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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
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,
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[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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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.
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"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
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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
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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,
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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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.)
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!
Trailhead atop Milner Pass, the Continental Divide, along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.
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.
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.
//Since 1997 the ANC government has used various methods to fend-off criticism. These have run from attacking motive to bullying, obfuscation, bullshitting, lying, and outright denial. Over time civil society and media became inured to these tactics. So it was something of a welcome surprise when senior government officials - including the president and his deputy - started admitting responsibility for South Africa's energy shortages.
The basic line pushed by President Thabo Mbeki (and others) was that government underestimated the likely rate of economic growth and wrongly ignored Eskom's warnings that it needed to start building new capacity. For this they were very sorry.
These apologies have not silenced criticism, but they have been very effective in drawing attention away from where it should have been focused. This is known, in other fields, as misdirection. A Wikipedia entry notes how "The magician choreographs his actions so that even the critical and observant spectators are likely to look where the magician wants them to. More importantly, they do not look where they should not." One way of doing this is through movement, whereby "A larger action covers a smaller action."
Similarly, it is to the government's advantage to admit to failing to approve the building of new generating capacity on time. At worst they can be accused of ideological prevarication. Meanwhile, our gaze is shifted away from places where the ANC would prefer it not to wander. One of these is the way in which the ANC funding vehicle - Chancellor House - has been cut-in on massive contracts for the building of the Bravo and Madupi power stations. The other relates to the way in which the Eskom's racial obsessions were responsible for last week's massive black outs.//
www.politicsweb.co.za/iservice/eskom-the-real-cause-of-th...
www.property24.com/Property24/Hub/ShowSectionArticles_Ful...
A soon to be former McDonald's at Village Plaza along 1065 Easton Avenue, pictured here in June 2020.
This oddly mint-capped McDonald's was likely once red-roofed and opened at Village Plaza in 1975, though official town records remain mostly obfuscated.
This location was planned to close in June 2024, after several decades of familiar operation, will now extend its long overdue expiration for a few weeks longer as its newer location puts finishing touches at its nearby Rutgers Plaza, nearly across the street.
The newly-built gray box will replace an equally aged and vacated, former 70's era Burger King, was demolished for its construction, which was approved in November 2022.
Very few "vintage" capped McDonald's that haven't submitted to gray kiosk hell can now be counted on one hand in the state of New Jersey.
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.
These are the proceedings of my presentation for #34C3, Leipzig, Germany || December 2017.
I opened the »institutions of Resolution Disputes« [i.R.D.] on March 28, 2015, as a solo show, hosted by Transfer Gallery in New York City. On September 9, 2017, its follow-up »Behind White Shadows« also opened in Transfer. At the heart of both shows lies research on compressions, with one central research object: the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm, the core of the JPEG (and other) compressions. Together, the two exhibitions form a diptych that is this publication, titled Beyond Resolution.
By going beyond resolution, I attempt to uncover and elucidate how resolutions constantly inform both machine vision and human perception. I unpack the ways resolutions organize our contemporary image processing technologies, emphasizing that resolutions not only organize how and what gets seen, but also what images, settings, ways of rendering and points of view are forgotten, obfuscated, or simply dismissed and unsupported.
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.
A short series of photographs of horse shoeing.
First of all, our patient model, Dexter, here seen wondering what all the fuss is about.
Despite, or perhaps becasue of, my best efforts, the subsequent pictures have become a little jumbled order-wise. My apologies for this, I hope it doesn't obfuscate the narrative excessively.
The old stump jumper. A trusty truck of a bike, good with a trailer or heavy load. Much fun for meandering through alleys and urban exploration. Not much fun for crossing town. Still hemming and hawing over if I should build a big old custom rack for it. Making it too nice would obfuscate its original intent.
