable to define our own resolutions, or have we become oblivious to them?

Resolutions do not just function as an interface effect*, but as hyperopic lens, obfuscating any other possible alternative resolutions from the users screens and media literacy. When we speak about video, we always refer to a four cornered moving image. Why do we not consider video with more or less corners, timelines, or soundtracks? Fonts are monochrome; they do not come with their own textures, gradients or chrominance and luminance mapping. Text editors still follow the lay-out of paper; there is hardly any modularity within written word technologies. Even ghosts, the figments of our imagination, have been conditioned to communicate exclusively through analogue forms of noise (the uncanny per default), while aliens communicate through blocks and lines (the more ‘intelligent’ forms of noise).

The user is hiking the resolution platforms comfortably. He is shielded from the compromises that are at stake inside his resolutions. Unknowingly suffering from this type of technological hyperopia, he keeps staring at the screens that reflect mirage after mirage.

 

A resolution is the lens through which constituted materialities become signifiers in their own right. They resonate the tonality of the users hive mind and constantly transform our technologies into informed material vernaculars.

Technology is evolving faster than we, as a culture, can come to terms with. This is why determinations such as standards are dangerous; they preclude alternatives. The radical digital materialist believes in informed materiality*: while every string of data is ambiguously fluid and has the potential to be manipulated into anything, every piece of information functions within adhesive* encoding, contextualization and embedding. Different forms of ossification slither into every crevice of private life, while unresolved, ungoverned free space seems to be slipping away. This is both the power and the risk of standardization.

 

We are in need for a re-(Re-)Distribution of the Sensible*.

The iRD offers a liminal space for resolution studies. Resolution studies is not only about the effects of technological progress or about the aesthetization of the scales of resolution. Resolution studies is a studies on how resolution embeds the tonalities of culture, in more than just its technological facets.

Resolution studies researches the standards that could have been in place, but are not. As a form of vernacular resistance, based on the concept of providing ambiguous resolutions, the iRD employs the liminal resolution of the screen as a looking-glass. Here, hyperopia is fractured and gives space to myopia, and visa versa. This is how iRD exposes the colors hidden inside the grey mundane objects* of everyday life.

 

The iRD is not a Wunderkammer for dead media*, but a foggy bootleg trail for vernacular resistance.

Progress has fathered many dead technologies. A Wunderkammer, or curiosity cabinet of media resolutions would celebrate these dead objects by trapping them inside a glass bell, relieving them indefinitely of their action radius. While the iRD adheres to the settlements of governing media resolutions, it also welcomes ventures along the bootleg trails of the tactical undead*. These undead move beyond resolution, through the literacies of the governing techno-cultures, into liminal spaces. They follow the wild and uncanny desire paths that cut through sensitive forms and off-limit areas into speculative materialities, futures and critical turns*. They threaten the status quo of secure forms of media and provide the ambiguity that is so necessary for inspiration, action and curiosity.

 

The iRD believes that methods of creative problem creation* can bring authorship back to the layer of resolution setting.

Resolution theory moves against what seems like an unsolvable puzzle of flattening reality. The iRD function one way trail straight into the Sea of Fog and towards the abyss of techno-norms. The iRD can however also be a modular framework, that opens and expands standards through inspection and reflection. As any good theory of media, resolution theory is a theory on literacy. Literacy of the machines, the people, the people creating the machines and the people being created by the machines. Through challenging the platforms of resolution, it can help the wanderer to scale actively between these states of hyperopia and myopia. It can uncover crystal cities of fog as well as shine a light on the soon to be distributed futures. Here we can mine for the yet unscreened timonds.

ob·fus·cate   [ob-fuh-skeyt, ob-fuhs-keyt]

 

verb (used with object), -cat·ed, -cat·ing

.

1. to confuse, bewilder, or stupefy.

2. to make obscure or unclear: to obfuscate a problem with extraneous information.

3. to darken.

In Typographic Obfuscation, 2014 OCAD U Graphic Design medal winner Chris Lange explores ways to defend the privacy of day-to-day personal communication using low-tech and accessible tactics as an alternative to encryption.

(+4)

 

Expired film (circa 2006/7), developed 12/2009

   

In the comments:

1) The individual pictured is discussed here in considerable depth.

2) A former, high school-epoch associate--

3) Chubby (blonde) me and the former best friend-type figure--

4) Contemporary (if obfuscated) me--

  

The original 18 eight-foot sculptures by Jacob Epstein date from 1908, when this building was designed by Charles Holden for the British Medical Association. Although there was a public outcry against the statuary (which would not even lead to a raised eyebrow in 2007), the BMA stood by Epstein.

 

However, when the Rhodesian High Commission bought the building 30 years later, the new owners saw fit to crudely mutilate them on the basis of safety. It does seem that the statues were decaying to some extent, but many feel this is likely to have been a mere pretext - and restoration does not appear to have been considered.

 

The whole event seems to have become shrouded in much obfuscation and myth. This account from Art & Architecture has the ring of authority and balance to me - it acknowledges the safety issue, but considers it simply a pretext for mutilation:

 

www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/insight/brockington_epstein...

 

Other sources I have found introduce wild variants on the story:

 

www.shadyoldlady.com/location.php?loc=923

www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/content.phtml?re...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Epstein

arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1310821,00.html

www.londonist.com/archives/2006/01/londonist_stalk_3.php

 

The most popular story, retailed by both The Londonist, The Guardian and the Shady Lady site, is that a pedestrian was struck by a falling phallus, leading to the mutilation of the statues on safety grounds. This has all the hallmarks of an urban myth or sensationalist journalism to me. There are no specifics in the story (which is the very hallmark of an urban myth), no recourse to primary sources, no date, no name, no injury details, not even the name of the piece the genitalia supposedly fell off (all 18 pieces have names). Wikipedia, refreshingly, refers merely to pieces falling off the statues without mentioning phalluses or even pedestrians being struck, which seems rather more plausible.

 

Two sites, The Guardian and the SL site, refer to the mutilation taking the form of castration of the statues. As we can see from the shots here, not all of them were.

 

The Guardian and Newcastle University (the latter has no truck with the safety issue) erroneously consider all 18 of the statues to be male. They are not, as can be seen from the shots here, and the plaster cast of Maternity on the Arts & Architecture site.

 

The Londonist introduces an extra twist in which the 'building's owners' are ordered (by an unspecified authority) to 'secure' the statues rather than engineering the situation themselves.

