precise photos on Flickr

Precise landing!

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“Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small.”

~Donald Rumsfeld

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I was backstage during one of our church's activities and saw this guy manning the sound system mixer controls. I was amazed at how "smooth" and adept he was with the controls; as if, he can operate the thing with his eyes closed. This one was taken with a vintage Chinon 55mm f/1.4 lens.

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Width (Beam): 100"

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Draft: 26"

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Miniature Being of Darkness Fantasy Hutch~1:12th Scale by Enchanticals ~I'm Coming Back

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“A Little Tale”…

He was not of this earthly plane. To be precise, he was trapped here…unable to find the portal or open it, on those occasions when it became visible to him, between this earthly plane and his home on the Other side deep down in the fiery dark hot smelly bowels of hell.

He had been trapped on this side for so long, at least 250-300 earthly years, which to him was far too long. He hungered for his dark hot smelly cesspool of a home. Each new day he didn’t think he could endure even for one more second the singing of those creatures called birds, the bright colors of the flowers, the intensity of the sun, and oh, all that horrible lush green foliage, as well as the sound of human laughter, especially the young ones.

So, to avoid all that horror, he slept during the time of the light and was awake when darkness fell and that hot bright sun set. He was a denizen of the night. A creature of darkness.

He kept completely to himself, for the most part, when it came to interacting with those “in body” beings called humans. Although he was forced on occasion to interact with these humans, he found them repulsive. Well, truth be told, not all were repulsive to him. Being a creature from the Other side, he possessed many abilities that these repulsive humans did not. Their bodies and minds limited them and they, unaware or uncaring, didn’t know or attempt to find out that they could have at least some of the same abilities he possessed if they just opened their minds. But, they were content to be thick blocks of cement going through their pathetic daily rituals as if they were something of importance.

One of his abilities, and the one that alerted him to the humans that were not repulsive to him, was that he could see inside of each and every one of them… right to their very souls. He could weed through them and find the ones with the black evil hearts. Now, those were his kind of beings for he knew when they left their clumsy earthly bodies and passed through that elusive portal, separating this world from the next, they would reside in the bowels of hell, where he belonged and should be, and be like him.

Now, with these humans, he developed a false relationship with them. Evil as he was, he wanted no relationships, attachments or the like. No, he did this because he needed them and wanted to use them or rather their souls, when their human hearts stopped beating, indicating the body had died and their souls were released, as a means to either push their souls aside and leave them stranded and earthbound and slip through the portal to reach his home or to attach himself to their black souls as they passed through the portal to hell.

For two years he tried to “tag along” on the black hearts souls’ passage from his world through the portal to hell, but each time his efforts failed. When he was with them when they died, their death being a result of his actions, he saw the portal, which appeared at each black hearted human’s death, but he could not pass through it with them. Their souls, screaming in horror and terror, passed through the portal and left this world for their new residence in hell, and he remained behind.

When he first got trapped on this side 250-300 human years ago due to a stupid mistake on his part, he spent the first 50-100 of these human earth rotation years looking for the portal to home, but to no avail. Then, he became aware of these humans and realized he could see into them and find those with black hearts. That is when the idea came to him to either tag along or push their dark souls aside after their human hearts stopped beating and pass through the portal to home, leaving them behind.

But, waiting years for them to die was excruciating on top of the fact that when they did die, he was still left behind. He had to wait for their death and then he remained here…still trapped. So, he became obsessed to find a quicker way to get back to his hell. Using all his black magic and spells, as well as any tool or instrument at hand, he began to kill black hearted humans…one after another. He would go to prisons where the crop of evil hearts was more than plentiful and kill and kill and kill, tagging along or trying to push their screaming horror filled black souls aside. But, he failed each and every time. He could not understand why.

When he saw the portal to hell, he would get a glimpse of his home… all fiery, hot, dank, and dark and he could hear the screams of those damned to live there for eternity. His hunger to get there increased even more.

He held back some black hearted souls, who were grateful not to be damned and allowed to remain on this earthly plane, as his slaves to do his bidding. He would command them to kill human after human along with him and help him try to use any way possible as a means to get through that portal, but he could not. For….The Angel of Death would not let him pass through and return home to hell. He was trapped here. Trapped.

