Occupy- We The People
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South Dakota farmstead. My photo with Textures Clouds, Texture 217 and Texture 273 by Lenabem, Anna J.
www.flickr.com/photos/lenabem-anna/27658081168/in/album-7...
www.flickr.com/photos/lenabem-anna/8264750592/in/album-72...
www.flickr.com/photos/lenabem-anna/6352767193/in/album-72...
La Ceja, Colombia; 2.300 meters above sea level.
Tangara xanthocephala
(Saffron-crowned Tanager / Tángara coronada)
Saffron-crowned Tanager is a brightly colored tanager with a distinctive yellow head. This species occurs through the Andes from Colombia and Venezuela south to Bolivia, and occupies humid montane forests and secondary woodlands.
Due to human destruction of habitat, it is hypothesized that the population numbers are decreasing. Like most Tangara tanagers, the Saffron-crowned is sexually monomorphic.
neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/Species-Account/nb/species/...
An ocular thing for Sliders Sunday.
These are some ornamental quince fruits that were pruned earlier in the year and then forgotten about. Unnoticed, they've shriveled-up into things reminiscent of giant raisins. This one looked like it had an eye where the stalk used to be so I thought I'd expand on that concept...
HSS !
He's like a little troll who lives below a bridge and doesn't want anyone to cross it. He lives inside the hole of this cable table. The hole is just beneath him. When he hears anyone trying to get a drink he pops up and usually scares the so called offender off. He forgets that it is a public facility.
IMPORTANT: for non-pro users who read the info on a computer, just enlarge your screen to 120% (or more), then the full text will appear below the photo with a white background - which makes reading so much easier.
The color version of the photo above is here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ticino-best-photos-of-southern-...
THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO:
So far there's only been one photo in my gallery that hasn't been taken in my garden ('The Flame Rider', captured in the Maggia Valley: www.flickr.com/photos/191055893@N07/53563448847/in/datepo... ) - which makes the image above the second time I've "strayed from the path" (although not very far, since the photo was taken only approximately 500 meters from my house).
Overall, I'll stick to my "only-garden rule", but every once in a while I'll show you a little bit of the landscape around my village, because I think it will give you a better sense of just how fascinating this region is, and also of its history.
The title I chose for the photo may seem cheesy, and it's certainly not very original, but I couldn't think of another one, because it's an honest reflection of what I felt when I took it: a profound sense of peace - although if you make it to the end of this text you'll realize my relationship with that word is a bit more complicated.
I got up early that day; it was a beautiful spring morning, and there was still a bit of mist in the valley below my village which I hoped would make for a few nice mood shots, so I quickly grabbed my camera and went down there before the rising sun could dissolve the magical layer on the scenery.
Most human activity hadn't started yet, and I was engulfed in the sounds of the forest as I was walking the narrow trail along the horse pasture; it seemed every little creature around me wanted to make its presence known to potential mates (or rivals) in a myriad of sounds and voices and noises (in case you're interested, here's a taste of what I usually wake up to in spring, but you best use headphones: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfoCTqdAVCE )
Strolling through such an idyllic landscape next to grazing horses and surrounded by birdsong and beautiful trees, I guess it's kind of obvious one would feel the way I described above and choose the title I did, but as I looked at the old stone buildings - the cattle shelter you can see in the foreground and the stable further up ahead on the right - I also realized how fortunate I was.
It's hard to imagine now, because Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world today, but the men and women who had carried these stones and constructed the walls of these buildings were among the poorest in Europe. The hardships the people in some of the remote and little developed valleys in Ticino endured only a few generations ago are unimaginable to most folks living in my country today.
It wasn't uncommon that people had to sell their own kids as child slaves - the girls had to work in factories or in rice fields, the boys as "living chimney brushes" in northern Italy - just because there wasn't enough food to support the whole family through the harsh Ticino winters.
If you wonder why contemporary Swiss historians speak of "slaves" as opposed to child laborers, it's because that's what many of them actually were: auctioned off for a negotiable prize at the local market, once sold, these kids were not payed and in many cases not even fed by their masters (they had to beg for food in the streets or steal it).
