Did someone say tattooed feet?

Yes, and that someone was me.

Shannon's got a lot of tattoos. I think you can pretty well infer that from this picture alone, even if you hadn't seen yesterday's shot of her back. At the point at which you've got several tattoos on your feet, it's not too much to assume that there would be more, the higher up on the body you go.

Now, let's see if I remember this correctly: there's three on the feet, total, one right above the ankle, one on the right hip, one on each lower abdomen, one running down the left side, one on the wrist? I think that wrist one might actually be something she's Going to get, but doesn't have yet.

I remember when only punks, bikers and ex-cons had tattoos. It was really little more than ten years ago, I remember meeting two friends of mine in high school, they had tattoos around their waists, and it was the most incredible thing because, well, they were neither ex-cons, punks or bikers. So I guess it had just started back then, regular folk doing what up until then had been taboo in regular society. When I got mine, it was still something you rarely saw in polite society, something only a select few of my friends had.

Maybe it's living in Los Angeles, but now it's almost impossible to go a day without seeing someone with at least one tattoo-sleeved arm. Just a regular person working retail somewhere, tattooed to the gills.

I kind of miss those taboo days.

French postcard by Cinémagazine-Selection, no. 894. Photo: Paramount. Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930).

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was the first German actress who became successful in Hollywood. Throughout her long career, she constantly reinvented herself. In 1920s Berlin, she started as a cabaret singer, chorus girl, and film actress. In the 1930s, she became a Hollywood star, then a World War II frontline entertainer, and finally, she was an international stage show performer from the 1950s till the 1970s. Now we remember her as one of the icons of the 20th century.

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany, in 1901. She was the younger of two daughters of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine née Felsing. Her mother was from a well-to-do Berlin family who owned a clock-making firm and her father was a police lieutenant. He died in 1911. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocrat first lieutenant in the Grenadiers courted Wilhelmina and eventually married her in 1916. He was killed on the Russian front in 1918. The young Marie Magdalene and her elder sister, Elisabeth, were brought up strictly in an upper-middle-class Prussian home. It would be this influence that would shape her acting career and her life as a citizen in years to come. Dietrich attended school in Berlin and Dessau from 1907 to 1919. She studied violin and became interested in theatre and poetry as a teenager. Her dreams of becoming a concert violinist were cut short when she injured her wrist. In 1921, she auditioned unsuccessfully for Max Reinhardt's drama academy, but she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. The next year she played a part in the silent film So sind die Männer/The Little Napoleon (Georg Jacoby, 1922). On the set of another film, Tragödie der Liebe/The Tragedy of Love (Joe May, 1923), she met production assistant Rudolf Sieber. They were married in 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, later billed as actress Maria Riva, was born in 1924. Throughout the 1920s Marlene continued to work on stage and in films both in Berlin and Vienna. She attracted most attention in stage musicals and revues, such as Broadway and Es Liegt in der Luft/It's in the Air. By the late 1920s, she was also playing leading parts in such films as Café Elektric/Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky, 1927) with Willi Forst, Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame/I Kiss Your Hand Madame (Robert Land, 1929) with Harry Liedtke, and Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt/The Woman One Longs For (Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt, 1929) opposite Fritz Kortner.

In 1929 Marlene Dietrich played her breakthrough role of Lola-Lola, a cabaret singer who causes the downfall of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), a hitherto respected schoolmaster, in the Ufa production Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Josef von Sternberg thereafter took credit for having ‘discovered’ her. The film is also noteworthy for introducing her signature song Falling in Love Again. On the strength of Der blaue Engel's success, and with encouragement and promotion from Von Sternberg, Dietrich then moved to Hollywood. She left her husband and daughter behind. Paramount sought to market her as a German answer to MGM's Swedish sensation Greta Garbo. Her first American film, Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) opposite Gary Cooper earned her her only Oscar nomination. Between 1930 and 1935 she was the star of six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount: Morocco (1930); Dishonored (1931), about a spy who betrays her country for love of a worthless man (Victor McLaglen); Shanghai Express (1932), a melodrama in which she is a China Coast prostitute who offers herself to a warlord (Warner Oland) to save the life of a former lover (Clive Brook); Blonde Venus (1932), a mother-love soap opera;, The Scarlet Empress (1934), an opulent and visually stunning melodrama about a lascivious Catherine the Great; and The Devil Is A Woman (1935), an erotic tale about a soldier-corrupting vamp in turn-of-the-century Seville. Wikipedia describes how Von Sternberg worked very effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous femme fatale: "He encouraged her to lose weight and coached her intensively as an actress – she, in turn, was willing to trust him and follow his sometimes imperious direction in a way that a number of other performers resisted. A crucial part of the overall effect was created by Von Sternberg's exceptional skill in lighting and photographing Dietrich to optimum effect — the use of light and shadow, including the impact of light passed through a veil or slatted blinds (as for example in Shanghai Express) — which, when combined with scrupulous attention to all aspects of set design and costumes, make this series of films among the most visually stylish in cinema history." Because it displayed her beauty most effectively, The Devil Is a Woman was her particular favourite. But after the dismal failure of The Devil Is A Woman, Paramount fired Von Sternberg, and the star and director would never work together again.

Without Von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich made her first comedy, Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936). It was a satire about an urbane jewel thief (Dietrich) who steals a choice necklace from a Parisian jeweller and, in efforts to keep it, becomes involved with a hayseed Detroit engineer (Gary Cooper). Although Dietrich's salary in the mid-1930s was enormous, she was never listed among the top ten box-office attractions, and depression-era audiences often felt she was preposterously exotic. She was even labelled 'box office poison' after Knight Without Armour (Jacques Feyder, 1937) proved an expensive flop. In 1939, her stardom revived when she played the freewheeling saloon entertainer Frenchie in the comic Western Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) opposite James Stewart. Hollywood's attempt to make her more 'ordinary' worked. The film also introduced another favourite song, The Boys in the Back Room. She played a similar role with John Wayne in The Spoilers (Ray Enright, 1942). In December 1941, the US had entered World War II, and Dietrich became one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She toured the US from January 1942 to September 1943 and it is said that she sold more war bonds than any other star. During two extended tours for the USO in 1944 and 1945, she sang and performed the singing saw for Allied troops on the front lines in Algeria, Italy, England, and France. For musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralize enemy soldiers, she recorded a number of songs in German, including the ballad Lili Marleen. The troops loved her. In 1947, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the US for her wartime work. In 1950, the French state conferred the title of Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur (knight of the Legion of Honour) on her, in 1971 she was named Officier by President Pompidou and in 1989 Commandeur by President Mitterrand.

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Marlene Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly-paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theatres in major cities worldwide. Her costumes (body-hugging dresses covered with thousands of crystals as well as a swansdown coat), body-sculpting undergarments, careful stage lighting helped to preserve Dietrich's glamorous image well into old age. She never fully regained her former screen glory, but she continued performing in films for distinguished directors. Her successful film roles included an exotic gypsy in Golden Earrings (Mitchell Leisen, 1947), with Ray Milland, an ex-Nazi cafe singer in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948), a famous singer and murderer in Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), an aging bandit queen in Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), the wife of a suspected murderer in Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957), a cynical brothel-keeper in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), and the aristocratic widow of a prominent Nazi general in Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961). Dietrich's show business career largely ended in 1975, when she broke her leg during a stage performance in Sydney, Australia. Her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer in 1976. Her final on-camera film appearance was a small role in Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo/Just a Gigolo (David Hemmings, 1979), starring David Bowie. Dietrich withdrew to her apartment in Paris. She spent the final 11 years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few — including family and employees — to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben/Marlene, was published in 1979. In 1982, she agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was only allowed to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star". In 1992, Marlene Dietrich died of renal failure at the age of 90 in Paris. Ten years after her death, Berlin - the city of Dietrich's birth which she shunned for most of her life - declared her an honorary citizen. In a 1992 obituary The New York Times wrote: "In her films and record-breaking cabaret performances, Miss Dietrich artfully projected cool sophistication, self-mockery and infinite experience. Her sexuality was audacious, her wit was insolent and her manner was ageless. With a world-weary charm and a diaphanous gown showing off her celebrated legs, she was the quintessential cabaret entertainer of Weimar-era Germany."

Sources: James Naremore (Senses of Cinema), Wikipedia, The New York Times, Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Built for the SWFactions game on Eurobricks. Original Post with Story: www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/184504-f...

Through the struggles and sacrifices of the Cragmaloids and the Freedom Fighters, the TaggeCo slavers have been defeated, and ANKUS has been freed.

Most of the Freedom Fighters depart to Ilum, but for the first time, the grateful Cragmaloids take a leap of faith and invite outsiders to dwell among their proud people. The Followers of the Force are given land to establish villages, where they might live in harmony with the native people and find their lives enriched by the spirit of this ancient planet.

The village of Pathabigani (meaning "Trust Given to Friends" in the Cragmaloid's bellowing language) is currently preparing a select few for an expedition to a far-off system in search of Force-important artifacts. But in the late afternoon we see that work for the day has wound down. The researchers, technicians, farmers, and refugees all enjoy food and drink, mingling and talking and joking together. Everyone's attention gradually turns to the game of Corellian Spike being played by the runaway Prince, the wandering Bo'Barbi, and Sakaru Onichi in the lamplight under the awning. Suddenly, the crowd erupts into cheers and groans: at a climatic moment Sakaru reveals a winning Bantha's Wild, cementing the Prince's shocking defeat. Nobody is more shocked than the Prince himself, but Sakaru takes the victory with grace.

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it" - Lord of the Rings

Known only to a select few, those who have dared to tread off the beaten track,

Finnich Glen is a natural and stunning gorge just north of Glasgow.

Descending a path is known as Jacob`s Ladder, leads you down into a lost world of shadows and whisper's. The water so dark and menacing it draws you in.

I don't usually get overly excited for new Chima sets... okay, I never get excited for new Chima sets... however, when I saw that one of the legend beasts was going to be a lion (obviously) I started to see some possibilities. Plus, I was able to recently get my hands on a few of the eagle Creator set from last year. Needless to say, I have been itching to build a griffon. Especially after I built the eagle, and was blown away by his articulation and detail.

So, here is the final result. The love child of two official LEGO sets, my imagination, and a sprinkling of spare parts from my bins.

I'm really pleased with how this guy turned out, and I definitely plan to buy more Chima legend beasts soon so that I can craft some more Galacian beasts.

*** The Great Northern Griffon is the largest of all the griffon breeds in Galacia. This particular griffon hails from the snow-capped peaks of Norderan. Known for being semi-sentient and having particularly wicked tempers, only a select few dwarves have tamed this large species of griffon as a war beast.

Alexander Dennis presents the brand new 100-seat Enviro400XLB three-axle double decker, developed in close collaboration with Lothian Buses and chassis manufacturer Volvo. 42 of these high-capacity buses will enter service in Edinburgh from January onwards. They are manufactured in Falkirk, securing jobs and adding value to the Scottish economy directly and via the extensive local supply chain.