 

It's not really the point. What we should be asking is why the owners of a prestigious building on the Strand should see fit not only to mutilate their own building's facade, but to continue to display that mutilation in public when restoration - or complete removal - were both obvious options. I would suggest that they were making a statement.

 

This Weird Place, new work by Lane Hagood, Alika Herreshoff, Cody Ledvina, Lee Piechocki, Anthony Record & Eric Shaw. All six artists engage the unsteady ground between figuration and abstraction using diverse, unique means. Through the flaying of representation through abstraction (and vice versa), both are dissected, and we are allowed a teetering view between revelation and obfuscation.

 

Anthony Record’s images are wrung from the awkward pixels of primitive computer drawing programs, and re-rendered with fastidious care into paintings and needlepoint rugs, which both counter and exalt their origins. Both Eric Shaw and Cody Ledvina work impulsively, in an elemental and pseudo-psychedelic re-examining of the familiar figure through rhythmic amalgamation and deconstruction. Lee Piechocki and Alika Herreshoff’s work serves as a counterbalance, meditative and responsive to the inherent concerns of painting, color, and line (and hinting at, rather than blatant in relation to figuration and intent). Lane Hagood’s approach is scholarly, and rooted in cavernous literary reference which leads to work that both contradicts and acknowledges the post-modern paradox of inescapability from quotation and never-ending intellectual reiteration.

Fried Eggs

 

Oh my God!

 

I freak out every time this happens.

 

Actually I'm instantaneously transported through the decades to the past at that spot when I totally freaked out about this the first time, when I was five years old and shown by my mother the eggs she opened into the pan. They're twins! This never fails to make me a little bit sad. I was aware then, at five years of age, the eggs would develop into chicks, if they were left alone by us and if they were fertilized, just as the fruit seeds I planted in dirt developed into plants, so I was aware then that by eating eggs I was destroying the potential for darling little chicks, and that can put a boy off eggs permanently. I contrive in my mind a farm scene where a hen is sitting on six eggs and then one day seven chicks appear as if by magic -- it's a bloody numerical miracle! -- another of the awesome and delightful mysteries of life. Slain.

 

Speaking of regret over being a baby chicken killer; by cracking open four eggs to whip out a batch of cupcakes, like yesterday, I'm admitting to myself of being a serial chicken-abortionist, and that makes me a little bit sad too. This happens every time I crack open an egg and especially happens whenever I crack open a number of eggs at once, and that transport to childhood happens automatically every time I open up a double-yolk egg. "They'd be twins!" My inner child yells inside from a long-distant past that is still quite present. Then the taint of remembered boyish sadness descends. Then I lift the emotional pall, deftly by practice, and turn to heat up some home-made green chili in the same pan the chicken pre-fetuses were fried, because what would a plate of aborted sadly unfertilized unusually doubled Gallus gallus domesticus ova be without green chili when it's already right there on hand in its little plastic container? Nothing, that's what. I have tortillas too, but they're frozen, and frankly, on chicken-miracle day I can not be bothered with thawing.

 

See how our big fat scientific selves obfuscate with language to assuage and to put a distance between the reality of what we're doing and the experiences of our precious littler emotional selves?

  

Photo 2 of 2

 

Photos for Things Wot I Made Then Ate

This obfuscated C/C++ program in the shape of the Statue of Liberty outputs the text of Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus", the sonnet engraved in the pedestal, when run.

 

A downloadable version is available at www.steven-nichols.com/ladyliberty.php

 

The New Colossus

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

In Typographic Obfuscation, 2014 OCAD U Graphic Design medal winner Chris Lange explores ways to defend the privacy of day-to-day personal communication using low-tech and accessible tactics as an alternative to encryption.

26 June, Spring has been the driest in a decade, with overcast skies obfuscated by the smog of a big city. Since last night strong wind have blown, chasing away the urban muck. The evening light speaks of life's rebirth. The promise of Summer monsoons only a few days away.

 

Two perspectives arise for this photo with dark, light and lotus: Buddhist and Christian.

I took this in one of my favorite places, beside the Celedon Pagoda at the National Museum of Korea. www.museum.go.kr/main/index/index002.jsp Thus, I start with the Asian meaning of the lotus within Buddhism:

Lotuses are symbols of purity and 'spontaneous' generation and hence symbolize divine birth. The lotus is rooted in deep mud and its stem grows through murky water. But the blossom rises above the muck and opens in the sun, beautiful and fragrant. In Buddhism, the lotus represents the true nature of beings, who rise through samsara into the beauty and clarity of enlightenment.

 

Second, my own preferred Christian perspective.

One wanders aimlessly through life. When one hears the call to step out of darkess, with an amount of grace one heeds the call and enters the light of day.

 

Jesus spoke to all the people, saying, “I am the Light of the world. Anyone who follows Me will not walk in darkness. He will have the Light of Life.” John 8:12

 

Nun redete Jesus wieder zu ihnen und sprach: Ich bin das Licht der Welt. Wer mir nachfolgt, wird nicht in der Finsternis wandeln, sondern er wird das Licht des Lebens haben.

 

Jésus leur parla de nouveau. Il dit: «Je suis la lumière du monde. Celui qui me suit ne marchera pas dans les ténèbres, mais il aura au contraire la lumière de la vie.»

 

Otra vez Jesús les habló, diciendo: —Yo soy la luz del mundo; el que me sigue no andará en tinieblas, sino que tendrá la luz de la vida.

 

耶稣又对众人说：“我是世界的光。跟从我的，就不在黑暗里走，必要得着生命的光。”

 

ثُمَّ وَاصَلَ يَسُوعُ كَلامَهُ لِلنّاسِ فَقالَ: «أنا هُوَ النُّورُ لِلعالَمِ. مَنْ يَتْبَعُنِي لا يَمْشِي أبَداً فِي الظُّلْمَةِ، بَلْ يَكُونُ مَعَهُ النُّورُ الَّذِي يَقُودُ إلَى الحَياةِ.»

 

Hillsong, "You'll Come" www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RmZFaruXhs

 

As surely as the sun will rise

You'll come to us

As certain as the dawn appears

 

You'll come let your glory fall

As you respond to us

Spirit Rain, flood into our thirsty hearts again

You'll come.