Translated from German Wikipedia: ...The Piazza grande in Locarno, where the Locarno Film Festival is held today, was one of the places where orphans, foundlings and children from poor families were auctioned off. The boys were sold as chimney sweeps, the girls ended up in the textile industry, in tobacco processing in Brissago or in the rice fields of Novara, which was also extremely hard work: the girls had to stand bent over in the water for twelve to fourteen hours in all weathers. The last verse of the Italian folk song 'Amore mio non piangere' reads: “Mamma, papà, non piangere, se sono consumata, è stata la risaia che mi ha rovinata” (Mom, dad, don't cry when I'm used up, it was the rice field that destroyed me.)... de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaminfegerkinder
The conditions for the chimney sweeps - usually boys between the age of 8 and 12 (or younger, because they had to be small enough to be able to crawl into the chimneys) - were so catastrophic that many of them didn't survive; they died of starvation, cold or soot in their lungs - as well as of work-related accidents like breaking their necks when they fell, or suffocatig if they got stuck in inside a chimney. This practice of "child slavery" went on as late as the 1950s (there's a very short article in English on the topic here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spazzacamini and a more in depth account for German speakers in this brief clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gda8vZp_zsc ).
Now I don't know if the people who built the old stone houses along my path had to sell any of their kids, but looking at the remnants of their (not so distant) era I felt an immense sense of gratitude that I was born at a time of prosperity - and peace - in my region, my country and my home. Because none of it was my doing: it was simple luck that decided when and where I came into this world.
It also made me think of my own family. Both of my grandparents on my father's side grew up in Ticino (they were both born in 1900), but while they eventually left Switzerland's poorest region to live in its richest, the Kanton of Zurich, my grandfather's parents relocated to northern Italy in the 1920s and unfortunately were still there when WWII broke out.
They lost everything during the war, and it was their youngest daughter - whom I only knew as "Zia" which means "aunt" in Italian - who earned a little money to support herself and my great-grandparents by giving piano lessons to high-ranking Nazi officers and their kids (this was towards the end of the war when German forces had occupied Italy).
I never knew that about her; Zia only very rarely spoke of the war, but one time when I visited her when she was already over a 100 years old (she died at close to 104), I asked her how they had managed to survive, and she told me that she went to the local prefecture nearly every day to teach piano. "And on the way there would be the dangling ones" she said, with a shudder.
I didn't get what she meant, so she explained. Visiting the city center where the high ranking military resided meant she had to walk underneath the executed men and women who were hanging from the lantern posts along the road (these executions - often of civilians - were the Germans' retaliations for attacks by the Italian partisans).
I never forgot her words - nor could I shake the look on her face as she re-lived this memory. And I still can't grasp it; my house in Ticino is only 60 meters from the Italian border, and the idea that there was a brutal war going on three houses down the road from where I live now in Zia's lifetime strikes me as completely surreal.
So, back to my title for the photo above. "Peace". It's such a simple, short word, isn't it? And we use it - or its cousin "peaceful" - quite often when we mean nice and quiet or stress-free. But if I'm honest I don't think I know what it means. My grandaunt Zia did, but I can't know. And I honestly hope I never will.
I'm sorry I led you down such a dark road; I usually intend to make people smile with the anecdotes that go with my photos, but this one demanded a different approach (I guess with this latest image I've strayed from the path in more than one sense, and I hope you'll forgive me).
Ticino today is the region with the second highest average life expectancy in Europe (85.2 years), and "The Human Development Index" of 0.961 in 2021 was one of the highest found anywhere in the world, and northern Italy isn't far behind. But my neighbors, many of whom are now in their 90s, remember well it wasn't always so.
That a region so poor it must have felt like purgatory to many of its inhabitants could turn into something as close to paradise on Earth as I can imagine in a person's lifetime should make us all very hopeful. But, and this is the sad part, it also works the other way 'round. And I believe we'd do well to remember that, too.
To all of you - with my usual tardiness but from the bottom of my heart - a happy, healthy, hopeful 2025 and beyond.