With Lothian’s services in the Scottish capital seeing consistent patronage growth, the operator collaborated with Alexander Dennis to develop the 13.4m Enviro400XLB. Offering 100 seats and able to carry up to 131 passengers in total, it delivers unrivalled capacity for busy routes in the capital, while its front and middle doors will speed-up dwell times at bus stops. It has been built to even higher standards than bus users in Edinburgh are familiar with, with comfortable high-backed seating, WiFi, USB charging, mood lighting and audio-visual stop announcements.

Alexander Dennis’s Enviro400XLB is the first bus for the United Kingdom to be mounted on Volvo’s recently launched three-axle B8L chassis, powered by the efficient 350hp Euro 6 D8K engine.

On Friday 09th November 2018, a select few from Lothian Buses and enthusiasts were specially invited by MD Richard Hall to pay a visit to the Alexander Dennis factory in Falkirk.

Northern lights fill the sky on the north shore of Madeline Island. An unexpected spike in activity was seen by a select few of soul who braved the cold and wind - Color from the horizon to about 70 degrees upward.

German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 5125/1, 1930-1931. Photo: Ufa. Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was the first German actress who became successful in Hollywood. Throughout her long career, she constantly reinvented herself. In 1920s Berlin, she started as a cabaret singer, chorus girl, and film actress. In the 1930s, she became a Hollywood star, then a World War II frontline entertainer, and finally, she was an international stage show performer from the 1950s till the 1970s. Now we remember her as one of the icons of the 20th century.

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany, in 1901. She was the younger of two daughters of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine née Felsing. Her mother was from a well-to-do Berlin family who owned a clock making firm and her father was a police lieutenant. He died in 1911. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocrat first lieutenant in the Grenadiers courted Wilhelmina and eventually married her in 1916. He was killed on the Russian front in 1918. The young Marie Magdalene and her elder sister, Elisabeth, were brought up strictly in an upper-middle-class Prussian home. It would be this influence which would shape her acting career and her life as a citizen in years to come. Dietrich attended school in Berlin and Dessau from 1907 to 1919. She studied violin and became interested in theatre and poetry as a teenager. Her dreams of becoming a concert violinist were cut short when she injured her wrist. In 1921, she auditioned unsuccessfully for Max Reinhardt's drama academy, but she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. The next year she played a part in the silent film So sind die Männer/The Little Napoleon (Georg Jacoby, 1922). On the set of another film, Tragödie der Liebe/The Tragedy of Love (Joe May, 1923), she met production assistant Rudolf Sieber. They were married in 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, later billed as actress Maria Riva, was born in 1924. Throughout the 1920s Marlene continued to work on stage and in films both in Berlin and Vienna. She attracted most attention in stage musicals and revues, such as Broadway and Es Liegt in der Luft/It's in the Air. By the late 1920s, she was also playing leading parts in such films as Café Elektric/Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky, 1927) with Willi Forst, Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame/I Kiss Your Hand Madame (Robert Land, 1929) with Harry Liedtke, and Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt/The Woman One Longs For (Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt, 1929) opposite Fritz Kortner.

In 1929 Marlene Dietrich played her breakthrough role of Lola-Lola, a cabaret singer who causes the downfall of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), a hitherto respected schoolmaster, in the Ufa production Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Josef von Sternberg thereafter took credit for having ‘discovered’ her. The film is also noteworthy for introducing her signature song Falling in Love Again. On the strength of Der blaue Engel's success, and with encouragement and promotion from Von Sternberg, Dietrich then moved to Hollywood. She left her husband and daughter behind. Paramount sought to market her as a German answer to MGM's Swedish sensation Greta Garbo. Her first American film, Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) opposite Gary Cooper earned her her only Oscar nomination. Between 1930 and 1935 she was the star of six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount: Morocco (1930); Dishonored (1931), about a spy who betrays her country for love of a worthless man (Victor McLaglen); Shanghai Express (1932), a melodrama in which she is a China Coast prostitute who offers herself to a warlord (Warner Oland) to save the life of a former lover (Clive Brook); Blonde Venus (1932), a mother-love soap opera;, The Scarlet Empress (1934), an opulent and visually stunning melodrama about a lascivious Catherine the Great; and The Devil Is A Woman (1935), an erotic tale about a soldier-corrupting vamp in turn-of-the-century Seville. Wikipedia describes how Von Sternberg worked very effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous femme fatale: "He encouraged her to lose weight and coached her intensively as an actress – she, in turn, was willing to trust him and follow his sometimes imperious direction in a way that a number of other performers resisted. A crucial part of the overall effect was created by Von Sternberg's exceptional skill in lighting and photographing Dietrich to optimum effect — the use of light and shadow, including the impact of light passed through a veil or slatted blinds (as for example in Shanghai Express) — which, when combined with scrupulous attention to all aspects of set design and costumes, make this series of films among the most visually stylish in cinema history." Because it displayed her beauty most effectively, The Devil Is a Woman was her particular favourite. But after the dismal failure of The Devil Is A Woman, Paramount fired Von Sternberg, and the star and director would never work together again.

Without Von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich made her first comedy, Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936). It was a satire about an urbane jewel thief (Dietrich) who steals a choice necklace from a Parisian jeweller and, in efforts to keep it, becomes involved with a hayseed Detroit engineer (Gary Cooper). Although Dietrich's salary in the mid 1930s was enormous, she was never listed among the top ten box-office attractions, and depression-era audiences often felt she was preposterously exotic. She was even labelled 'box office poison' after Knight Without Armour (Jacques Feyder, 1937) proved an expensive flop. In 1939, her stardom revived when she played the freewheeling saloon entertainer Frenchie in the comic Western Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) opposite James Stewart. Hollywood's attempt to make her more 'ordinary' worked. The film also introduced another favourite song, The Boys in the Back Room. She played a similar role with John Wayne in The Spoilers (Ray Enright, 1942). In December 1941, the US had entered World War II, and Dietrich became one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She toured the US from January 1942 to September 1943 and it is said that she sold more war bonds than any other star. During two extended tours for the USO in 1944 and 1945, she sang and performed the singing saw for Allied troops on the front lines in Algeria, Italy, England and France. For musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralize enemy soldiers, she recorded a number of songs in German, including the ballad Lili Marleen. The troops loved her. In 1947, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the US for her wartime work. In 1950, the French state conferred the title of Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur (knight of the Legion of Honour) on her, in 1971 she was named Officier by President Pompidou and in 1989 Commandeur by President Mitterrand.

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Marlene Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theatres in major cities worldwide. Her costumes (body-hugging dresses covered with thousands of crystals as well as a swansdown coat), body-sculpting undergarments, careful stage lighting helped to preserve Dietrich's glamorous image well into old age. She never fully regained her former screen glory, but she continued performing in films for distinguished directors. Her successful film roles included an exotic gypsy in Golden Earrings (Mitchell Leisen, 1947), with Ray Milland, an ex-Nazi cafe singer in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948), a famous singer and murderer in Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), an aging bandit queen in Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), the wife of a suspected murderer in Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957), a cynical brothel-keeper in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), and the aristocratic widow of a prominent Nazi general in Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961). Dietrich's show business career largely ended in 1975, when she broke her leg during a stage performance in Sydney, Australia. Her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer in 1976. Her final on-camera film appearance was a small role in Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo/Just a Gigolo (David Hemmings, 1979), starring David Bowie. Dietrich withdrew to her apartment in Paris. She spent the final 11 years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few — including family and employees — to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben/Marlene, was published in 1979. In 1982, she agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was only allowed to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star". In 1992, Marlene Dietrich died of renal failure at the age of 90 in Paris. Ten years after her death, Berlin - the city of Dietrich's birth which she shunned for most of her life - declared her an honorary citizen. In a 1992 obituary The New York Times wrote: "In her films and record-breaking cabaret performances, Miss Dietrich artfully projected cool sophistication, self-mockery, and infinite experience. Her sexuality was audacious, her wit was insolent and her manner was ageless. With a world-weary charm and a diaphanous gown showing off her celebrated legs, she was the quintessential cabaret entertainer of Weimar-era Germany."

Sources: James Naremore (Senses of Cinema), Wikipedia, The New York Times, Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

I'd been trying to catch one of these reincarnated New England coal trains but missed the first two due to the holiday and timing.

The word going around is that there are a dozen of these trains coming out of the Monongahela coal fields via an all CSXT routing to Ayer for hand off to Pan Am and forwarding to the Merrimack Generating station.

While us railfans have been excited there are a group of people who are, shall we say much less enthusiastic about the return of these trains! Consequently this one wasn't plastered all over social media in advance. However, a select few folks still knew about it, so I wasn't alone here on the Rt. 31 / Center Depot Road overpass despite it being relatively early on a weekday morning....but at least everyone here was a coal train supporter!

Here we see 80 car train N618-14 curling thru CP57 and climbing to the top of the Charlton Hill grade on CSXT's Boston Subdivision.

Charlton, Massachusetts

Monday December 16, 2019

Hi ❤

We are looking for a select few bloggers for .:Swagger:. by Kawaii!

Alexander Dennis presents the brand new 100-seat Enviro400XLB three-axle double decker, developed in close collaboration with Lothian Buses and chassis manufacturer Volvo. 42 of these high-capacity buses will enter service in Edinburgh from January onwards. They are manufactured in Falkirk, securing jobs and adding value to the Scottish economy directly and via the extensive local supply chain.

With Lothian’s services in the Scottish capital seeing consistent patronage growth, the operator collaborated with Alexander Dennis to develop the 13.4m Enviro400XLB. Offering 100 seats and able to carry up to 131 passengers in total, it delivers unrivalled capacity for busy routes in the capital, while its front and middle doors will speed-up dwell times at bus stops. It has been built to even higher standards than bus users in Edinburgh are familiar with, with comfortable high-backed seating, WiFi, USB charging, mood lighting and audio-visual stop announcements.

Alexander Dennis’s Enviro400XLB is the first bus for the United Kingdom to be mounted on Volvo’s recently launched three-axle B8L chassis, powered by the efficient 350hp Euro 6 D8K engine.

On Friday 09th November 2018, a select few from Lothian Buses and enthusiasts were specially invited by MD Richard Hall to pay a visit to the Alexander Dennis factory in Falkirk.

While I was dressed today had some fun trying on some outfits for tomorrow. Wife likes the longer one. My sister has moved out to her own place so she is having a house warming dinner party for a select few and the theme is "Blues Night" so basically you have to come in dressed in blue!

My Spring pre-orders have arrived! First off is the W Club Event Exclusive Royal Treatment Veronique Gift Set. Because it is the W Club’s 10th Anniversary and Integrity Toys’ 20th Anniversary, the designers have cooked up something special… or they might have fallen short on this one. For this year’s Spring Collection, the designers took a risk with the face designs as they are stylized than usual. I think they went for a Valia-esque style of screening which I’m not really accustomed to with FR. Only a select few of them really spoke to me. I do have to say that they are prettier in hand than in pictures. That’s one thing I love about Integrity Toys’ products. Since it’s the anniversary year, it’s a no-brainer that Veronique is the Unveiling Event doll this year as she is the main woman of Fashion Royalty. The doll that started it all alongside her best friend Adele Makeda.