 

DE COLORES

This is a very high quality, cosmopolitan M1 Garand, and the bolt is a German Sauer and Son unit from Suhl (Thuringia), Germany, on a Breda receiver, and so on.

 

Apparently, the Danish Breda export contract went to 11,000 specimens, and seems to be one of very few deliveries to use five-digit or more serial numbers. Many of the other contracts, ordnance staff and PB-GVT advise, used the more common "four digits & letter turnover" display common in Europe. If there are exceptions to this, they've not yet appeared in the photo lexicon.

 

The Indonesia and Nigerian rifles seem to follow the Italian "continental" pattern, too--four digits, letter lot codes, etc., etc. But we do not yet know if that was true of all of those rather large lots. Not enough specimens have been seen and handled.

 

I have not yet entirely lost interest in the M1 Garand, but I sure as hell am tired of discussing it with folks who refuse to fact check ANYTHING. Another major beef: crackpot scumbags with any but imaginary background or credentials, proffering up b.s. and swami-salami "facts"/"beliefs" as authoritative.

 

For reasons I cannot grasp, it seems far easier for an ignorant, narrowly experienced clown to say, "That's wrong!", than for someone who's been doing his homework for so very, very long.

  

After all those hours spent at a microscope, doing metal and finish work, and using UV and IR to do metal analysis, and spending ALL that money on calls, letters, telexes, all over the U.S. and Europe, it just annoys hell out of me that some joker can just make up crap, based upon a rifle he owns or saw somewhere, or even a hundred, and then attack me. Such novices deserve everything rotten that happens to them, but I'll be damned if I'm wasting another ten minutes of my time on that sort of raving disaster waiting to happen.

 

Obviously, this cosmopolitan piece was not built to be in original configuration.

 

It is a stainless 1 turn in 12" barreled unit, in .308, a vastly more efficient, practical, modern and accurate round, far more similar to the original .276 Pedersen Center fire than was the .30 Model of 1906 with which this design fought in WW2 and Korea.

 

There's no longer any point building competition, recreation, or "shooting" rifles in the ancient and obsolete .30/06 loading any more. Its use always limited the rifle, anyway.

 

Accuracy is determined by scientific examination with optimum ammunition in hard fixtures, over long periods of times. Anecdotal BULLSHIT about someone shooting this or that rifle and doing a particular thing, even if TRUE, is not useful information. The superior accuracy of the newer, shorter cartridge was established by Ackley, others at Aberdeen, and hundreds of other places. Lying sonsofbitches who tell yarns merely obfuscate reality.

 

Doesn't matter much to me.

  

Plus, between my eyesight, the breathing issues, and a lot of other deterioration, I can't shoot well enough to pass muster even at informal family outings. As of late summer of 2021, this is changing for the better, due to cataract surgery, a major program of weights and machines in pulmonary rehabilitation, and just plain cussed determination.

 

The logo is a stylized Alpini Bersaglieri ( apologies, Jins, if I didn't spell that right or phrase it properly) logo, with the "N" for "NATO". Laminated maple/walnut.

 

Fully copyrighted, all rights reserved. No reproduction of any kind without express WRITTEN permission.

To "save" money Haringey Council decided to close one of the two Reuse and Recycling Centres in our London borough. The Centre in Park View Road, Tottenham N17 closed on 23 October 2017. (Please scroll down to see a map.)

 

This photo is one of several taken by our friend and neighbour Martin Ball on Sunday afternoon 29 October 2017. Posted here with his permission.

 

A "saving" or a "cut"?

 

What is the impact locally of the closure? The answer seems plain. Our borough had two centres: one in the richer west of Haringey and one in the poorer east. Now there is just one in the west. A service halved. How can Haringey Council and its apologists summon up the magic of 'spin' to tell a different story? Maybe pretending this isn't so bad? Or, not a cut at all, but an improvement?

 

They can indeed. Their upbeat "narrative" is set out on the Council's website. If you haven't got time to plough through the obfuscation here's a summary.

 

Here's the Story.

Once upon a time in the area now now known as the Reuse and Recycling Centre there was a municipal facility for emptying household dustbins (waste bins). I've heard older residents call it the "Dust Destructor" and on a old map I've seen it labelled as "The Refuse Destructor". Others may refer to "the tip" or the "the dump".

 

A second Centre was opened at Western Road, Hornsey. According Haringey's website, this is "a larger and more modern site".

 

So where can people now take waste and recycling? The official website says that "Haringey residents can take their waste" to "a number of other recycling centres that you can use for free in North London". These include recycling centres in: North Finchley; Kentish Town; Islington; Chingford; Walthamstow; and in Leyton.

 

Now isn't that helpful and exciting? Exploring new parts of North East London.

 

Pack up your rubbish

In your friend's car boot

And drive, drive, drive.

As long as you've a satnav

To plot the route

You finally arrive.

What's the use

complaining?

It never is worthwhile.

So hoik your waste

On the nearest bus

And smile smile smile.

 

§ The original song.

My super-rant ahead: The common belief of how trees became petrified is a myth of science. Petrified wood, and all the formations of the US Southwest, are brimming with strong evidence of a world-wide flood that covered the earth several thousand years ago, and quickly burried these trees under mud and sediment. The cystalization process was quite quick, compared to accepted scientific timeframes. (Info for that here: earthage.org/EarthOldorYoung/scientific_evidence_for_a_worldwide_flood.htm)

 

There is ample evidence for this account, but that evidence is ignored, so you won't hear any of it in the media. Or if you do hear it, it's derided with all manner of logical falacies and strawman arguments to discredit, and make the other positions look weak and ill-conceived. It's no wonder that the common man doesn't give such arguments a second thought, trusting "the experts" instead.

 

However, giving attention to the other side of such arguments would expose the flimsy foundations of mainstream science (i.e. beliefs like: everything came from nothing, big bang, evolution, universe/earth are billions of years old, no god, we are insignificant specs of dust in an endless universe, this reality and all you see is just convenient coincidence, etc).

 

Mainstream science is very much a faith-based religion, albeit a well disguised one. They have woven a false belief system with just enough truth sprinkled in to keep people invested in it, as the one-and-only possible view of how the world works and our place in it. This system continues to push the mainstream narrative without question, ignoring evidence, obfuscating, leading public opinion away from questioning the version of reality they're given, and away from the overwhelming proof of there being One true Creator of all things, our significance and our purpose in His design.