The project is developed using various pre-set text-to-image models, processing text prompt inputs. On the borderline between sensitive content and an easy slip into topics of violence, this project visualizes the depths of the subconscious of these models, excavating the influences of media and online information exchange. The quantified traces of reality and collective histories allow algorithms to generate content that recycles the past – building the spine of quasi-historical narratives – often obfuscated with prejudice and misinformation, along with the author’s personal bias. Generated outputs are presented inside a hypertext object – a tent that the audience can enter, as it were.
Photo: Florian Voggeneder
nd you are another,--and both of us comin
each case he recognizes the coextensive right, so far as that alone is concerned, of the existing government to assert itself, and stem the tide of revolt. It is the old question of the Rights of Man and the Mights of Man, concerning which Carlyle has had so much to say. A trial between the Mights often throws considerable light upon the question of the Rights; and, until at any rate the true Might has been ascertained by this crucial test, one may without half-heartedness admit that both of the opposing Rights, the conservative and the disruptive, are genuine rights, mutually antagonistic and internecine, but neither disproved by the other. But this is only the most rudimentary view of the matter. An abstract and indefeasible right of insurrection may exist, maintainable in any and every case; and yet a particular instance of insurrection maybe foolish, wicked, and altogether worthy of ruin and extinction. And the writer believes that he is perfectly consistent with himself in thinking both that the abstract right of insurrection existed in the case of the Southern States of the Union and the abstract right of repression in the Federal Government, and also that this particular insurrection deserved condemnation and failure, and this particular repression deserved credit and triumph,--a triumph which, when the "Mights of Men" had been sufficiently tested, it very arduously and very conclusively managed to achieve. As to the question of a _legal and constitutional_ right of secession, the writer has not the impudence to express--and scarcely to entertain--an opinion. That is a question for American lawyers and publicists to discuss and determine; the obfuscated British mind being entitled to affirm only this: that there seems to have been something to say on the Southern side of the question, as well as a good deal on the Northern. The writer apprehends that the abstract right of insurrection on the one hand, and of self-conservation on the other, quite overbears, in so vast and momentous a debate, the narrow, technical, legal question: that which it does not overbear is the rightness or wrongness
In July 1969, much of the world celebrated the “giant leap for mankind” of the successful moon landing. Fifty years later, nothing is quite so straightforward. "In Event of Moon Disaster" illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining this seminal event. What if the Apollo 11 mission had gone wrong and the astronauts had not been able to return home? A contingency speech for this possibility was prepared, but never delivered, by President Nixon—until now.
"In Event of Moon Disaster" invites you into this alternative history and asks us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect, and obfuscate the truth around us. The project has a physical installation as well as an online component. The installation version consists of a 1960s American living room set allowing viewers to step back in time to watch the coverage of the Apollo 11 mission live on a vintage TV. The film journeys from blast off all the way to the moon where something goes terribly wrong and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are stranded, prompting President Nixon to deliver the elegiac contingency speech to a mourning world. The website contains both the film and accompanying educational materials as well as a quiz used to evaluate the effectiveness of the awareness campaign.
Credits: Halsey Burgund, Francesca Panetta
Harness for Self-Reflection
Combining sculpture, image and text, "Harness for Self-Reflection" (2021) considers the tenuous relationship between chronic illness, agency and activism. Object and image compose a self-referential installation and looping phenomena that choreographs movement within the surrounding space. Documenting a private performance ritual of self-examination, eight silken image-texts hang in a pinwheel formation around a central copper cylinder. A wearable viewing apparatus or harness, hangs limp with nonuse at the structure’s center.
Cotton cord becomes the common thread between illness and culture, sexuality and healing, social bondage and autonomous political agency. Interweaving the ‘domestic’ craft of macramé with erotic shibari techniques, the harness binds the body to a large mirror suspended between the artist’s legs during performance–self-bondage diagnoses, reclamation of agency, auto-interview introspection. Performance images are overlaid with portions of a poetic text written in the artist’s hand. Here, temporal linearity collapses as terrains of embodied knowledge are traversed through metaphor, idiom, diary remembrance and real-time narration of a medical examination. Latent illness, elusive agency, fugitive knowledge; raw edged silken prints are volatile and highly sensitive to voyeuristic presences where even slight movements cause the material to flow and obfuscate.