There seems to be two themes in this year’s Spring Collection. One is the early 60s debutante theme and the other is the early 60s Mad Men inspired theme. For the retail price of $225, this gift set comes with a ball gown, a tweed coat, a yellow sheath dress, lingerie, a hand bag, a pair of shoes, a jewelry set and a pair of ‘gloved’ hands. Reminiscent to the earlier gift sets offered by IT from way back at a similar price. While the black & white debutante ball gown works well with her pale skin and red lips, the simplicity of its construction isn’t really my cup of tea. While I thought the coat was too plain at first, I now understand the minimal approach of it upon examining it as they were going for the cocoon-like structure similar to Prestige Natalia’s jacket. It has no buttons and no pockets just one hidden hook closure at the top. I’m partial with the yellow sheath dress as the neckline has been done a million times before. While the matching belt gives the dress some detail, it’s definitely hard to put on as it is cut about a half an inch too short. I pre-ordered this set for the fact that there are pieces that I love in this set. The Birkin-esque bag is a sure winner. Integrity finally took inspiration from Hermès which something I only see previously from handmade 1:6 scale sellers on etsy or ebay. I also love the lingerie as I can see it worn like a top paired with a wide leg, high wasted pair of trousers. The details on the shoes are impeccably done. Definitely a must-have! I really feel this set could have included more, maybe a necklace and drop earrings and a second pair of shoes.

Comparing this set to last year’s Unveiling Event doll, High Visibility Agnes, this comes with fashion pieces that I can actually use on a regular basis and that’s certainly a plus. In this year’s Spring Collection, the dolls came with the old hand sculpts and the other pair are FR2 hand sculpts. I don’t know if it’s the designers’ way of pleasing the people who like either sculpts but I just wish they could settle for one and not both… or better yet create new ones. I like the old ones because of how dainty they look but at the same time I like the FR2 hands as they have separate fingers so they can wear multiple rings. So why not combine both? A smaller version of Color Infusion hands maybe?

I’ve been really selective with my FR purchases for this year. While I love some of the fashion pieces, I wasn’t really pleased with the face designs. While I think Veronique has one of the best face designs in this collection, I don’t see the Veronique that I love in Royal Treatment. I don’t think the risk that the designers took paid off this time.

860 bhp, 6,262 cc rear-mounted longitudinal 65-degree V-12 engine with Bosch Motronic ME7 electronic fuel injection, six-speed electro-hydraulic semi-automatic transmission, front and rear independent pushrod suspension with unequal length wishbones, coil-over springs, and manually adjustable telescopic shock absorbers, and four-wheel Brembo carbon-ceramic disc brakes. Wheelbase: 104.3 in.

•The first customer FXX produced

•Single ownership from new; used at only three Corse Clienti events

•Upgraded with the Evoluzione package by the factory

•One of Ferrari’s rarest and most exclusive automobiles; a track-day titan

The performance car industry was characterized in the mid-2000s by a supercar battle royale that raged between Europe’s most prestigious automotive manufacturers. Porsche’s Carrera GT, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren , and the Ferrari Enzo were all vying to be crowned king of the supercars. All three were capable of speeds over 200 mph and 0–60 times in the low three-second range, and they looked like nothing else on the road. Nevertheless, only one could be the best, and most agreed that the Enzo was the undisputed champion. As the Enzo was produced in lower numbers than both the Carrera GT and SLR McLaren and it boasted incredible looks with startling performance, many believed it to be the top dog and a car that its company simply would not be able to top for quite some time.

However, Ferrari was not a company to rest on its laurels, and many within the company thought that there was still much that could be improved upon with the Enzo platform. During the summer of 2005, at private, invitation-only events throughout Europe and North America, Ferrari announced to a select few that it would be producing a special track-only car that would be available in limited production to its best customers. The purpose of this car would be to give Ferrari’s most loyal clients the opportunity to develop the next generation of road cars through unprecedented access to Ferrari’s newest automotive technology and engineers. This new car, based on the already-incredible Ferrari Enzo, would provide an insane amount of performance, with a top speed stated at 214 mph.

The FXX was formally announced a few months later in December 2005 at the Bologna Motor Show, and it garnered an incredible amount of attention from both the world’s motoring press and automotive enthusiasts alike. Only 38 examples would be produced, making it one of the rarest cars in the history of the company. For the lucky enthusiasts given a chance to own an FXX, it was almost considered to be a blessing, as they would be given the opportunity to work directly with the factory to help develop future cars bearing the Cavallino Rampante.

Unlike Ferrari’s successful and very well run Challenge Series, the FXX would be run under the Corse Clienti program. This program, equally successful in its own right, was responsible for providing factory support to clients with Formula One Ferraris, and it would play a similar role in the FXX Programme. This would be a non-competitive program, in which owners would be invited, along with their cars, to select events, where they would be able to drive their cars on the track at speed. Like the F1 Clienti program, the factory would provide owners with a team of technicians and engineers for mechanical support and to advise the drivers on how to achieve the best results with their car. These events allowed the owners to improve their driving abilities in a controlled environment through feedback from the industry’s best factory drivers and support staff. The cars would be serviced and maintained by the factory, and owners were even given the opportunity to store their cars at Ferraris facilities in Maranello if they so desired, leaving the company in charge of transporting the cars to and from events.

The FXX presented here, chassis number 145369, was the very first FXX produced. It was ordered new by its first and current owner at the announcement of the program, and at that time, it was established that he would receive the first example built by the factory. Following its delivery, the car has only been used in three Corse Clienti events, at the inaugural FXX event at Homestead-Miami Speedway in April 2006, at the same venue once more in March of 2007, and at Laguna Seca in August 2008. This totals to only six heats over the three Corse Clienti events, with the car logging perhaps three to four hours of track time since new. The color scheme of pearl white with red trim is unique amongst the 37 other FXXs produced, and it is incredibly attractive both at speed and at a standstill.

In early 2008, before it was used at the Laguna Seca Corse Clienti event in August, FXX number 1 was converted to Evoluzione specifications by the factory. Thanks to data, telemetry, and feedback gathered from owners over the first two years of the program, the factory was able to perform a series of upgrades to the car in order to increase every parameter of its performance. The “Evo” upgrades included gear ratios being changed to accommodate the extra 1,000 rpm produced by the engine, which resulted in the gearshifts now taking place in 60 milliseconds and the FXX’s lap time around Fiorano being cut down by two seconds. The upgrades also included modified aerodynamics, an improved and more complex traction-control system, a braking system upgraded with better cooling and ductwork and more durable brake pads, and a rear-camera upgraded in order to provide the driver with increased rearward visibility.

Ownership of a FXX provides its possessor not only with a car of incredible performance but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work directly with the company that created it through a wholly unique racing experience. There is no doubt that data gained during the FXX program contributed to the development of the revolutionary LaFerrari, as well as numerous other cars in the marque’s current lineup and perhaps future models in the years to come. Despite the unveiling of the LaFerrari and its Corse Clienti sibling, the FXX K, the FXX Programme will continue for the 2015 season, with a calendar of events already announced. Both the car and program showcase Ferrari’s unwavering commitment to their customers to produce not only the finest motor cars in the world but to also furnish an entire motoring experience based around an automobile.

With only three Corse Clienti events under its belt, FXX number 1 is ready for many more track days, and it will forever remain a symbol of Ferrari’s ever-evolving performance, technology, and steadfast commitment to its clientele.

This Ferrari FXX Evoluzione (chassis ZFFHX62X000145369) sold for $1,622,500.

[Text from RM Auctions]

www.rmsothebys.com/lots/lot.cfm?lot_id=1072254

This Lego miniland scale Ferrari FXX Evoluzione (2005) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 96th Build Challenge - The 8th Birthday, titled - 'Happy Crazy Eight Birthday, LUGNuts' - where all previous build challenges are available to build to. This model is built to the LUGNuts 89th Build Challenge, - "Over a Million, Under a Thousand" - a challenge to build a vehicle which costs over one million dollars, or under on thousand dollars.

First test shooting unperforated Fuji HRII Microfilm Negative film.

Fellow film shooter Dan ( www.flickr.com/photos/nano_burger/ ) tipped me off to the world of unperforated 35mm microfilms. This film is beautiful, is rated iso 25 and scans like butter.

How to shoot it? A select few 35mm cameras can shoot unperforated film. The cream of the crop - the Canon EOS 10s - superb camera all around!

Image © 2014 Michael Raso

Flip Side Records

Pompton Lakes NJ

April 2014

Canon EOS 10s 35mm slr camera

Promaster EF 75 - 300mm f4 lens

Home Developed in Kodak D76.Scan - Epson V700

Shoot film!

filmphotographyproject.com/

While I was dressed today had some fun trying on some outfits for tomorrow. Wife likes the longer one. My sister has moved out to her own place so she is having a house warming dinner party for a select few and the theme is "Blues Night" so basically you have to come in dressed in blue!

Summer in the city... for a select few

Hello all you hipsters out there,Your too cool for school, To hip to be understood,I dedicate this painting to all of you its called (The Beat Poet Is Off To The Coffee Shop For Another Reading.) Listen to your jazz, Spill out your words of wit, Reject things of this world, Live on your own terms ,No can tell you what to do,Only a select few really can grasp the true concept of what your poems say,Your too far out for this little world in which we dwell and I'm sure your too hip to have any one dedicating a painting to you,but I do in none the less for in your rejection, I'm accepted, now how is that for a twist on coolness? Peace out my friends its time for me to spin one up and dance the allemande with the milky way,for that is the one place that I feel most at home,so before I say good bye my beatnik friends, keep on writing your poems for the future and wearing your sunglasses with dark colors, I would shake your hands but that is for only for the corporate types and we all know just a nod will do.Steve. p.s. Click on the note to see the poet!

Oh here we go... I picked out the best of the best. The ones that have spoken to me. The ones who I think are the best versions of each doll. It’s all about the face and the hair for me, and not necessarily the fashions. I told myself I would NEVER get any Poppy Parker or any of the Dynamite Girls… but I can’t help it! They’re irresistible! Most dolls from my selection are produced from 2009 to present. One from 2006 and a select few from 2008. I’d like to keep my collection as slim as possible, so any moment IT releases a version of one of the characters who is better than the previously released ones, one could get eliminated from the list. I am insane! I know.

Black&White means I have not acquired the doll yet, while Full Color means I have the doll in my collection or I pre-ordered the doll.

credits:

The Muse Adele/kostis1667

Tropicalia Workshop Poppy/think_pink1265/insidethefashiondollstudio

I did have a select few photos of this Taco Bell in my archives, and here's one of them. Looks like a rather close-cropped view from the very end of 2013. I have a better archived photo (or two), which I may share later. As you've probably heard about 10000000000X times by now, "this is a developing situation", but as of earlier this afternoon actual live workers were inside the place doing actual work. Hopefully that will continue...