 

Science has been built on a foundation of deceit through its heavily controlled and funded, but extremely dumbed-down egocentric legions of scientists (scientific priests) for centuries to give the public a form of stiffled scientific advancement, while keeping them ignorant, and dismissive of anything that stands to question the foundational beliefs of science. Scientists who DO question and consider exposing the problems with their "on the shoulders of giants" textbook assumptions, face ridicule in their industries and career suicide.

 

This is why I always say, if you care to get closer to the truth of earth's past, humanity's past, the purpose of life, and where we're going, you have to accept that truth is never given so easily. But since most of us want it to be that easy, the con artists running this world are only too happy to oblige, at your expense.

 

Truth has to be diligently sought out, outside of mainstream circles. media, academia and the well funded religion of science will never admit that they've been wrong. Too much is at stake, too many jobs and industries, cultures, false religions and manmade institutions would be disrupted or dissolve entirely. That won't be allowed to happen, so the chrarade will continue.

 

Yeshua (Jesus) said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me."

 

The road to the truth is in Him, and He reveals these things to us if we strip away the layers of nonsense we've been taught all our lives.

 

Crystal Forest,

Petrified Forest National Park

For Wardrobe Remix.

 

I was on a mission to obfuscate - cognitive dissonance is when you wear a cardigan and a pair of shades at the same time. And I would have uploaded a picture of myself after the haircut except that I looked exceptionally . . . bald, as my stylist is wont to regard my scalp as a timeless fashion accessory.

 

- m)phosis black cardigan, pale green chiffon pleated flapper blouse and black berms

- Melissa+Campana iridiscient red pumps

- Vintage shades from Tokyo

- Vintage red earrings with gold stripes

- Vintage gold diamante necklace

- Plastic gold links chain and faux snakeskin white bag from FEP

- Assorted bangles

- Seiko Kinetic watch

This was probably my luckiest shot of the 2020 Great Conjunction, taken with a Canon T5i/700D and a 300mm lens. Weather was *really* bad for weeks here and I had a very narrow time window to get the planets above the horizon while the Sun is bellow. The clouds made me miss the maximum approximation day (Dec 21st) but I got this one from Dec 24th.

 

The bigger light point in the top of the image is Jupiter with the Galilean Moons: Callisto is visible in the dot farthest from the planet, Ganymede and Europa are merged together in the indistinguishable oval blob near to Jupiter, while Io is completely obfuscated by the planet's light.

 

Saturn is visible in the lower part, but undistinguished from its rings: at the moment this picture was taken, their angle relative to Earth made them appear as an oval shape, and the lack of resolution from the image merged them together.

 

Picture is a single 0,5s exposure at ISO 3200 and f/5.6; minimum editing done in RawTherapee and the image was cropped to better frame the planets.

Compared to 2017, this year’s doc scene felt somehow less vibrant (if stats have any value, I listed half the number of entries but I’ve seen the same amount). Nonetheless, two YouTube montages stood out: The Road Movie and Our New President, both set in Russia and both dealing with the post-tv mediascape. The former dispenses an overdose of dash-cam footage to provide a post-human look at the state of the country through the eyes of vehicular subjectivity (in a sense, The Road Movie is the ultimate Ballardian film). The latter is an assemblage of Russian propaganda aimed at both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump collected from YouTube, RT, and other shady media platforms. I listed Dirty Money at number two, but I really meant only the first episode, directed by Alex Gibney, on the so-called Dieselgate. Gibney’s masterful reconstruction of the Volkswagen’s scandal highlights the connection between Nazism, technocratic rationalism, the car manufacturing industry as a whole, and climate change. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, instead it merely illustrates that greed is a bottomless pit. In many ways, Dieselgate is the reason why these days France is on fire and Emmanuel Macron will be likely remembered as the most hated President in the history of the country. Money is not only dirty, but also dark. Kimberly Reed’s eponymous doc felt like the sequel to Get Me Roger Stone! They both make clear that the American political system in inherently rotten and unless a major overhaul is undertaken, the future will be bleaker than the dystopian present we live in (see Lawrence Lessig’s new book, America Compromised). Minervini’s latest film – the only doc that I saw at a film festival this year (Venice) – confirms his status as the most talented Italian director working today – while Carlo Ferrand’s fascinating mixed-media portrait of Walter Benjamin (courtesy of Festival Scope) is not as enlightening as I hoped, but it is nonetheless, grand. PFOA, the synthetic chemical used in Teflon that has been contaminating non human animals and human animals since its creation it’s the “protagonist” of The Devil We Know. DuPont has been aware of the toxicity of this substance since 1961 and, obviously, has not done anything about it aside from obfuscating maneuvers and PR-campaigns about its “safety”. Stephanie Soechtig’s documentary is basically an update to Marie-Monique Robin’s The World According to Monsanto: Who’s more evil, Monsanto/Bayer or Dupont? It’s like asking if vampires are more lethal than zombies. Corporate America will definitely kill you either with Roundup, subprimes loans, or Teflon. The Devil We Know is also the best (real) horror film of the year, as the title suggests. The most shocking revelation of Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?? is that Mister Rogers was a Republican. It’s an ironic discovery – at least for me – considering that today the GOP stands for everything that the popular TV presenter despised: bigotry, racism, ignorance, corruption, misogyny, and, again, greed. Liz Garbus’s analysis on The New York Times’s reaction to the Trump election was already anachronistic by the time it was released, pace Michael Barbaro. It’s not her fault: the 24-hour news cycle is not exactly conducive to the documentary format. Alyson Clayman’s doc Take Your Pills is the unofficial adaptation of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7. I gave her extra points for featuring my heroine, UC Berkeley’s Professor Wendy Brown. Shirkers, Three Identical Strangers, Wild Wild Country, Eating Animals left me cold. Generation Wealth was a huge disappointment. Among the many docs I missed this year are Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, RaMell Ross’s Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, and Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap (mea culpa). The most depressing doc of the year was, by far, Bert Marcus’s The American Meme: a useful (?) reminder that social media have irreparably damaged our society. The most depressing doc of the year was, by far, Bert Marcus’s The American Meme. It confirms what we already knew: We’re living in the end of times.

Diaea dorsata crab spider , hiding in plain sight on a hazel leaf.

The original 18 eight-foot sculptures by Jacob Epstein date from 1908, when this building was designed by Charles Holden for the British Medical Association. Although there was a public outcry against the statuary (which would not even lead to a raised eyebrow in 2007), the BMA stood by Epstein.