Brisbane botanical gardens sunday morning. I like this one. It’s shot at nearly 200mm on the M50 by the lake at the botanical gardens. It’s just nice
8000 people showed up......For HYPE HYPE HYPE........
if you didnt know....sam adams the mayor of portland setup an eviction for the occupy portland camp last night at 12:01am
I had to see for myself if the cops were going to gas the protestors or do anything.....and NOPE...the crowd just thinned and people of portland let the police come in and clean up the filth that has become occupy portland......
walking through the occupy camp....all you could smell was human feces and garbage.......
is this what a revolution looks like?
hours later police raided the camp with no resistance what so ever.......and started throwing away all the garbage left behind by the occupy portlanders.......
You can watch whats left of the Hype live right now follow the link below
www.livestream.com/occupyptown
you can also read about the events unfolding as well in this article
www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/11/police_end_...
this guy was nuts-ing out to the music. i have my doubts as to the sincerity of many of the people camping out at the "protest" Occupy LA movement. many seemed to be the same people; bums, transients, homeless, mentally ill, that live on the streets. here they had free food and free sleeping bags.
"exhausted but unyielding"
An occupied flyover, Harcourt Road, Central, Hong Kong
Adopting a genuine universal suffrage in the 2017 Chief Executive, without its candidates being pre-screened, is one core issue of the current revolt.
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Today I went to a Hyperloop presentation and levitation demo at Stanford University. It was super cool. The event was organized by the Science Fiction Society of Silicon Valley, that promotes science fiction that becomes reality.
In 2012 Elon Musk of SpaceX proposed a train system called "Hyperloop" for superfast travel between cities and made his design open to the public. Elon held a competition for Hyperloop builders this January. One of the contestants was rLoop, a crowdsourced company. The founder of rLoop gave a TEDx style talk.
After the talk a colleague with an OCCUPY MARS t-shirt did a demo on a small scale model. The pod (the car that moves in the Hyperloop tube) was levitating by magnets above an aluminum surface. Here he shows the bottom side of the pod. You can see the four rotating magnets.
I processed a soft HDR photo from a RAW exposure, and carefully adjusted the curves and color balance.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC5592_hdr1sof2c
Barcelona, Spain, summer 2017. Elite chrome 100 (expired), c-41 process. Olympus 35SP (zuiko 42mm 1.7 lens)
Prompt: A digital fine art, ultra-realistic, Depicting an outhouse in the middle of a forest in winter during a snowstorm. There is a sign on the outhouse door "Occupied", no noise, no grain, 4k resolution, high-details
This digital fine art was created using OpenAI Sora AI and Photoshop
As we approached the cabin we planned on staying in for the night, we passed this concrete block. It's there to tell people driving up canyon if the cabin is occupied or not. It wasn't, so we turned it around from VACANT to OCCUPIED.
The cabin sits at the end of a canyon and is still a couple of miles distant. There's not a lot of parking, due to the nature of the canyon, and this will hopefully save some people some trouble and the residents some unwanted visitors.
Every cabin I've stayed at, in and around Death Valley, has a US flag that you fly to alert people that it's occupied. This one did, too, but you can't see it until it's too late.
Argus Range
Mojave Desert
Photographed near Charleston Slough, Mountain View, California - Standing, no cover
Please click twice on the image to view at the largest size
I'd not seen a Snowy Egret on a post usually occupied by a tern, gull or cormorant. But it seemed quite comfortable on its chosen perch.
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From Wikipedia: The snowy egret (Egretta thula) is a small white heron. The genus name comes from Provençal French for the little egret, aigrette, which is a diminutive of aigron, 'heron'. The species name thula is the Araucano term for the black-necked swan, applied to this species in error by Chilean naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina in 1782.
The snowy egret is the American counterpart to the very similar Old World little egret, which has become established in the Bahamas. At one time, the plumes of the snowy egret were in great demand as decorations for women's hats. They were hunted for these plumes and this reduced the population of the species to dangerously low levels. Now protected in the United States by law, under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, this bird's population has rebounded.
Distribution and habitat:
The snowy egret is native to North, Central and South America. It is present all year round in South America, ranging as far south as Chile and Argentina. It also occurs throughout the year in the West Indies, Florida and coastal regions of North and Central America. Elsewhere, in the southern part of the United States, it is migratory, breeding in California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. It is found in wetlands of many types; marshes, riverbanks, lakesides, pools, salt marshes and estuaries. It is not found at high altitudes nor generally on the coast. The snowy egret has occurred as a vagrant in Europe, in Iceland, Scotland and the Azores. It has also been recorded in South Africa.