Each day when he slept, his mind relived the day he made that stupid blunder which caused him to remain on this side. He tried to figure out how to reverse what he had done. Day after day, earth rotation after earth rotation, he thought while he slept, but nothing came to him. No idea, no discovery, no answer, no sign…nothing.

But, what did come to him was the realization that because he enjoyed, no reveled, in his damnation and loved the smelly fiery bowels of hell with all the screaming and crying black hearted souls, it was deemed that was not punishment for his evil. The punishment of damnation meant he should suffer, not enjoy his fate. So, he was tricked into making that stupid error and lost access to the portal to hell, thus preventing him from going home forever. He was now, truly damned and punished.”

~ Marsha J West, Author*

* The “A Little Tale” is my original idea and story. I am the author of that story and it is my property. Thus, it cannot be copied, reproduced, reprinted or used in any way or any medium. Also, this hutch is my original idea, creation and design. It is also my creative property. It is not to be copied, resold or reproduced.

1:72 Focke Wulf Ta 152J-2; “Weisse Zwölf” (12+~ White) of the 10./JG26 der Deutschen Luftwaffe, piloted by Hauptmann Wernher Suhrbier; Flensburg, early 1946 (modified Mistercraft Fw 190 kit) - WiP by Dizzyfugu

The kit and its assembly:

This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!

Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.

The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…

Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.

The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.

The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!

The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.

Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…

Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.

The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.

As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.

Pilot V5 Precise Click by Brad Dowdy

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Big old Vauxhall cruises on by by David

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Precise model escapes me at this distance in time . Viceroy?

Morley (Moods) 20 by Jean-Marc

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Devrais-je préciser que Morley est une artiste et une femme fabuleuse ?

Should I make clear that Morley is a fab' artist and a fab' woman ?

"That bird over the ocean see’s its shadow big and strong

No it's not an illusion she's been up there for so long

Swoop like an arrow, like a jet plane, like a dream

Sing, she is singing and she’s singing right through me

She said:

Child your voice is the sound-wave of your soul

Listen carefully to what you know

You've been here before and you have grown

All that is seen cannot be shownIn a flash over the ocean

Over the roof tops over my head

Gone she was gone, will I remember what she said ?

Stand like a mountain through injustice through the Strain

Forgive like the prophets over and over again

She said:

Child your voice is the sound-wave of your soul

Listen carefully to what you know

You've been here before and you have grown

All that is seen cannot be shown

Slow, slowly I take my turn

And the flame grows taller as I learn

One, one by one so high

The ones I love take to the sky

When, when it comes my time

Will I leave a trail of light

My soul over the ocean

Will see its shadow big and strong

No it wont be an illusion

May I have been up there for so long

I’m gonna swoop like an arrow, like a jet plane, like a Dream

Forever be singing, like she singing straight through me

She said:

Child your voice is the sound-wave of your soul

Listen carefully to what you know

You've been here before and you have grown

All that is seen cannot be shown..."

[Bird Over The Ocean]

En concert au Moods à Monaco.

www.morleymusic.org/

Tanfield Railway Station by John Stock

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When was the world's first railway laid? No one is quite confident on a precise date but simple rails have been used to guide vehicles for centuries, definitely as far back as the middle ages and possibly even in ancient Greece.

What is certain is that in the early 1600s a Nottinghamshire businessman called Huntingdon Beaumont came to Northumberland and laid rails from collieries near Blyth to a shipping point on the coast.

His waggonway used horses hauling wooden waggons on wooden wheels on wooden rails, however this was not a financial success. It did though provide the spark of progression from primitive wooden rails over short distances, to a railway network which would change Britain and the world forever.

Tyneside Roads

From the mid 1600 onwards waggonways and the Tyneside coal industry became linked so closely that they were known throughout the rest of Britain as 'Tyneside Roads'. A network of lines linked collieries on both sides of the Tyne to the river.

It is no coincidence that the North East was the area where waggonways took greatest hold, because canal building was impossible due to deep valleys and steep hills. What set the rail systems of Tyneside apart from all others was its use of the flanged wheel - a key element of the modern railway as we know it.

A revelation

When the Tanfield Railway - or waggonway as it was known at the time - was built in 1725, it was a revelation. Its massive engineering was unlike anything else in its era, or even since the Roman Empire. It was a triumph of engineering over nature, a clear signal that a new industrial age was upon the world, and that railways would play a massive part.