 

However, when the Rhodesian High Commission bought the building 30 years later, the new owners saw fit to crudely mutilate them on the basis of safety. It does seem that the statues were decaying to some extent, but many feel this is likely to have been a mere pretext - and restoration does not appear to have been considered.

 

The whole event seems to have become shrouded in much obfuscation and myth. This account from Art & Architecture has the ring of authority and balance to me - it acknowledges the safety issue, but considers it simply a pretext for mutilation:

 

www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/insight/brockington_epstein...

 

Other sources I have found introduce wild variants on the story:

 

www.shadyoldlady.com/location.php?loc=923

www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/content.phtml?re...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Epstein

arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1310821,00.html

www.londonist.com/archives/2006/01/londonist_stalk_3.php

 

The most popular story, retailed by both The Londonist, The Guardian and the Shady Lady site, is that a pedestrian was struck by a falling phallus, leading to the mutilation of the statues on safety grounds. This has all the hallmarks of an urban myth or sensationalist journalism to me. There are no specifics in the story (which is the very hallmark of an urban myth), no recourse to primary sources, no date, no name, no injury details, not even the name of the piece the genitalia supposedly fell off (all 18 pieces have names). Wikipedia, refreshingly, refers merely to pieces falling off the statues without mentioning phalluses or even pedestrians being struck, which seems rather more plausible.

 

Two sites, The Guardian and the SL site, refer to the mutilation taking the form of castration of the statues. As we can see from the shots here, not all of them were.

 

The Guardian and Newcastle University (the latter has no truck with the safety issue) erroneously consider all 18 of the statues to be male. They are not, as can be seen from the shots here, and the plaster cast of Maternity on the Arts & Architecture site.

 

The Londonist introduces an extra twist in which the 'building's owners' are ordered (by an unspecified authority) to 'secure' the statues rather than engineering the situation themselves.

 

It's not really the point. What we should be asking is why the owners of a prestigious building on the Strand should see fit not only to mutilate their own building's facade, but to continue to display that mutilation in public when restoration - or complete removal - were both obvious options. I would suggest that they were making a statement.

 

This image is of a working (!) C program that computes the value of π. (I think. I haven't actually checked the code. That's part of the point of the contest, I think.)

I've been a mite busy lately, and not Flickring so much. Here is one of the reasons: YouthCentral

 

Had to do a re-skin for this project to tie in with the Games. It isn't perfect from a standards perspective, but given incredibly tight deadlines and very detailed requirements from one of my favourite clients, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved

 

Screenshot taken with the excellent Firefox extension, Screen Grab!. Interestingly, it enacted the JS for the sIFR, but not the JS for the scrolling Right Here, Right Now box (good thing it degrades well, huh?)

 

See? I actually do things besides take photos and talk rubbish on the web! ;)

 

For those who have no idea what any of the above means, don't worry too much. I belong to a thoroughly obscure profession that is often obfuscated by jargon, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. In real English, no less!

WHAT proofs have we that the Egyptians were a colony from Atlantis?

 

1. They claimed descent from "the twelve great gods," which must have meant the twelve gods of Atlantis, to wit, Poseidon and Cleito and their ten sons.

 

2. According to the traditions of the Phœnicians, the Egyptians derived their civilization from them; and as the Egyptians far antedated the rise of the Phœnician nations proper, this must have meant that Egypt derived its civilization from the same country to which the Phœnicians owed their own origin. The Phœnician legends show that Misor, from whom, the Egyptians were descended, was the child of the Phœnician gods Amynus and Magus. Misor gave birth to Taaut, the god of letters, the inventor of the alphabet, and Taaut became Thoth, the god of history of the Egyptians. Sanchoniathon tells us that "Chronos (king of Atlantis) visited the South, and gave all Egypt to the god Taaut, that it might be his kingdom." "Misor" is probably the king "Mestor" named by Plato.

 

3. According to the Bible, the Egyptians were descendants of Ham, who was one of the three sons of Noah who escaped from the Deluge, to wit, the destruction of Atlantis.

 

4. The great similarity between the Egyptian civilization and that of the American nations.

 

5. The fact that the Egyptians claimed to be red men.

 

6. The religion of Egypt was pre-eminently sun-worship, and Ra was the sun-god of Egypt, Rama, the sun of the Hindoos,

 

p. 359

 

[paragraph continues]Rana, a god of the Toltecs, Raymi, the great festival of the sun of the Peruvians, and Rayam, a god of Yemen.

 

7. The presence of pyramids in Egypt and America.

 

8. The Egyptians were the only people of antiquity who were well-informed as to the history of Atlantis. The Egyptians were never a maritime people, and the Atlanteans must have brought that knowledge to them. They were not likely to send ships to Atlantis.

 

9. We find another proof of the descent of the Egyptians from Atlantis in their belief as to the "under-world." This land of the dead was situated in the West--hence the tombs were all placed, whenever possible, on the west bank of the Nile. The constant cry of the mourners as the funeral procession moved forward was, "To the west; to the west." This under-world was beyond the water, hence the funeral procession always crossed a body of water. "Where the tombs were, as in most cases, on the west bank of the Nile, the Nile was crossed; where they were on the eastern shore the procession passed over a sacred lake." (R. S. Poole, Contemporary Review, August, 1881, p. 17.) In the procession was "a sacred ark of the sun."

 

All this is very plain: the under-world in the West, the land of the dead, was Atlantis, the drowned world, the world beneath the horizon, beneath the sea, to which the peasants of Brittany looked from Cape Raz, the most western cape projecting into the Atlantic. It was only to be reached from Egypt by crossing the water, and it was associated with the ark, the emblem of Atlantis in all lands.

 

The soul of the dead man was supposed to journey to the under-world by "a water progress" (Ibid., p. 18), his destination was the Elysian Fields, where mighty corn grew, and where he was expected to cultivate the earth; "this task was of supreme importance." (Ibid., p. 19.) The Elysian Fields were the "Elysion" of the Greeks, the abode of the blessed, which we have seen was an island in the remote west." The Egyptian

 

p. 360

 

belief referred to a real country; they described its cities, mountains, and rivers; one of the latter was called Uranes, a name which reminds us of the Atlantean god Uranos. In connection with all this we must not forget that Plato described Atlantis as "that sacred island lying beneath the sun." Everywhere in the ancient world we find the minds of men looking to the west for the land of the dead. Poole says, "How then can we account for this strong conviction? Surely it must be a survival of an ancient belief which flowed in the very veins of the race." (Contemporary Review, 1881, p. 19.) It was based on an universal tradition that under "an immense ocean," in "the far west," there was an "under-world," a world comprising millions of the dead, a mighty race, that had been suddenly swallowed up in the greatest catastrophe known to man since he had inhabited the globe.