____________________________________

Taco Bell, 2006-built, Church Rd. at Pepper Chase Dr., Southaven MS

Vernazza, Cinque Terre 2013 ❤️ this is such an amazing place and a must see if you are going to Italy! We spent one day exploring the towns of Cinque Terre, would love to spend more time here, however one day was enough to see most of the towns and spend a bit of time in them! #italy #cinqueterre #colors #travel #travelling #europe #wanderlust #vintique #bestplacestogo #bestvacationspix #beautifuldestinations #colormesummer #shotaward #special_shots #select_few #instagoodmyphoto ##wonderful_places #worldbestgram #worldplaces #italy_vacations

323 Likes on Instagram

6 Comments on Instagram:

zedawy: Awesome gallery

conversationswithmysister: Oh DEFINITELY on my 'to do' list...time is such a precious (sometimes unattainable) thing!!!

instagram.com/rg.travelgram: Beautiful shots!

daegels_adventures: Love your feed!

be_mine_joey: Awesome angle, great work again

hometravelfood: 🍷💥

Alexander Dennis presents the brand new 100-seat Enviro400XLB three-axle double decker, developed in close collaboration with Lothian Buses and chassis manufacturer Volvo. 42 of these high-capacity buses will enter service in Edinburgh from January onwards. They are manufactured in Falkirk, securing jobs and adding value to the Scottish economy directly and via the extensive local supply chain.

With Lothian’s services in the Scottish capital seeing consistent patronage growth, the operator collaborated with Alexander Dennis to develop the 13.4m Enviro400XLB. Offering 100 seats and able to carry up to 131 passengers in total, it delivers unrivalled capacity for busy routes in the capital, while its front and middle doors will speed-up dwell times at bus stops. It has been built to even higher standards than bus users in Edinburgh are familiar with, with comfortable high-backed seating, WiFi, USB charging, mood lighting and audio-visual stop announcements.

Alexander Dennis’s Enviro400XLB is the first bus for the United Kingdom to be mounted on Volvo’s recently launched three-axle B8L chassis, powered by the efficient 350hp Euro 6 D8K engine.

On Friday 09th November 2018, a select few from Lothian Buses and enthusiasts were specially invited by MD Richard Hall to pay a visit to the Alexander Dennis factory in Falkirk.

I found my prince 4 yrs ago today and Im the luckest woman in this world to have married my bestfriend,my lover,my everything so many memories we share every single day and this tribute here is only a selected few happy anniversary my love

Chassis n° DB4/886/L

Zoute Sale - Bonhams

Estimated : € 1.200.000 - 1.600.000

Sold for € 1.236.250

Zoute Grand Prix 2022

Knokke - Zoute

België - Belgium

October 2022

The competition potential of Aston Martin's new DB4 had been recognised from the outset, and the factory lost no time in developing a lightweight version suitable for racing, the resulting DB4GT debuting at the 1959 London Motor Show. The model had already been proven in competition earlier that year when the prototype ('DP/199') driven by Stirling Moss won its first race at Silverstone. Extensive modifications to the standard car took 5" (127mm) out of the wheelbase, and replaced the rear seats with a luggage platform on all but a small number of cars. Together with lighter, 18-gauge bodywork, these changes reduced the car's weight by around 200lb (91kg).

The GT used a tuned engine which, equipped with a twin-plug cylinder head and triple Weber 45DCOE carburettors, produced a claimed 302bhp at 6,000rpm, a useful increase over the standard car's claimed 240bhp. Maximum speed, of course, depended on overall gearing, but 250km/h was achieved during testing with a 0-100km/h time of 6.2 seconds recorded. The DB4 was also one of the first cars to go from standstill to 160km/h and then brake to a dead stop on under 20 seconds, a tribute, in part, to its up-rated Girling brakes as used on Aston Martin's competition sports racers of the era.

While several customers liked the idea of the GT engine, not all were so keen on the DB4GT's Spartan, competition orientated and less roomy interior, preferring the civility of the standard model. To accommodate these select few clients, Aston Martin was happy to supply the DB4 with the GT engine. The first three such examples were completed in 1961 during production of the 'Series 3' DB4, followed by a further five in 'Series 4' and six in 'Series 5' plus one convertible, making 15 cars in total (source: AMOC Register).

This matching-numbers car, left-hand drive chassis 'DB4/886/L', is one of the five 'Series 4' saloons delivered with the twin-plug GT engine installed, three of which were left-hand drive, and is thus one of the rarest of all DB4 variants. The car was delivered new in 1962 via US importers J S Inskip first owner Henry Dingley Jr of Auburn, Maine, a motor sports enthusiast known to have raced Alfa Romeos and a Lotus XI. The DB4 was ordered with the desirable GT-type dashboard, overdrive gearbox, oil temperature gauge, brake servo, chrome wheels, and a Bray block heater as well as the GT engine. The Aston's immediate history thereafter is not known, but by January 1985 it was in the ownership of Thomas Clark of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. '886/L' next passed to S A Taylor in the USA and in 1992 was acquired by Philip Cowan of Guernsey, Channel Islands. Later that same year the car was sold to Mr Rolf Annecke of Neuenkirchen, Germany.

During the years of Mr Annecke's ownership the car was completely restored (body, mechanicals, engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, electrics, etc) including a bare metal re-spray in Deep Carriage Green (an original Aston Martin colour). The extensive engine overhaul and tune up was carried out by Roos Engineering of Safenwil, Switzerland, while the interior was completely refurbished using correct original materials: Connolly leather, Wilton carpeting, etc.

In 2014 Mr Annecke offered the DB4 for sale. At that time approximately 1,000 miles had been covered since the rebuild's completion in 2005, the odometer reading at time of sale being 48,000 miles. Some 500 miles previously the old original Dunlop wire wheels had been exchanged for new 16" Borrani-style wheels shod with new Dunlop racing tyres. Most aspects of the restoration are documented by bills and photographs on file.

In early 2014 Mr Annecke sold the DB4 to the consignor, a connoisseur marque enthusiast based in Belgium. Determined to return the Aston to concours-standard original specification, he commissioned Carrosserie Philip Vilain in Brussels to start work in the summer of 2014. Vilain's brief was to completely restore the coachwork and chrome, and so the body was stripped back to bare metal and repainted in its original black livery, the entire process being documented by numerous photographs on file.

The factory's Aston Martin Works division was approached in 2015 to carry out a thorough evaluation of '886/L'. They made several recommendations, resulting in further refurbishment that included installing a new radiator, steering wheel, front/rear windscreens, headlights, and accelerator pedal. At the same time the interior was correctly re-trimmed in red leather with Wilton woollen carpets and a correct headlining. Related invoices on file total over £78,000 (approximately €90,500). Aston Martin Works issued a Gold Certification book in September 2016, confirming '886/L' to be a fully matching-numbers car retaining its original GT engine. Additional paperwork includes a factory production record; a former bill of sale and registration document; a BMIHT Certificate; and the aforementioned restoration records. The car is UK registered and comes to the sale with EU duties paid.

To call the GT-engined DB4 a 'factory hotrod' may not be entirely appropriate, but there can be no denying that its unique combination of high performance and 'gentlemen's club' refinement, not to mention a decent sized boot, makes it particularly appealing. Rarer but in the same top league as many a more expensive motor car from Maranello it represents a very refined choice for the discerning collector. As such it is nevertheless the ideal companion for use on long-distance tours and rallies and would surely be a welcome participant at any prestigious concours d'élégance event.

This site led me down yet another rabbit hole in a fascinating deep dive into Greek history, and beyond into the mists of Neolithic prehistory.

This remote, windswept temple site on the coast at Brauron, 25 km from Athens, was associated with a cult of Artemis. There was a matching temple of the same cult located on the Acropolis, more convenient to the people of Athens.

The Arkteia festival was celebrated every four years and involved a procession from the shrine of Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis to Brauron. At Brauron, Athenian girls approaching puberty formed groups consecrated for a time to Artemis as arktoi, she-bears, and spent their time in sacred dances, running races and making sacrifices. The girls are believed to have been a select few chosen from aristocratic families to represent the entire community. Vase paintings show that cultic nudity was an element in these preparations for womanhood. In early times, the participants wore actual bear skins, but by the 5th century BCE bears had become scarce. Short, saffron-yellow chiton dresses meant to symbolize the bear skins were substituted. These were shed during the final ritual to symbolize the participant's maturation.

The name Artemis may (or may not) derive from arktos, ‘bear’, and she was conceived in this cult as a great she-bear. The bear cult was a remnant of Neolithic totemic and shamanistic rituals and formed part of a larger bear cult found further afield in other Indo-European cultures, from Celtic to Germanic to Finnish and Sami.

Among other things, Artemis was the goddess of wildlife and wildlands, as well as passages both physical and metaphorical, including the passage from girl (parthenos) to woman (gyne). An epigram in the Anthologia Graeca concerns the offerings of childish playthings a nubile young girl dedicates to Artemis on the eve of marriage; many such tokens have been recovered from the sacred spring at Brauron. Water was often a focal point in sanctuaries to Artemis.

Artemis was a danger to be propitiated by women during childbirth; to her were dedicated the clothes of women who had successfully borne a child (no small sacrifice, as clothes were hideously expensive in pre-industrial — nay, pre-spinning-wheel — days). Similarly, the garments of women who died in childbirth were dedicated to Iphigeneia at Brauron. A wooden rack parallel to the stoa may have held such offerings; stone footings remain into which wooden planks could be slotted.

Cult activity at Brauron is known from the 8th century BCE forward from dedications in the sacred spring, and a temple was built in the 6th century BCE. It was demolished by the Persians in 480 BCE and rebuilt in the 420s BCE. The temple complex included the small temple itself, a U-shaped (or, if you’re Greek, Π-shaped) stoa that formed a courtyard, and adjacent dining rooms (see notes on photo). Many more structures, including a palaestra and a gymnasion, have not yet been uncovered.

Parts of the stoa have been re-erected, some with new marble capitals. To the right of the stoa are dining rooms. Each had a single course of limestone ashlars around the base of the room; the rest of its walls were adobe brick.

Little of the temple itself remains; a Christian basilica was built in the 6th century CE on the other side of the valley using spoliated material taken from the sanctuary. The small church here dedicated to Hagios Georgios (left rear) was erected in the 15th century. The Classical temple stood on a platform above the stepped retaining wall and below the where the church is now located. The sacred spring is just to the right of the stepped retaining wall.

This is the Fellini tomb at the cemetery in Rimini, which I took on the 75th wedding anniversary of Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina. The flowers, one bouquet for Federico & one for Giulietta are the ones I placed.

What made this day more special was something that happened to me on the 1st of September last year at the Twin Peaks: Conversation With the Stars event that took place in Sydney.

I had a VIP Gold ticket, & VIP ticket holders were allowed to submit two questions they would like to ask David Lynch, who would appear via Skype, & a select few would be invited up on stage to ask the man directly their questions.

I was one of the lucky few, & my questions to David were:

"I saw you speak with David Stratton in Brisbane for your exhibition in 2015 & he asked you about Blue Velvet at the Montreal Film Festival, & then you went on to mention that you got to dance with Giulietta Masina. I was just wondering how that came about & what was it like speaking to her in real life?"

He responded:

"It was a beautiful night. At the festival I think Giulietta Masina was on the jury and after Blue Velvet screened there in Montreal everybody was asked to go to this ballroom—and there was going to be a dinner and a party afterward. And at this ballroom they came to me and they said ‘We would like you to start the dancing with Giulietta Masina’. And I thought I had died and gone to heaven. And I see her and the music starts, and I go to her. And she is coming over to me. And away we go, starting the dancing in the ballroom with me and Giulietta Masina. It was unbelievable. And I’m dancing with her and I want to ask her about Federico Fellini, and I’m looking at her face and I’m at a loss for words”

As he was answering I felt emotional as I love both Federico & Giulietta, & I was too young to have met them. I have heard they were just fantastic people from people that knew them, & it breaks my heart when I think about the tragedies in their lives, so it was extremely important to me to place flowers on their grave this year, just as I did last year, but 75 is more of a milestone.