Punctured momentarily when performer and viewer catch each other’s gaze through the viewing apparatus, the installation forms a feedback loop of looking that simultaneously threatens disaster and promises relief. A cyclical structure, cotton loops, and cursive script; "Harness for Self-Reflection" ensnares, a lens through which to consider the trap of visibility.
Bill Doggett is a good example of the obfuscated role of Jazz in Pop. But despite dipping his toe in the Pop market, he definitely wanted to be named a Jazz musician. Take a glance at his resume, and you find him gigging with a lineage that was moving from Jazz, to Swing, to Jump Blues, and onto R&B lounge acts. He slipped into the Rock n’ Roll hype (the charts) with Honky Tonk in 1956, but he was feeling the groove, rather than the market trend.
I bought “Honky Tonk (Parts 1 & 2)” in early 2000 in an obscure, Mom and Pop D.I.Y. junk shop in Queens, New York. Did I know who Bill Doggett was? Not by name, but by the King label (which James Brown, and Little Willie John recorded on). Think of someone in Queens listening to this when it hit, and then forgive me for not buying all the 45s at this store (I made a four 45 selection).
“Shindig” (b/w “Hammer Head”) was recently bought on Ebay, a scratchy over-priced import from somewhere in Texas, obviously a “Honky Tonk” post-hit release, a DJ freebie with a cool enough picture of Bill Doggett.
“Honky Tonk” is a sinewy slippery cool headed jam, ripe for hard-core cats, jive beatniks, and the teenage market. This was the style that Doggett and his combo went for over and over, but somehow it was the “Honky Tonk” riff that took off and hit #1.
All these twists and turns in Doggett’s career can be simply distilled through his naming the hit, “Honky Tonk”, a term with typically miscegenated American roots:
Above is quoted From The Gay Falcon story written by Michael Arlen
For the full story see the colourized version of the falcon photo in our gallery.
Gay Falcon
By Michael Arlen
Introduction
May 2, 1927
In 1941 George Sanders was the star of a popular RKO detective series based upon the Leslie Charteris novels about Simon Templar, known as the Saint. Charteris may not have been happy about the way his hero was depicted in the series, but he did receive a nice royalty for each of the films. And that may have been why, in a new RKO series, Sanders suddenly was playing, not Simon Templar, but Gay Lawrence, an almost identical suave playboy detective, this one called the Falcon. Moreover, his co-star in The Gay Falcon, and its first follow-up, was Wendy Barrie, who had occupied a similar position in the two preceding Saint adventures.
Naturally, Charteris was upset by the transparent name switch and said so, as, subsequently, did his attorney. But RKO responded that the Falcon film was derived from a 1940 Strand short story by Michael Arlen entitled, conveniently enough, "Gay Falcon."
Michael Arlen was the pen name of Dikran Kouyoumdjian, who received prominence as the result of his novel, The Green Hat (1924), which he turned into a 1925 theatrical success in London and New York, the Broadway leads being Katherine Cornell and Leslie Howard. (Because the story was considered somewhat daring at the time, MGM changed the title to A Woman of Affairs for a Greta Garbo film.) Arlen also penned an oft-anthologized story, "The Gentleman from America." (It eventually became an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.) Arlen's photograph appeared on the May 2, 1927, cover of Time.
Arlen wrote only one Falcon story, and his connection to the Falcon movies was de-emphasized by RKO after the second of the series. The third one, The Falcon Takes Over, actually came from Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe mystery, Farewell, My Lovely, later filmed as Murder, My Sweet. In a way, the Falcon, who had been the Saint, thus briefly became Philip Marlowe (though not by that name, of course). And, then, in another identity shift, the George Sanders Falcon was killed--in The Falcon's Brother--and Gay's sibling, Tom Lawrence, adopted the Falcon identity, pledging to carry on his work. (The switch was smoothed by having Sanders' real-life brother, Tom Conway portray the new Falcon.) George Sanders was no doubt happy to escape the amalgam of identities, while Conway, never the Saint nor Philip Marlowe, had his series role of a lifetime.