 

10. There is no evidence that the civilization of Egypt was developed in Egypt itself; it must have been transported there from some other country. To use the words of a recent writer in Blackwood,

 

"Till lately it was believed that the use of the papyrus for writing was introduced about the time of Alexander the Great; then Lepsius found the hieroglyphic sign of the papyrus-roll on monuments of the twelfth dynasty; afterward be found the same sign on monuments of the fourth dynasty, which is getting back pretty close to Menes, the protomonarch; and, indeed, little doubt is entertained that the art of writing on papyrus was understood as early as the days of Menes himself. The fruits of investigation in this, as m many other subjects, are truly most marvellous. Instead of exhibiting the rise and progress of any branches of knowledge, they tend to prove that nothing had any rise or progress, but that everything is referable to the very earliest dates. The experience of the Egyptologist must teach him to reverse the observation of Topsy, and to '`spect that nothing growed,' but that as soon as men were planted on the banks of the Nile they were already the cleverest men that ever lived, endowed with more knowledge and more power than their successors for centuries and centuries could

 

p. 361

 

attain to. Their system of writing, also, is found to have been complete from the very first. . . .

 

"But what are we to think when the antiquary, grubbing in the dust and silt of five thousand years ago to discover some traces of infant effort--some rude specimens of the ages of Magog and Mizraim, in which we may admire the germ that has since developed into a wonderful art--breaks his shins against an article so perfect that it equals if it does not excel the supreme stretch of modern ability? How shall we support the theory if it come to our knowledge that, before Noah was cold in his grave, his descendants were adepts in construction and in the fine arts, and that their achievements were for magnitude such as, if we possess the requisite skill, we never attempt to emulate? . . .

 

"As we have not yet discovered any trace of the rude, savage Egypt, but have seen her in her very earliest manifestations already skilful, erudite, and strong, it is impossible to determine the order of her inventions. Light may yet be thrown upon her rise and progress, but our deepest researches have hitherto shown her to us as only the mother of a most accomplished race. How they came by their knowledge is matter for speculation; that they possessed it is matter of fact. We never find them without the ability to organize labor, or shrinking from the very boldest efforts in digging canals and irrigating, in quarrying rock, in building, and in sculpture."

 

The explanation is simple: the waters of the Atlantic now flow over the country where all this magnificence and power were developed by slow stages from the rude beginnings of barbarism.

 

And how mighty must have been the parent nation of which this Egypt was a colony!

 

Egypt was the magnificent, the golden bridge, ten thousand years long, glorious with temples and pyramids, illuminated and illustrated by the most complete and continuous records of human history, along which the civilization of Atlantis, in a great procession of kings and priests, philosophers and astronomers, artists and artisans, streamed forward to Greece, to Rome, to Europe, to America. As far back in the ages as the

 

p. 362

 

eye can penetrate, even where the perspective dwindles almost to a point, we can still see the swarming multitudes, possessed of all the arts of the highest civilization, pressing forward from out that other and greater empire of which even this wonderworking Nile-land is but a faint and imperfect copy.

 

Look at the record of Egyptian greatness as preserved in her works: The pyramids, still in their ruins, are the marvel of mankind. The river Nile was diverted from its course by monstrous embankments to make a place for the city of Memphis. The artificial lake of Mœris was created as a reservoir for the waters of the Nile: it was four hundred and fifty miles in circumference and three hundred and fifty feet deep, with subterranean channels, flood-gates, locks, and dams, by which the wilderness was redeemed from sterility. Look at the magnificent mason-work of this ancient people! Mr. Kenrick, speaking of the casing of the Great Pyramid, says, "The joints are scarcely perceptible, and not wider than the thickness of silver-paper, and the cement so tenacious that fragments of the casing-stones still remain in their original position, notwithstanding the lapse of so many centuries, and the violence by which they were detached." Look at the ruins of the Labyrinth, which aroused the astonishment of Herodotus; it had three thousand chambers, half of them above ground and half below--a combination of courts, chambers, colonnades, statues, and pyramids. Look at the Temple of Karnac, covering a square each side of which is eighteen hundred feet. Says a recent writer, "Travellers one and all appear to have been unable to find words to express the feelings with which these sublime remains inspired them. They have been astounded and overcome by the magnificence and the prodigality of workmanship here to be admired. Courts, halls, gate-ways, pillars, obelisks, monolithic figures, sculptures, rows of sphinxes, are massed in such profusion that the sight is too much for modern comprehension." Denon says, "It is hardly possible to believe, after having seen it, in the reality of the existence of so many buildings

 

p. 363

 

collected on a single point--in their dimensions, in the resolute perseverance which their construction required, and in the incalculable expense of so much magnificence." And again, "It is necessary that the reader should fancy what is before him to be a dream, as he who views the objects themselves occasionally yields to the doubt whether he be perfectly awake." There were lakes and mountains within the periphery of the sanctuary. "The cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris could be set inside one of the halls of Karnac, and not touch the walls! . . . The whole valley and delta of the Nile, from the Catacombs to the sea, was covered with temples, palaces, tombs, pyramids, and pillars." Every stone was covered with inscriptions.

 

The state of society in the early days of Egypt approximated very closely to our modern civilization. Religion consisted in the worship of one God and the practice of virtue; forty-two commandments prescribed the duties of men to themselves, their neighbors, their country, and the Deity; a heaven awaited the good and a hell the vicious; there was a judgment-day when the hearts of men were weighed:

 

"He is sifting out the hearts of men

Before his judgment-seat."

 

Monogamy was the strict rule; not even the kings, in the early days, were allowed to have more than one wife. The wife's rights of separate property and her dower were protected by law; she was "the lady of the house;" she could "buy, sell, and trade on her own account;" in case of divorce her dowry was to be repaid to her, with interest at a high rate. The marriage-ceremony embraced an oath not to contract any other matrimonial alliance. The wife's status was as high in the earliest days of Egypt as it is now in the most civilized nations of Europe or America.