My second question was:

"I know you love Fellini, & this year is the 75th wedding anniversary between Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina. I shall be in Rimini over that time to place flowers on their grave in celebration. Would you like me to say anything to them for you & buy flowers to place them for you too?"

He responded:

“Yes I would and I would like you to tell them how great they are and how they were both such a great inspiration to me.”

I thanked him before leaving the stage, & he in turn thanked me.

This made the day more special, & I did pass on his message. I also said to them that the flowers were from myself & David Lynch.

Nikon F4. AF Nikkor 14mm F2.8D lens. CineStill 50 35mm C41 film.

Its probably about time i posted some more photos from the former 'Kingsway' Telephone Exchange Bunker under Central London. All the info on this place is easy to find through google so i wont repeat it here but it goes without saying it was a pretty special place for me to finally get to see. Another one of those places that even 2 years previously would have seemed a million miles away from being glimpsed by a select few let alone being wide open for months on end!

Even if we were not the first to set foot in there we did manage to get in before the crowds. The place was largely still an unknown apart from archive photos and a few sets from official tours quite some time in the past. In some ways after seeing the king of cold war bunkers at Spring Quarry, spending a couple of years in and out of London tube network and seeing many of the other deep level bunkers across London i did kind of know what to expect but as always there were a few bits that really surprised. If only it was this easy in Birmingham and Manchester i could get my first tattoo!

Revamp of Ray'd

Name: Ray’d

Species: Matoran

Occupation: Leader of the Knights of Eons

Titles: The Knight of Eons

Alignment: Lawful Good

Personality: Noble, courageous

Element: Red Lightning

Side Powers: None

Kanohi: Hau, mask of shielding

Weapons: Crimson Lightning Blade

Backstory:

Ray’d was a young Matoran who lived with a select few of his kind, Matoran of Lightning. It is a great rarity on Aeos to have lightning wielders, but Ray’d was one of a kind, he wielded red tinted lightning. Ray’d was happy in his little village, not only because he had his brothers and sisters, but he had his best friend, an unnamed Matoran of white lightning. They went everywhere together, and they had a bond unlike any other. All of that soon came to an end though. One day, the village was perpetually annihilated by The Corrupted Crown and his Makuta forces. The Corrupted Crown personally led an assault on this village, he did not want any lightning Matoran to defy him, as their power is immense. Ray’d hid from the carnage, safe from The Corrupted Crown’s wrath, but his friend was not. The Corrupted Crown personally gutted the Matoran, right in front of Ray’ds eyes. Ray’d was broken, but a fire lit inside of him. He left his spot of hiding and ran towards The Corrupted Crown. Before the Corrupted Crown could spot the Matoran, Ray’d vanished.

Ray’d awoke in a dimly lit room, with strange symbols plastered in the stone walls. He was approached by a hooded, tall figure. Ray’d tried to fight, but the figure was not bothered by any punches he threw. The figure, after Ray’d had calmed down, took him into a chamber. The chamber was filled with statues of warriors throughout the ages, and at the end stood a one of a kind statue, the only statue of Aeon to ever exist. The figure explained to Ray’d that he has watched his village for some time, and had chosen him to be a new member of his league. Ray’d, in confusion, asked about the league and his involvement. The figure explained that he knew a strong Matoran of lightning would emerge from that special village, and since Ray’d was the last of the village to survive, he was the chosen Matoran. The figure thrusted a sword infront of Ray’d and asked him to join the Knights of Eons. They would fight for justice, truth, and uphold Aeon’s legacy of benevolence through secrecy. Ray’d could finally have his chance to uphold the memory of his fallen brother. He agreed, and trained for years.

In the current time, Ray’d now leads the Knights of Eons as their most powerful member, and arguably, their most powerful leader. He works in shadows to keep Aeon’s secret watch relevant. He must only follow one rule as a leader, he cannot reveal Aeon’s identity as the Creator. The rule is convoluted and not understandable, but he must uphold it. He now works with the Toa Dusk under the guise of being a concerned warrior against the Makuta menace, but in secret, he works with them under the real title of a Knight of Eons.

I am trying an experiment. The last time I uploaded a racy photo of myself in which I was asleep in fishnets, I had it locked for friends only, but as always, I am proud of my work, and I really like the way this photo turned out. This is my art, and yes, I realize some will see it as sexy, but I am not doing this because I am trying to draw attention to myself. I have this series of photos I took that only a select few have seen, and what good is art without viewers? I feel it is tastefully done, so no lewd or nasty comments please! I will grant some leeway to friends & PAC members, because it is their job to be goofy. I will also not add anyone who posts disgusting porn pics, so if that's all you have to offer, don't even think about adding me! So here goes, this should be interesting. *nervously taps fingers*

View On Black

Please do not take or use any of my photos in any way without permission from me. If you would like a print please contact me, thank you!

I now have a facebook page. If you like my work, I would truly appreciate your support. Thank you! www.facebook.com/monsharicreations

Routemasters at the Scottish Bus Group (SBG)….

This particular bus RM875 (WLT835) was new to London Transport in July 1961. By the mid-1980s, London Transport had realised that, fine bus though it was, the Routemaster couldn’t go on for ever and began to sell surplus RMs. Whilst initially it found little market for these buses other than scrap dealers, the impending introduction of deregulation outside the Capital was to change all that.

Deregulation forced bus companies to look carefully at their operations and seek whatever competitive advantages they could. One perceived idea was to reintroduce a conductor. The introduction of buses such as the Atlantean, National and Fleetline and their one person operation (OPO) had seen most conductor-operated services ended, as they were deemed terribly old fashioned. However, was there a place a conductor in this brave new world?

The logic was that a conductor could get passengers on a bus faster, faster than a OPO bus where the driver had to also collect fares. This had the benefit of a potentially faster, friendlier service as well as potentially less buses needed to maintain the same service levels. Yes the downside was the extra crew member and the extra resultant costs. But some felt it was a price worth paying if you got it right, especially as these front engines buses were dirt cheap. .

You’d hardly think of the SBG as at the cutting edge of progressive ideas of bus operation. But it was. It resulted from the new subsidiaries the Group created to prepare for deregulation. These were managed by new young managers with fresh ideas. One of these was Clydeside Scottish.

It decided crew operation was worth trying and so borrowed a surplus Routemaster (RM652 - WLT652) in 1985 from London Transport (LT) to trial it on various routes, particularly in and out of Glasgow. Obviously impressed it purchased that bus and ordered more and one was the bus seen here, which came in September 1986. It’s been restored in Clydeside livery with the ‘Welcome aboard. We’re going your way’ branding. Clydeside kept the ex-LT fleet numbers numbers for its fleet.

Clydeside also sub-hired one of its Routemasters to fellow new subsidiaries Kelvin Scottish and Strathtay Scottish, to trial on their routes. The trials were a success and led to both ordering their own versions Soon LT was selling loads of these buses to SBG and preparing these in-house. One of the Clydeside buses was also trialled in Edinburgh but perhaps that was a step too far for the famously conservative Eastern Scottish.

Soon the Clydeside fleet grew to be one off the most substantial fleets of Routemasters outside London. Most were standard RMs but a RML (RML900 - WLT900) was also acquired as was a former RMA Airport bus which was refurbished as a dual purpose bus available for hire. It refurbished its standard Routemasters to a high standard and even upgraded some with better lighting, these being known as ‘Clydemasters’ with a special radiator badge. All other Routemasters acquired a name beginning with the letter R at the rear entrance, such as Rodney the Routemaster, Ralph, Rudolph, etc. Some Routemasters were even acquired from Kelvin when it withdrew these, having overstretched itself on competitive routes.

Sadly, when Clydeside was reunited with Western in 1989, Western’s more conservative management had no time for such fripperies such as conductors and the RMs were an easy target. To be fair, an accounting error had seen Clydeside’s costs massively understated and so that company was facing massive losses, hence the need for its merger with Western None were repainted in Western’s new livery and all were renumbered into Western’s standard fleet scheme. Many of their registrations were transferred to Western’s coaches to hide their age and they were progressively withdrawn. Western then acquired various Fleetlines and other similar OPO buses - mainly from Kelvin which had withdrawn these as it grappled with its own issues - which needed fortunes spent on them to get them up to useable standards. All the Clydeside ones had gone from regular service by the end of 1991.

The Kelvin and Strathtay fleets lasted longer. The Strathtay ones were used in Tayway services in Dundee as well as competitive services against Stagecoach’s Perth Panthers. Most carried the Strathtay colours of orange, white and blue. Certain vehicles had this laid out in a very - er - distinctive style but it was soon changed to a style more conducive to the vehicle. Some were repainted out of Strathtay orange, white and blue and into a red and white Perth City Transport colours on routes within Perth competing with Stagecoach but these were ultimately unsuccessful and Strathtay ended up withdrawing from services within Perth.

The Strathtay ones lasted until 1994 and they had an interesting legacy. Currently what was Strathtay is now part of Stagecoach East Scotland and up until just before the pandemic Stagecoach was still using conductors on the Tayway services, presently run by Volvo B5LH/ADL Enviro 400MMCs making that service one of the last to use conductors.

Kelvin’s ones were no less interesting. All arrived in Kelvin’s bold yellow and two-tone blue livery. They were used in competition with dominant operator Strathclyde’s Buses, some in services they shared with sister company Clydeside. Sadly not all these routes were successful and in the end, Kelvin’s ones settled down on to the 5/5A service between Easterhouse and Faifley (5A) or Old Kilpatrick (5), They lived a fairly uneventful life on these services, rarely venturing onto other services, the only exception being the odd occasional appearance on what was left of the 61 service between Baillieston and Glasgow.

Kelvin seemed to lose interest in its Routemasters by this stage and some were looking increasingly careworn and being kept alive by borrowing parts from other withdrawn buses, although to be fair the company was hardly flush with cash at the time. Only a select few were repainted in successor Kelvin Central livery. Most were withdrawn in 1993. Oddly, just before that, the Routemaster fleet had grown slightly when Kelvin Central acquired Stagecoach’s Magicbus subsidiary in 1992 along with its Routemasters which included some new to Northern General, the only customer outside LT to buy the Routemaster new, as even the RMAs mentioned earlier were owned by LT, despite being used on services to what was at that time called London Airport (now Heathrow).

When the 5/5A service was split in the city centre, this led to the death knell for Kelvin’s Routemasters and most were replaced by OPO Leyland Nationals on these routes, acquired when Kelvin Central took over independent operators Greens of Kirkintilloch and John Morrow of Clydebank.