First laid down more than a quarter of a century before the first railway officially sanctioned by government, over 75 years before the first steam locomotive and a whole 100 years earlier than the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the Tanfield Railway is the world's oldest railway. We will be the first railway to celebrate our tricentenary in 2025.

Strange Fruit by Neil Noland

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This is the precise tree where Emperor Chongzhen and his principal eunuch, Cheng'en, ended their lives together by hanging themselves. (More information at the bottom of these notes.)

Jingshan Park is, along with Beihai Park, one of two optimal sites for getting a panoramic view of the Forbidden City. Both parks were historically built as imperial gardens, hence their appeal to modern Beijingers and tourists alike.

Specifically, Jingshan Park is immediately to the north of the Forbidden City across the street from the former palace’s Shengwu Gate on the north wall. (As all visitors to the Forbidden City are now required to enter through the south (Meridian) gate and exit through the north gate, Jingshan Park is the first site they see.

Jingshan Park’s history outdates that of the Forbidden City. The massive palace grounds were built in 1420, but this park’s history dates back roughly a thousand years, having been built during the Liao and Jin Dynasties (roughly early 12th century).

The park is about 230,000 square meters (not terribly big, but a comfortable size all the same) and enjoys the honor of being in the geographic center of old Beijing. The main feature of the park is Jingshan Hill, which is 94.2 meters tall. The walls and palace gates from the Jin Dynasty are quite well-preserved, as are architectural complexes from the ensuing Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.

Atop Jingshan Hill are five pavilions, representing the five directions (north, south, east, west, center) of Chinese culture. The highest, and centrally located, pavilion is Wanchun (Everlasting Spring) Pavilion. Guanmiao (Wonder Appreciation) Pavilion and Zhoushang (All-Round View) Pavilion lie to the east of Wanchun and Jifang (Gathering Fragrance) and Fulan (Panoramic View) Pavilions are to the west.

From Wanchun Pavilion, there is a wonderful panoramic view of Beijing. To the east, you can easily see in the distance (unless it’s a really, really smoggy day) to the CCTV building. The Forbidden City dominates the foreground to the south. Tiananmen Square and Qianmen would be directly behind that and off to the southwest in the distance is the National Performing Arts Center. Immediately to the west is Beihai Park and its outstanding white dagoba (whence the other panoramic views of the area are to be found). The view to the north of Wanchun Pavilion is dominated by hutongs and highlighted by Gulou (Drum Tower) with Zhonglou (Bell Tower) obscured immediately behind that. Farther beyond the hutongs and the towers are modern, nondescript high rise buildings.

Jingshan Park is a delight year-round. Having more than 10,000 peonies, the park is abloom come spring. Lotuses take center stage in summer, while fruit and chrysanthemum buds make appearances in autumn. There are many evergreens in the park so, even in winter, there is color to be found.

An interesting (albeit morbid) historical footnote to the park is this: At the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, there was a peasant uprising led by Li Zicheng. He broke into the city (aided by Manchus) to overthrow the emperor. As Emperor Chongzhen realized his days were numbered, in the 17th year of his reign, he decided to take his own life. He escaped the Forbidden City, found his way across to this park and, along with a faithful eunuch, hung himself from a tree in the eastern part of the park. The eunuch did the same. (Who went first and who went second isn’t recorded. Yet, they did seem to make copious notes about where the two had hung themselves to the point where the exact tree is identified to this day in the park.) Thus ended the Ming Dynasty and began the Qing. (If memory serves me correctly, the Manchus basically ended up using Li Zicheng to help bring the Ming to an end and supplant themselves as the rulers during the Qing Dynasty. For the common reader, the Manchus are easily identifiable in movies and TV shows as the folks where the men have their hair pulled back in very long braids and almost look bald from the front. Think of Chow Yun-Fat from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as an example.)

Picture in San Maurizio, Milàn by gian paolo cicéri

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Description to be precised, sooner or later

triangular man by Masha Kirikova

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This man looks a bit like my grandfather. The same strict mouth, the same dry hard working peasant lines. And this man is also an engineer, precise and very experienced. I miss my grandfather so much and look for his face everywhere. For 11 years.

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