 

Slavery was permitted, but the slaves were treated with the greatest humanity. In the confessions, buried with the dead,

 

p. 364

 

the soul is made to declare that "I have not incriminated the slave to his master," There was also a clause in the commandments "which protected the laboring man against the exaction of more than his day's labor." They were merciful to the captives made in war; no picture represents torture inflicted upon them; while the representation of a sea-fight shows them saving their drowning enemies. Reginald Stuart Poole says (Contemporary Review, August, 1881, p. 43):

 

"When we consider the high ideal of the Egyptians, as proved by their portrayals of a just life, the principles they laid down as the basis of ethics, the elevation of women among them, their humanity in war, we must admit that their moral place ranks very high among the nations of antiquity.

 

"The true comparison of Egyptian life is with that of modern nations. This is far too difficult a task to be here undertaken. Enough has been said, however, to show that we need not think that in all respects they were far behind us."

 

Then look at the proficiency in art of this ancient people.

 

They were the first mathematicians of the Old World. Those Greeks whom we regard as the fathers of mathematics were simply pupils of Egypt. They were the first land-surveyors. They were the first astronomers, calculating eclipses, and watching the periods of planets and constellations. They knew the rotundity of the earth, which it was supposed Columbus had discovered!

 

"The signs of the zodiac were certainly in use among the Egyptians 1722 years before Christ. One of the learned men of our day, who for fifty years labored to decipher the hieroglyphics of the ancients, found upon a mummy-case in the British Museum a delineation of the signs of the zodiac, and the position of the planets; the date to which they pointed was the autumnal equinox of the year 1722 B.C. Professor Mitchell, to whom the fact was communicated, employed his assistants to ascertain the exact position of the heavenly bodies belonging to our solar system on the equinox of that year. This was done, and a diagram furnished by parties ignorant of his object, which showed that on the 7th of October, 1722 B.C.

 

p. 365

 

the moon and planets occupied the exact point in the heavens marked upon the coffin in the British Museum." (Goodrich's "Columbus," p. 22.)

 

They had clocks and dials for measuring time. They possessed gold and silver money. They were the first agriculturists of the Old World, raising all the cereals, cattle, horses, sheep, etc. They manufactured linen of so fine a quality that in the days of King Amasis (600 years B.C.) a single thread of a garment was composed of three hundred and sixty-five minor threads. They worked in gold, silver, copper, bronze, and iron; they tempered iron to the hardness of steel. They were the first chemists. The word "chemistry" comes from chemi, and chemi means Egypt. They manufactured glass and all kinds of pottery; they made boats out of earthenware; and, precisely as we are now making railroad car-wheels of paper, they manufactured vessels of paper. Their dentists filled teeth with gold; their farmers hatched poultry by artificial beat. They were the first musicians; they possessed guitars, single and double pipes, cymbals, drums, lyres, harps, flutes, the sambric, ashur, etc.; they had even castanets, such as are now used in Spain. In medicine and surgery they had reached such a degree of perfection that several hundred years B.C. the operation for the removal of cataract from the eye was performed among them; one of the most delicate and difficult feats of surgery, only attempted by us in the most recent times. "The papyrus of Berlin" states that it was discovered, rolled up in a case, under the feet of an Anubis in the town of Sekhem, in the days of Tet (or Thoth), after whose death it was transmitted to King Sent, and was then restored to the feet of the statue. King Sent belonged to the second dynasty, which flourished 4751 B.C., and the papyrus was old in his day. This papyrus is a medical treatise; there are in it no incantations or charms; but it deals in reasonable remedies, draughts, unguents and injections. The later medical papyri contain a great deal of magic and incantations.

 

p. 366

 

"Great and splendid as are the things which we know about oldest Egypt, she is made a thousand times more sublime by our uncertainty as to the limits of her accomplishments. She presents not a great, definite idea, which, though hard to receive, is, when once acquired, comprehensible and clear. Under the soil of the modern country are hid away thousands and thousands of relics which may astonish the world for ages to come, and change continually its conception of what Egypt was. The effect of research seems to be to prove the objects of it to be much older than we thought them to be--some things thought to be wholly modern having been proved to be repetitions of things Egyptian, and other things known to have been Egyptian being by every advance in knowledge carried back more and more toward the very beginning of things. She shakes our most rooted ideas concerning the world's history; she has not ceased to be a puzzle and a lure: there is a spell over her still."

 

Renan says, "It has no archaic epoch." Osborn says, "It bursts upon us at once in the flower of its highest perfection." Seiss says ("A, Miracle in Stone," p. 40), "It suddenly takes its place in the world in all its matchless magnificence, without father, without mother, and as clean apart from all evolution as if it had dropped from the unknown heavens." It had dropped from Atlantis.

 

Rawlinson says ("Origin of Nations," p. 13):

 

"Now, in Egypt, it is notorious that there is no indication of any early period of savagery or barbarism. All the authorities agree that, however far back we go, we find in Egypt no rude or uncivilized time out of which civilization is developed. Menes, the first king, changes the course of the Nile, makes a great reservoir, and builds the temple of Phthah at Memphis. . . . We see no barbarous customs, not even the habit, so slowly abandoned by all people, of wearing arms when not on military service."

 

Tylor says (" Anthropology," p. 192):

 

"Among the ancient cultured nations of Egypt and Assyria handicrafts had already come to a stage which could only have

 

p. 367

 

been reached by thousands of years of progress. In museums still may be examined the work of their joiners, stone-cutters, goldsmiths, wonderful in skill and finish, and in putting to shame the modern artificer. . . . To see gold jewellery of the highest order, the student should examine that of the ancients, such as the Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan."

 

The carpenters' and masons' tools of the ancient Egyptians were almost identical with those used among us to-day.

 

There is a plate showing an Aztec priestess in Delafield's "Antiquities of America," p. 61, which presents a head-dress strikingly Egyptian. In the celebrated "tablet of the cross," at Palenque, we see a cross with a bird perched upon it, to which (or to the cross) two priests are offering sacrifice. In Mr. Stephens's representation from the Vocal Memnon we find almost the same thing, the difference being that, instead of an ornamented Latin cross, we have a crux commissa, and instead of one bird there are two, not on the cross, but immediately above it. In both cases the hieroglyphics, though the characters are of course different, are disposed upon the stone in much the same manner. (Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. v., p. 61.)