An interesting side note. As I mentioned LT was selling surplus RMs to SBG to compete with Strathclyde’s Buses. At the same time, Strathclyde’s Buses stocked up with mini-buses (MCW Metroriders mainly) to fight the RMs. This led to surplus Atlanteans as Strathclyde’s Buses renewed its fleet. It in turn sold these surplus Atlanteans to London Country, the National Bus Company subsidiary who used these on tendered services which were won from former LT subsidiaries, leading to surplus RMs. Plus ca change….

I have only collected vintage and mod Barbie up until now...Being a child of the 80’s, I decided to add a few dolls from that era to my collection. There are a select few that I really want, and this was at the top of my wishlist...I vividly remember this doll as her hair and that gold lamé outfit were so glamorous. This is a variation as she has the harder to find sheer gloves. She has never been removed from the box, and is in absolute mint condition.

The Indiana Northeastern Railroad was kind enough to let a select few do a night session at their shop in Ashley, IN on Aug 6, 2015.

© Eric T. Hendrickson 2015 All Rights Reserved

A selection of seat moquettes in Stagecoach Manchester vehicles.

The top row shows original Stagecoach seat moquettes:

[l] original chevron stripes

[m] blue beachball

[r] green beachball (only in green Electric Hybrid buses)

The bottom row shows non-orginal moquettes found in a select few Stagecoach buses in Manchester (now in Magicbus fleet), following purchase of vehicles from extinct bus operators:

[l] Bullocks (S959 URJ)

[m] Dennis's (X793 JHG & MW52 UJE)

[r] Mayne's (MX03 KZN) (now retrimmed into corporate Beachball)

I climbed over the inevitable wall and lost myself in urbex. Embracing the crunch of broken glass and peeling paint, a strange content derived. Wandering from shell to shell as you scan the broken walls for textured feature. In St Vincentschurch an artist left their mark for just a selected few to see. The murals feel so at home amongst decay hidden from the eyes of those who fail to venture. Revelling in surreal I ghosted amongst the rotten floors and there I was a monster, monster.

Who says Conrail didn't have tenders? A select few ex-PRR tenders were retained in support of steam powered equipment - in this case, a steam powered wreck crane. The wreck train is seen sitting west of GRAY's eastbound home signal - note the dwarf signal governing wrong-track movement. A keen eye can see GRAY Tower just at the edge of the frame.

CR 45306. Tyrone, PA.

November 29, 1981. Jeffrey S. Brouse photo.

Adam Klimchock collection.

(I know that this description is lengthy. I tried to make it as short as possible.)

~ Of the Seven Divines ~

"A Primer on the Worship of the Major Gods and Goddesses in the Lands of Galacia and Beyond."

Thorne Babblebrook ~ Willowstone Historian

Since the dawn of civilization in the lands of Galacia and beyond, there have been stories told of beings that exist beyond our sight and comprehension who have shaped the mortal realm. These unseen forces have guided the fate of all beings from an unknown and unglimpsed realm known as the Vale of the Mists. The invisible hands of these deities have helped to raise great kingdoms and topple them down again. They are responsible for the changes in the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, and the victory or defeat of armies on the field of battle. The Seven Divines, as they have become known, represent the major forces of the natural world.

Enril – Enril is the patron god of justice, honor, and light. He is seen as being the chief of all the Seven Divines and one of the beings of the Holy Triad. Enril has ruled over the mortal realm since time immemorial. It was Enril who first decided bestow upon the world the races of men, dwarves, elves, and orcs, and to these races he gave the initial spark of civilization. Enril is seen as being a distant god, only because he prefers to allow his races to prove themselves worthy of the gifts that he has given them. Enril is also seen as being responsible for the celestial movements of the heavenly bodies and the natural rhythm of the universe. Enril is worshipped by a majority of followers. Kings, rulers, and clerics especially appreciate him for his emphasis on justice and light.

Gnar – Gnar is the patron god of the wisdom, magic, and the earth. Gnar, the blind god, is another of the Holy Triad, and the oldest of the Seven Divines. Ancient beyond description, Gnar maintains all of the collected knowledge of the ages and he is the god responsible creating the force known as magic and bestowing the gifting upon a selected few. Wizards, mages, and historians all revere the wisdom of Gnar, and through complicated rituals they commune with his knowledge of the unknown as they unravel the various mysteries of the universe. Residing mostly in his dimly lit cavern, Gnar is more than happy to depart shreds of wisdom upon the worthy, but never so much so that a mortal may become too powerful in their pursuit of the arcane.

Zephyria – Zephyria is the patron goddess of life, nature, and the winds. She is the final member of the Holy Triad, and she is the second most widely worshipped deity. Zephyria, the most involved of the Seven Divines in the lives of mortals, loves all living things and sees each being as one of her children. Zephyria is also seen as being responsible for weather patterns, climates, and the winds, it is for this reason that farmers, archers, rangers, and sailors worship her with reverence. She is also the creator of all the flora and fauna that exists beneath the heavens and in the sea. Zephyria has molded new races in her image, such as the dryad, satyr, and other spirits of the natural realm who live to protect the wilderness that Zephyria loves so dearly.

Argoth – Argoth, the only god of the Seven Divines recognized by the barbarian Morni of Grey Fogg, is the patron god of warfare, fire, and steel. By most, Argoth is worshipped as a god who appears in the form of a man, though the Morni have taken to associating the powerful Argoth with the form of a strong mountain bear. Often times, the superstitious Morni refer to Argoth as the Great Bear of the North. Outside of Grey Fogg, the main groups who worship Argoth are those of the warrior class, fighting men who value strength and courage, and those who work the forge. He is a very primitive and unforgiving god, and his followers rarely pray to him as they feel it will do them no good since Argoth will not save those weak enough to plead for his help. Though, soldiers will often utter a few solemn words in Argoth’s honor prior to a battle, asking for him to guide their hand in battle so that they may send him the souls of fellow warriors for judgement before his granite throne.

Narci – Narci is the patron goddess of love, beauty, and the arts. Being a lesser deity, and a creation of Gnar, Narci does not have the power wielded by those in the Holy Triad. Even so, she does have a strong following amongst those involved in the world of art. Many playwrights, painters, and musicians look to Narci as their muse. Lovers also look to Narci as a source of inspiration, and marriage ceremonies are generally conducted in her honor. Narci’s major weakness is her extreme vanity, which tends to get her into trouble with the other Divines.

Tidus – Tidus is the patron god of the tides and of all the seas of the mortal world. He is also known as the Sea King of Unda, the realm of the sea nymphs and the mermaids. Tidus, initially a creation of Zephyria, was raised to the level of a Divine in order to better protect the seas and waterways of the mortal realm, and to rule over the submariner race spirits known as the Nereid. Tidus has been known to give in to intense bouts of anger that lead to great storms, crashing waves, and devastating whirlpools. It is for this reason that sailors, fishermen, and ship makers take their worship of the temperamental god seriously.

“The Black One” – It has no name, no form, and no voice... but all are aware of the existence of this being of pure darkness. It is the patron god of death, destruction, and evil. “The Black One” exists for the sole purpose of sowing discord amongst the races of the mortal realm. Few chose to worship this Divine, though it has collected a small following amongst necromancers, thieves, outcasts, and others who live on the shadowy fringe of society. “The Black One” was once a respected Divine, however it lusted for power and was cast out of the Vale of the Mists for conspiring against its kin. “The Black One” now languishes and waits for its opportunity to strike back at the deities who cast it out. To aid in spreading death and destruction, this deity has created various repulsive races such as the vampires, werewolves, and gargoyles that favor the darkness of night and tread more in the realm of the dead than the land of the living.

Belgian press photo by BRT Television. Jean Arthur, John Lund and Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948).

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was the first German actress who became successful in Hollywood. Throughout her long career, she constantly reinvented herself. In 1920s Berlin, she started as a cabaret singer, chorus girl, and film actress. In the 1930s, she became a Hollywood star, then a World War II frontline entertainer, and finally, she was an international stage show performer from the 1950s till the 1970s. Now we remember her as one of the icons of the 20th century.

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany, in 1901. She was the younger of two daughters of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine née Felsing. Her mother was from a well-to-do Berlin family who owned a clock-making firm and her father was a police lieutenant. He died in 1911. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocrat first lieutenant in the Grenadiers courted Wilhelmina and eventually married her in 1916. He was killed on the Russian front in 1918. The young Marie Magdalene and her elder sister, Elisabeth, were brought up strictly in an upper-middle-class Prussian home. It would be this influence that would shape her acting career and her life as a citizen in years to come. Dietrich attended school in Berlin and Dessau from 1907 to 1919. She studied violin and became interested in theatre and poetry as a teenager. Her dreams of becoming a concert violinist were cut short when she injured her wrist. In 1921, she auditioned unsuccessfully for Max Reinhardt's drama academy, but she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. The next year she played a part in the silent film So sind die Männer/The Little Napoleon (Georg Jacoby, 1922). On the set of another film, Tragödie der Liebe/The Tragedy of Love (Joe May, 1923), she met production assistant Rudolf Sieber. They were married in 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, later billed as actress Maria Riva, was born in 1924. Throughout the 1920s Marlene continued to work on stage and in films both in Berlin and Vienna. She attracted the most attention in stage musicals and revues, such as Broadway and Es Liegt in der Luft/It's in the Air. By the late 1920s, she was also playing leading parts in such films as Café Elektric/Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky, 1927) with Willi Forst, Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame/I Kiss Your Hand Madame (Robert Land, 1929) with Harry Liedtke, and Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt/The Woman One Longs For (Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt, 1929) opposite Fritz Kortner.

In 1929 Marlene Dietrich played her breakthrough role of Lola-Lola, a cabaret singer who causes the downfall of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), a hitherto respected schoolmaster, in the Ufa production Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Josef von Sternberg thereafter took credit for having ‘discovered’ her. The film is also noteworthy for introducing her signature song Falling in Love Again. On the strength of Der blaue Engel's success, and with encouragement and promotion from Von Sternberg, Dietrich then moved to Hollywood. She left her husband and daughter behind. Paramount sought to market her as a German answer to MGM's Swedish sensation Greta Garbo. Her first American film, Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) opposite Gary Cooper earned her her only Oscar nomination. Between 1930 and 1935 she was the star of six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount: Morocco (1930); Dishonored (1931), about a spy who betrays her country for the love of a worthless man (Victor McLaglen); Shanghai Express (1932), a melodrama in which she is a China Coast prostitute who offers herself to a warlord (Warner Oland) to save the life of a former lover (Clive Brook); Blonde Venus (1932), a mother-love soap opera;, The Scarlet Empress (1934), an opulent and visually stunning melodrama about a lascivious Catherine the Great; and The Devil Is A Woman (1935), an erotic tale about a soldier-corrupting vamp in turn-of-the-century Seville. Wikipedia describes how Von Sternberg worked very effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous femme fatale: "He encouraged her to lose weight and coached her intensively as an actress – she, in turn, was willing to trust him and follow his sometimes imperious direction in a way that a number of other performers resisted. A crucial part of the overall effect was created by Von Sternberg's exceptional skill in lighting and photographing Dietrich to optimum effect — the use of light and shadow, including the impact of light passed through a veil or slatted blinds (as for example in Shanghai Express) — which, when combined with scrupulous attention to all aspects of set design and costumes, make this series of films among the most visually stylish in cinema history." Because it displayed her beauty most effectively, The Devil Is a Woman was her particular favourite. But after the dismal failure of The Devil Is A Woman, Paramount fired Von Sternberg, and the star and director would never work together again.