Diet:
The birds eat fish, crustaceans, insects, small reptiles, snails, frogs, worms and crayfish. They stalk prey in shallow water, often running or shuffling their feet, flushing prey into view by swaying their heads, flicking their wings or vibrating their bills. They may also hover, or "dip-fish" by flying with their feet just above the water surface. Snowy egrets may also stand still and wait to ambush prey, or hunt for insects stirred up by domestic animals in open fields. They sometimes forage in mixed species groups.
Breeding:
Snowy egrets breed in mixed colonies, which may include great egrets, night herons, tricolored herons, little blue herons, cattle egrets, glossy ibises and roseate spoonbills. The male establishes a territory and starts building the nest in a tree, vines or thick undergrowth. He then attracts a mate with an elaborate courtship display which includes dipping up and down, bill raising, aerial displays, diving, tumbling and calling. The immediate vicinity of the nest is defended from other birds and the female finishes the construction of the nest with materials brought by the male. It is constructed from twigs, rushes, sedges, grasses, Spanish moss and similar materials and may be 15 in (38 cm) across. Up to six pale bluish-green eggs are laid which hatch after about 24 days. The young are altricial and covered with white down when first hatched. They leave the nest after about 22 days.
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This shell was occupied as you can probably tell, looking at its center. I made sure to put it close to the water when I was done. I just fell in love with the shape.
Occupy Wall Street Movement.
Tonight, Wednesday October 19th 2011, The chief of police promised to back off of the movement.
This is a photograph of one of the banners at the rally.
Honfleur is a commune in the Calvados department in Normandy en.normandie-tourisme.fr/normandy-tourism-109-2.html in northwestern France. It is located on the southern bank of the estuary of the Seine across from le Havre and very close to the exit of the Pont de Normandie. Its inhabitants are called Honfleurais. It is especially known for its old, beautiful picturesque port, characterized by its houses with slate-covered frontages, painted many times by artists, including in particular Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet and Johan Jongkind, forming the école de Honfleur (Honfleur school) which contributed to the appearance of the Impressionist movement. The Sainte-Catherine church, which has a bell tower separate from the principal building, is the largest church made out of wood in France. The first written record of Honfleur is a reference by Richard III, Duke of Normandy, in 1027. By the middle of the 12th century, the city represented a significant transit point for goods from Rouen to England. Located on the estuary of one of the principal rivers of France with a safe harbour and relatively rich hinterland, Honfleur profited from its strategic position from the start of the Hundred Years' War. The town's defences were strengthened by Charles V in order to protect the estuary of the Seine from attacks from the English. This was supported by the nearby port of Harfleur. However, Honfleur was taken and occupied by the English in 1357 and from 1419 to 1450. When under French control, raiding parties often set out from the port to ransack the English coasts, including partially destroying the town of Sandwich, in Kent, England, in the 1450s. At the end of the Hundred Years' War, Honfleur benefited from the boom in maritime trade until the end of the 18th century. Trade was disturbed during the wars of religion in the 16th century. The port saw the departure of a number of explorers, in particular in 1503 of Binot Paulmierde Gonneville to the coasts of Brazil. In 1506, local man Jean Denis departed for Newfoundland island and the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. An expedition in 1608, organised by Samuel de Champlain, founded the city of Quebec in modern day Canada. After 1608, Honfleur thrived on trade with Canada, the West Indies, the African coasts and the Azores. As a result, the town became one of the five principal ports for the slave trade in France. During this time the rapid growth of the town saw the demolition of its fortifications on the orders of Colbert. The wars of the French revolution and the First Empire, and in particular the continental blockade, caused the ruin of Honfleur. It only partially recovered during the 19th century with the trading of wood from northern Europe. Trade was however limited by the silting up of the entrance to the port and development of the modern port at Le Havre. The port however still functions today. On August 25, 1944, Honfleur was liberated together by the British army - 19th Platoon of the 12th Devon's, 6th Air Landing Brigade, the Belgian army (Brigade Piron) on 25 August 1944.[1] and the Canadian army without any combat. en.normandie-tourisme.fr/articles/honfleur-278-2.html