 

Even the obelisks of Egypt have their counterpart in America.

 

Quoting from Molina ("History of Chili," tom. i., p. 169), McCullough writes, "Between the hills of Mendoza and La Punta is a pillar of stone one hundred and fifty feet high, and twelve feet in diameter." ("Researches," pp. 171, 172.) The columns of Copan stand detached and solitary, so do the obelisks of Egypt; both are square or four-sided, and covered with sculpture. (Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. v., p. 60.)

 

In a letter by Jomard, quoted by Delafield, we read,

 

"I have recognized in your memoir on the division of time among the Mexican nations, compared with those of Asia, some very striking analogies between the Toltec characters and institutions observed on the banks of the Nile. Among these

 

p. 368

 

analogies there is one which is worthy of attention--it is the use of the vague year of three hundred and sixty-five days, composed of equal months, and of five complementary days, equally employed at Thebes and Mexico--a distance of three thousand leagues. . . . In reality, the intercalation of the Mexicans being thirteen days on each cycle of fifty-two years, comes to the same thing as that of the Julian calendar, which is one day in four years; and consequently supposes the duration of the year to be three hundred and sixty-five days six hours. Now such was the length of the year among the Egyptians--they intercalated an entire year of three hundred and seventy-five days every one thousand four hundred and sixty years. ... The fact of the intercalation (by the Mexicans) of thirteen days every cycle that is, the use of a year of three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter--is a proof that it was borrowed from the Egyptians, or that they had a common origin." ("Antiquities of America," pp. 52, 53.)

 

The Mexican century began on the 26th of February, and the 26th of February was celebrated from the time of Nabonassor, 747 B.C., because the Egyptian priests, conformably to their astronomical observations, had fixed the beginning of the month Toth, and the commencement of their year, at noon on that day. The five intercalated days to make up the three hundred and sixty-five days were called by the Mexicans Nemontemi, or useless, and on them they transacted no business; while the Egyptians, during that epoch, celebrated the festival of the birth of their gods, as attested by Plutarch and others.

 

It will be conceded that a considerable degree of astronomical knowledge must have been necessary to reach the conclusion that the true year consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days and six hours (modern science has demonstrated that it consists of three hundred and sixty-five days and five hours, less ten seconds); and a high degree of civilization was requisite to insist that the year must be brought around, by the intercalation of a certain number of days in a certain period of time, to its true relation to the seasons. Both were the outgrowth of a vast, ancient civilization of the highest order,

 

p. 369

 

which transmitted some part of its astronomical knowledge to its colonies through their respective priesthoods.

 

Can we, in the presence of such facts, doubt the statements of the Egyptian priests to Solon, as to the glory and greatness of Atlantis, its monuments, its sculpture, its laws, its religion, its civilization?

 

In Egypt we have the oldest of the Old World children of Atlantis; in her magnificence we have a testimony to the development attained by the parent country; by that country whose kings were the gods of succeeding nations, and whose kingdom extended to the uttermost ends of the earth.

 

The Egyptian historian, Manetho, referred to a period of thirteen thousand nine hundred years as "the reign of the gods," and placed this period at the very beginning of Egyptian history. These thirteen thousand nine hundred years were probably a recollection of Atlantis. Such a lapse of time, vast as it may appear, is but as a day compared with some of our recognized geological epochs.

sacred-texts.com/atl/ataw/ataw502.htm

Erinyi is a character from White Wolf Gaming Studio's Vampire: the Masquerade roleplaying game, specifically from the "Montreal By Night" sourcebook. In the sourcebook, she's a non-player character (NPC) gargoyle, a member of the Sabbat. In the "World of Darkness" universe, gargoyles are created by vampire mages as guards: this involves kidnapping someone, turning them into a vampire, and then hideously reshaping their bodies into stonelike monsters. While gargoyles become the ultimate guards, capable of tearing apart a tank, the conversion process usually destroys their minds, leaving them with no memory of who they were before and no free will. This is seen by their makers as a feature, not a bug.

 

Though both the "good" Camarilla and "evil" Sabbat (good and evil being relative among vampires) use gargoyles, some have managed to rediscover their free will and broken from their masters' control. These free gargoyles usually hire themselves out as bodyguards, and use vampire Obfuscation magic to pass themselves off as human. The latter is very difficult, given that the average gargoyle is about seven feet tall, not counting wings (they can fly), tails, and horns.

 

The character of Erinyi in Montreal By Night is a rather confused person, driven nearly insane by the conversion process (which tends to happen with all of the Sabbat's "recruits"); the only thing that can calm her down from a homicidal rage is music. In fact, she's so filled with rage that her name translates to "fury" in Greek. And...that's about all that's told of her character.

 

When I was running a regular Vampire roleplaying game in college back in the early 2000s, I needed a good NPC. NPCs can get games back on track and push the characters where they need to go. I was flipping through Montreal By Night and came upon Erinyi. I added to her backstory by making her go rogue from the Sabbat and become more or less good--she's less rage filled and not really homicidal any longer, unless something makes her angry. To give her more of a tragic background for the players to work off of, I also gave "my" Erinyi the mind of a ten year old: her mind retreats into her childhood as a way of dealing with the madness of her existence. So now, you have essentially a monster who is childlike, but can pick up and throw a tank when she's upset.

 

The players loved Erinyi, and she's become something of a recurrent NPC when I run any World of Darkness game. So when I saw a World of Warcraft Succubus figure back in 2010, I decided to do some minor conversion work and repaint it as Erinyi.

 

In the actual World of Darkness campaign, gargoyles are hideous creatures, so this makes Erinyi a lot more attractive than gargoyles are supposed to be! I cut off some extraneous parts and then completely repainted the figure from mostly purple to mostly gray. Her clothes were green and gold, so those were repainted to purple--but it left a lot of filigree that really didn't fit Erinyi's character. So that was covered up by painting her bustier with Griz pawprints and "Montana"--the markings of my alma mater, the University of Montana. Finally, since gargoyles are not cloven hoofed, I painted her "hooves" as giant Nikes, and gave her some tube socks for good measure.

 

I was really impressed how Erinyi turned out, and she usually sits on my figure shelf. This picture was taken at the Montana State Fair, where I entered her into the figure competition. (She didn't win, but I was up against some very good mini painters.)

Testing out the light setup for my Brickworld 2016 display. Obfuscation on purpose. :)