Without Von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich made her first comedy, Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936). It was a satire about an urbane jewel thief (Dietrich) who steals a choice necklace from a Parisian jeweller and, in an effort to keep it, becomes involved with a hayseed Detroit engineer (Gary Cooper). Although Dietrich's salary in the mid-1930s was enormous, she was never listed among the top ten box-office attractions, and depression-era audiences often felt she was preposterously exotic. She was even labelled 'box office poison' after Knight Without Armour (Jacques Feyder, 1937) proved an expensive flop. In 1939, her stardom revived when she played the freewheeling saloon entertainer Frenchie in the comic Western Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) opposite James Stewart. Hollywood's attempt to make her more 'ordinary' worked. The film also introduced another favourite song, The Boys in the Back Room. She played a similar role to John Wayne in The Spoilers (Ray Enright, 1942). In December 1941, the US entered World War II, and Dietrich became one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She toured the US from January 1942 to September 1943 and it is said that she sold more war bonds than any other star. During two extended tours for the USO in 1944 and 1945, she sang and performed the singing saw for Allied troops on the front lines in Algeria, Italy, England, and France. For musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralize enemy soldiers, she recorded a number of songs in German, including the ballad Lili Marleen. The troops loved her. In 1947, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the US for her wartime work. In 1950, the French state conferred the title of Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur (knight of the Legion of Honour) on her, in 1971 she was named Officier by President Pompidou and in 1989 Commandeur by President Mitterrand.

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Marlene Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly-paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theatres in major cities worldwide. Her costumes (body-hugging dresses covered with thousands of crystals as well as a swansdown coat), body-sculpting undergarments, and careful stage lighting helped to preserve Dietrich's glamorous image well into old age. She never fully regained her former screen glory, but she continued performing in films for distinguished directors. Her successful film roles included an exotic gipsy in Golden Earrings (Mitchell Leisen, 1947), with Ray Milland, an ex-Nazi cafe singer in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948), a famous singer and murderer in Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), an ageing bandit queen in Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), the wife of a suspected murderer in Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957), a cynical brothel-keeper in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), and the aristocratic widow of a prominent Nazi general in Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961). Dietrich's show business career largely ended in 1975, when she broke her leg during a stage performance in Sydney, Australia. Her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer in 1976. Her final on-camera film appearance was a small role in Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo/Just a Gigolo (David Hemmings, 1979), starring David Bowie. Dietrich withdrew to her apartment in Paris. She spent the final 11 years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few — including family and employees — to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter writer and phone caller. Her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben/Marlene, was published in 1979. In 1982, she agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984) but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was only allowed to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star". In 1992, Marlene Dietrich died of renal failure at the age of 90 in Paris. Ten years after her death, Berlin - the city of Dietrich's birth which she shunned for most of her life - declared her an honorary citizen. In a 1992 obituary The New York Times wrote: "In her films and record-breaking cabaret performances, Miss Dietrich artfully projected cool sophistication, self-mockery and infinite experience. Her sexuality was audacious, her wit was insolent and her manner was ageless. With a world-weary charm and a diaphanous gown showing off her celebrated legs, she was the quintessential cabaret entertainer of Weimar-era Germany."

Sources: James Naremore (Senses of Cinema), Wikipedia, The New York Times, Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Jomolhari peak (7314m. altitude), not the highest peak in Bhutan but the prettiest, the ice cream cone can be glimpsed from a distance in the upper Paro Valley at select few spots, better views can be enjoyed after walking for several days through mud and paying money through the nose. Taken with a zoom lens, a Buddhist element in the foreground is a part of a school in the valley.

From Wiki:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jomolhari

I visited Hopetoun House during the warm spell at Easter 2019. Just got round to processing the photos! Here are a select few.

Can't wait to be back in Austria in November!! 😊 #travel #austria #europe #traveling #traveler #wanderlust #amazing #mountains #clouds #innsbruck #WOWmoment @worldwanderlust #myWOWmoment #igglobalwomenclub #worldplaces #worldbestgram #wonderful_places #bestplacestogo #bestvacationspix #beautifuldestinations #instagoodmyphoto #select_few #special_shots #shotaward #discoveraustria

246 Likes on Instagram

14 Comments on Instagram:

massimacii: :-)

instagram.com/eliza.jane: Thanks @massimacii 😀

spirit_of_wanderlust: Awesome gallery! 👌 @eliza_j

instagram.com/eliza.jane: Thanks @spirit_of_wanderlust ☺️

simondhunt: @eliza_j Gorgeous photo Eliza 😊👏👏👏

gingi_sj: I'll be going next month.☺

marcelamaz1ng: awesome!

der_dekorationsmaler: always welcome in Austria...

The power of fire should not be taken lightly.

Fire, like a mistress, can be warm and caressing one moment and easily angered and apt to rage upon you the next. Man would like to think he has tamed this beast for his own use, but the truth is that we are but custodians of this demon that all too often can turn on its master.

Among those who roam the night, there is known to a select few the secret of the dark arts. When one accepts fire as an entity and not one of the four elements they can then learn to live in harmony within its blaze and not be harmed.

Yes this is a real photo.

Yes this is my own hand.

No I was not burned.

(...singed perhaps, but not burned)

My photo club assignment for this month is hands. In an attempt to be original, this is what I came up with.

The aquatics community is small. Everyone seems to know everyone, but even if they don’t they do know a select few. Sean is one of those few. He’s taught my friends, he probably taught me at some point, and most recently he trained the new team on the pivot system. Coincidentally he’s also one of the principles at my old highschool now as well. The first distinguished memory of him I have was when we recertified our NLS together. It stands out to me as I’d never thought him or any of the other instructor of instructors needing to recertify those courses. The second distinguished one was during the Barnsley competition which I think is when we got to know each other best. It’s a blessing to have someone who can give feedback in a positive way while stilling being corrective. He’s finished teaching our team for a little while now though I know it’s only a matter of time until I see him around the pool again.

Tiko is a dog owned by an homeless young man that I came to know and like trough the many months that I have been going to to the bolhão market. He is very popular and all the coins that Tiko manaes to attract go straight for his food and general well being, something remarkable. Many sweet old ladies bring Tiko special made food but only a selected few are accepted the owner, who is afraid of some bad food being offered to the dog.

Missouri Pacific Railroad GP7 134 at McCook, Illinois on an unknown day in August 1979, Kodachrome by Chuck Zeiler. Number 134 was built as StLB&M GP7 4119 in July 1950 (c/n 11552), renumbered to MP 134 an an unknown date, retired in August 1979 and is seen here at Pielet Brothers scrap yard. Note the extra front numberboard, for which I have no explanation. However I received a comment by Joseph Yarbrough as follows -

On the MoPac, a select few GP7's had a "crew cab". These units were bought originally by the Texas & Pacific and Gulf Coast Lines. Outwardly they looked like any regular Geep with the exception that the crew-cabs were modified with an extra set of number board cut-out windows that were exactly the same size as the number boards located just below the usual number boards on the short hood/nose. Behind the windows inside the cab sat a spare seat... right beside the typical toilet. The "crew-cab" GP7s used by I-GN and STLB&M (series 4116-4123) were equipped with crew-cabs (modified circa 1953): 4117, 4119, 4120, 4122, and 4123. Since no other unit's received the crew cab, it's speculated that this modification may have been a "Texas thing" for the brakeman to ride inside the unit.

I don't know what the box behind the cab on this side was for. Anyone know, please leave a comment.

Click inside the image for a larger view.

Early 1940s Lebaron, I believe.

Taken at the Walter P. Chrysler's Museum, at the Chrysler's (FCA's) Headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Chrysler was acquired by Fiat, and the Fiat CEO became the FCA CEO. I guess he can't stand it to see an American icon, inventor, and a legend being honored with a museum. So he has now made the decision to close the museum and send all its contents to storage. He should be deported :-) ... Lens: Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L.

Light conditions are simply photography nightmare. A combination of Fluorescent (neon) lights, incandescent lights, flood lights, large windows daylight, etc.

The museum is a 3-story building, with lots, and lots, and lots of beautiful vehicles to see. It was also extremely crowded on that weekend because people heard that it was going to be closed for good.

The collection has vehicle models dating back as far as 1902.

All images were taken hand-held; no tripods allowed.

I did the best I could under the circumstances.

Editing almost one thousand images will take a lot of time, but only a select few will be uploaded here anyway.

I use Degoo (a Swedish company) for my Cloud storage. You can get 100GB of storage for free.

Here is the Invite link: degoo.com/g/IbJT56H

Chassis n° 367340

Peugeot 402 Légère re-bodied in the style of a Pourtout-built Darl'Mat Roadster

Bonhams : The Autumn Sale 2020

Estimated : € 170.000 - 200.000

Sold for € 201.250

Autoworld

www.autoworld.be

Brussels - Belgium

September 2020

"Paulin became the leading French stylist of the time... Everything he touched was designed with aerodynamics in mind. He was very conscious of fuel efficiencies and the aerodynamic efficiencies that could be created by the lines of the car. You could go faster, which meant you could put a smaller engine in the car..." – Adatto, Richard, From Passion to Perfection: The Story of French Streamlined Styling, 1930-1939.

The 1930s was a period when automobile engineers and stylists first began to apply the principles of aerodynamics to passenger car design, a movement that would result in some of the most breathtaking works of automotive art that the world had ever seen. One stunning example of this trend was the exclusive series of streamlined roadsters, coupés and cabriolets styled by Georges Paulin and built by the French coachbuilder Marcel Pourtout for Émile Darl'Mat, whose Paris-based company was one of the world's largest Peugeot agencies. The Peugeot 302 chassis was used at first, fitted with the larger (2.0-litre, later 2.1-litre) four-cylinder overhead-valve engine of the 402. Introduced at the Paris Motor Show in 1936, the 302 lasted for only 18 months, though its short wheelbase chassis would live on in the 402 Légère.

Darl'Mat was a passionate champion of the Peugeot marque and longed for it to return to racing, particularly at prestigious home events like the 24 Heures du Mans. Using his considerable influence, he obtained the factory's blessing for a limited run of sports cars worthy of Peugeot's sporting legacy. He was one of a select few dealers able to offer custom coachwork to his customers, and Peugeot was more than happy to supply him with whatever he needed, so long as the orders kept rolling in.

Darl'Mat enjoyed a close relationship with Marcel Pourtout's successful carrosserie on the outskirts of Paris, and together the two men would create some of Peugeot's most memorable – and beautiful – automobiles. Marcel Pourtout had founded his coachbuilding business in 1925 and produced unremarkable designs at first, though that all changed when he was joined by Georges Paulin. A dentist by profession, Paulin understood aerodynamics and had impeccable taste. He worked for Panhard, Unic and Peugeot, for whom he designed the 1934 'Eclipse' featuring a retractable steel cabriolet roof, a construction he patented. In 1940 Paulin joined the French Resistance to fight the Nazi regime but was arrested and executed. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government.