A Falcon newspaper supplement
Our introduction would end at this point were it not for the fact that that the Arlen-RKO Falcon was not the only one, or the first, or even the last. In 1936, Charles H. Huff, using the name Drexel Drake, was the author of a detective novel, The Falcon's Prey. The next year brought The Falcon Cuts In, one of the novellas that were separate-section supplements of the larger Sunday newspapers in that era. Another Drake Falcon mystery was The Falcon Meets a Lady (1938). Drake's short story, "The Falcon Strikes," appeared in American Magazine (November, 1938).
Drake's hero initially bore the name Malcolm J. Wingate, not exactly a winner. Thus, when a Falcon radio series debuted in 1943, Malcolm J. Wingate became Michael (Mike) Waring. To avoid legal entanglements with the still-running RKO series, the announcer made it clear in the closing credits that the Falcon adventures were "based upon the famous character created by Drexel Drake." Clear enough. But in the show's opening the announcer would say: "You met the Falcon first in his best-selling novels, then you saw him in his thrilling motion picture series. Now join him on the air…." So much for clarification by obfuscation. While in the Wingate-Falcon-Lawrence-Waring zone, we should note that in the trio of Film Classic Falcon films (1948-49) the name given to actor John Calvert was Mike Waring. Same thing for the 1955 television series.
Courtesy of Chatwick University Theartre and Art Departments
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All rights and copyrights observed by Chatwick University, Its contributors, associates and Agents
The purpose of these chronological photos and accompanying stories, articles is to educate, teach, instruct, and generally increase the awareness level of the general public as to the nature and intent of the underlying criminal elements that have historically plagued humankind.
No Part of this can reprinted, duplicated, or copied be without the express written permission and approval of Chatwick University.
These photos and stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.
As with any work of fiction or fantasy the purpose is for entertainment and/or educational purposes only, and should never be attempted in real life.
We accept no responsibility for any events occurring outside this website.
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All rights and copyrights observed by Chatwick University, Its contributors, associates and Agents
The purpose of these chronological photos and accompanying stories, articles is to educate, teach, instruct, and generally increase the awareness level of the general public as to the nature and intent of the underlying criminal elements that have historically plagued humankind.
No Part of this can reprinted, duplicated, or copied be without the express written permission and approval of Chatwick University.
These photos and stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.
As with any work of fiction or fantasy the purpose is for entertainment only, and should never be attempted in real life.
We accept no responsibility for any events occurring outside this website.
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The Bizarre Danish Study to Debunk the Theory that MMR Vaccine Causes Autism is a little explainer video to help end any confusion surrounding the legitimacy of the new Danish 'research' study.
All the information in the video is from the links included below.
Please feel free to share to those that believe this study supports vaccination.
If you want to buy Pixie's book 'Agnotology in Vaccines' then please click on the link below...
The Links...
- The Novo Nordisk 'research' paper; Hviid et al. 2019 - annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2727726
- An Autopsy on Hviid et al. 2019’s MMR/Vaccine Science-Like Activities - jameslyonsweiler.com/2019/03/05/an-autopsy-on-hviid-et-al...
- Healthy user bias explanation - vaccinepapers.org/healthy-user-bias-why-most-vaccine-safe...
- Novo Nordisk lawsuits - www.law360.com/companies/novo-nordisk-a-s/cases
- Problems with the DeStefano 2004 study - www.ageofautism.com/2014/09/more-questions-than-answers-f...
- The Importance of Having Data Sets - docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1760&...
- More proof of scientific obfuscation - childrenshealthdefense.org/news/studies-that-the-cdc-clai...
- Novo Nordisk's vaccine component product - novonordiskpharmatech.com/products/vaccine-production/
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.