Pourtout built around 105 of these streamlined cars for Darl'Mat between 1936 and 1939, and examples of the roadster ran competitively at Le Mans in 1937 and 1938. Demonstrating Paulin's conviction that a car did not necessarily need a large engine if it was effectively streamlined, three Darl'Mat Peugeots finished in the top ten in 1937, with the best placed example of Pujol/Contet coming home 7th overall, while the following year the Darl'Mat of de Cortanze/Contet finished 5th overall, winning the 2-Litre Class.

Many years later, while restoring the ex-Dorothy Patten and Baron Rainer von Dorndorf's Darl'Mat roadster, the vendor found this very sound Peugeot 402 Légère and realised that its chassis was identical to the roadster's. A tool-room copy of the roadster body was made and the result is the car offered here: a fitting homage to its designer, Georges Paulin.

Meticulously restored to the highest standard between 2017 and 2019, this superb car benefits from extra horsepower courtesy of a high-compression cylinder head and twin Solex carburetors mounted on a special Memini intake manifold. Power is transmitted via a Cotal electromagnetic gearbox to the Pilot wheels. Offered with restoration bills, French Carte Grise and Contrôle Technique, this pre-war icon is a pleasure to drive, a feast for the eyes, and ready for racing or any Concours d'Élégance.

Number 34 for 52 in 2020 : Books

Actually 3 birthday presents and 4 Christmas ones.

Nowadays I prefer to buy a Shelterbox rather than spend the money on tat. So a very select few of us exchange gifts.

www.shelterbox.org/

Click inside the image for a larger view.

Taken at the Walter P. Chrysler's Museum, at the Chrysler's (FCA's) Headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Chrysler was acquired by Fiat, and the Fiat CEO became the FCA CEO. I guess he can't stand it to see an American icon, inventor, and a legend being honored with a museum. So he has now made the decision to close the museum and send all its contents to storage. He should be deported :-) ... Lens: Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L.

Light conditions are simply photography nightmare. A combination of Fluorescent (neon) lights, incandescent lights, flood lights, large windows daylight, etc.

The museum is a 3-story building, with lots, and lots, and lots of beautiful vehicles to see. It was also extremely crowded on that weekend because people heard that it was going to be closed for good.

The collection has vehicle models dating back as far as 1902.

All images were taken hand-held; no tripods allowed.

I did the best I could under the circumstances.

Editing almost one thousand images will take a lot of time, but only a select few will be uploaded here anyway.

I use Degoo (a Swedish company) for my Cloud storage. You can get 100GB of storage for free.

Here is the Invite link: degoo.com/g/IbJT56H

Mugbil Al-Thukair was likely photographed in his bedchamber at his house in Manama, sitting on a prayer rug with a pious wistful countenance in a dapper embroidered silk Jubbah (open coat) and an ornate Cashmere Ghutra Shawl (headdress) fastened with the obsolete thick Najdi Agal (headband), the distinctive formal attire once worn by wealthy Arab merchants and tribal chieftains in Central Arabia and the northern Arabian Gulf in the early twentieth century as Al-Thukair supposedly was facing a Victorian colonial Anglo-Indian Raj four-poster teak wood bed (palang) surrounded by all the trappings of wealth typifying the lifestyle of a Gulf-rich pearl merchant and his household at the time, such as the open Indian teak wood wardrobe cabinet with an inside mirrored door on the left where a visible Cashmere Ghutra Shawl hangs from an open wardrobe drawer, a Victorian glass-shaded gas lamp in the right corner next to a pendulum clock in the back of a reclining wooden cane chair with its vertically striped cushion and several sitting chairs stacked high with books together with a variety of Persian rugs and carpets strewn across the floor during Jacques Cartier's second extended visit to Bahrain (from the 14th to the 26th of March 1912) the focal point of his Arabian Gulf pearl purchasing trip on Thursday, the 16th of March, 1912.

(Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair was born in 1844 in the rural town of Unaizah in the Al-Qassim region in northern Najd, Central Arabia as Al-Qassim has always been considered the agricultural heartland of the Arabian Peninsula known since pre-Islamic times as the "Alimental Basket" or granary of Arabia for its abundant agricultural assets into a prestigious erudite family of merchants widespread across Arabia and the Fertile Crescent with a trading history that could be traced back to the early eighteenth century from a young age Al-Thukair was endowed with natural business acumen combined with deep intellectual and literary interests following in the footsteps of generations of his family's enterprising male offspring which drove him first in 1867 at the tender age of 23 to the prosperous port town of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast of Arabia with its bustling market and cosmopolitan outlook the obvious first choice for any ambitious young man from the hinterlands of Arabia mainly Najd in those days where he began to make his mark as a budding young merchant at the same time exploring any available business opportunities in the port cities and towns of the Near East (Middle East) and those in the neighbouring Indian subcontinent principally in the newly British-founded port city of Bombay (Mumbai), the quickly burgeoning commercial hub on the Arabian Sea, the main western gateway to India and the key gathering place for Arab merchants and their families from Arabia in the subcontinent forming a dynamic expatriate Arab community that would continue to exist from the mid-nineteenth century until India's independence from Britain in 1947 Bombay also provided a good head start for scores of young merchants from the Arabian Peninsula at the time some of whom became well-known household business names across the region most notably Alireza of Jeddah, Alghanim, Al-Kharafi and Alshaya of Kuwait among others, spurring young Al-Thukair to learn Hindi, the pre-oil seafaring age's business lingua franca in the Arabian Peninsula since the majority of Arabia's trade passed through Indian entrepôts and in due course he became proficient in the essential business language, the thriving port city of Basra in southern Iraq was yet another desirable alternative business opportunity for Al-Thukair, a familiar business destination for his family for many decades and a second adopted domicile for several family members as Iraq's only maritime gateway to the rest of the world, often visited by him in the early to mid-1870s while en route to Iraq's only port on the Arabian Gulf his ship would stop at Bahrain one of the three major ports of the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (the other two were Aden and Jeddah) allowing him during the few hours interval between passengers and cargo disembarkation and embarkation to wander around the town of Manama the cosmopolitan commercial hub on the main island of the Bahraini archipelago examining closely along the way Manama's ethnically diverse purveyors of bountiful goods from all over the world meanwhile assessing the business possibilities of the Bahraini market especially its booming pearl trade prompting him to dabble in the lucrative commodity with great success as part of his general trading business interests and after spending ten years in the coastal town of Jeddah now as a seasoned well-established general merchant Bahrain beckoned as the centre of the pearl trade in the Arabian Gulf and beyond a pioneering position consolidated by possessing in its northern waters the richest pearl oyster beds in the Gulf renowned worldwide for producing the finest quality pearls for their iridescent lustre, size and variety of colours making it the place of choice for anyone wishing to try his luck in the pearl business back then which was the mainstay of the Arabian Gulf economy prior to the discovery of oil similarly sundry of his Central Arabian Najdi merchant counterparts from the austere Arabian inland such as Algosaibi, Al-Ajaji, Al-Qadi and Al-Bassam were lured to Bahrain by the country's newfound political stability following the accession of the young, astute and literarily inclined Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (1848-1932) to the throne in 1869 ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity after decades of turmoil and instability as reflected in the renewed confidence and heightened profitability prospects of the Bahraini pearl market driven by increasing international demand particularly in the West for high-quality natural pearls from the Arabian Gulf as rapidly soaring demand propelled pearl prices to unprecedented heights against such a heady backdrop Al-Thukair decided in 1877 at the age of 33 to relocate to Bahrain with his immediate family consisting of his wife and two young sons Abdullatif and Abdulmuhsin, a decision that would change his life forever Bahrain with its lush date palm groves and freshwater springs proved to be more suitable to his agrarian temperament than arid Jeddah though comparable to its vibrant multicultural and multi-ethnic society as it was the closest thing to a second home for the mature aspiring assiduous merchant after his beloved birthplace of Unaizah within a matter of years after arriving in the small island country he managed to become a leading pearl merchant and a highly esteemed public figure well-known for his philanthropic disposition, honest dealings, impeccable integrity and intellectual prowess so much so that he was dubbed "The Pride of Merchants" by the Bahraini business community he also took on the role of honorary chairman of the Manama business community and titular head of the Najdi diaspora community in Bahrain as a natural progression of his tremendous entrepreneurial successes and admirable character traits due to this exalted social status and the extensive network of highly influential personages he cultivated throughout the region Al-Thukair became increasingly sought-after as an arbiter of disputes including those of a political nature in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region but among the many scattered instances of his arbitration cases in the declassified annual Gulf reports from the British Archives, the following case from the latter stage of his life in Bahrain is one of the most striking examples of his high-level arbitrations where a family of illustrious clerics and judges resorted to his conscientious arbitration when asked by Ibrahim one of the two younger brothers of Bahrain's highest religious Muslim authority for nearly half a century the eminent cleric and unofficial supreme judge Sheikh Qasim Al Mehza (1847-1941) dubbed the "chief judge" unanimously by adherents of both Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian Muslim denominations of Bahraini society for his scholarly knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence to intercede between the two younger siblings one of whom Ahmed was a highly respected cleric in his own right the first Bahraini graduate of the Al-Azhar of Cairo in 1887 and ironically their elder brother the highly learned cleric and judge Sheikh Qasim, here is the next slightly edited citation from the British Gulf residency report of 1912 concerning local Bahraini affairs from 1st to 30th September, exact date unspecified (A difference over the ownership of a plot of land and a shop recently arose between Sheikh Qasim Bin Mehza and his two brothers Ahmed and Ibrahim and the two parties were not on speaking terms. At the request of Ibrahim, Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo intervened and succeeded in arranging a comprise) correspondingly he was acting as an unpaid adviser, interlocutor and mediator to some of the Arabian Peninsula's rulers as attested by one of the earliest documented references to Al-Thukair in the British Archives in late 1888 and early 1889 where he was linked to a series of accounts dealing with the recurring violent hostilities between the neighbouring Sheikhdoms of Qatar and Abu Dhabi in which he acted as a go-between on behalf of Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) the first British-recognised Qatari ruler independent of Bahraini suzerainty and founder of the Al-Thani ruling dynasty to help broker a peaceful settlement between the two parties and other key players in the conflict including the Al Rasheed the then rulers of Arabia's northern region of Ha'il and their Ottoman backers both of whom intervened on behalf of the Qatari side, from early on as a middle-aged man Al-Thukair had gained recognition as an ethical impartial figure and a reliable confidant to the majority of the rulers in the Arabian Gulf as demonstrated in numerous instances in this mini-biography of the man, the following two edited extracts are part of a comprehensive report on the latter stage of the long-drawn fitful hostilities between Qatar and Abu Dhabi covering the period from March 1888 to June 1890 by the British Gulf residency in Bushehr Persia (Iran) on the bloody conflict which involved lengthy correspondence between the British political agent in Bahrain and his superior the political resident in Bushehr where Al-Thukair is frequently mentioned, a conflict that started as a random mid-sea raid by Qatari corsairs on an Abu Dhabi-owned pearl fishing vessel in Qatari waters killing all of its crew presumably around the year 1880 escalating into a prolonged fierce enmity between Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan (r. 1855-1909) ruler of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) ruler of Qatar spiralling into uncontrollable atrocious carnage and depredation reprisals manifested in the thrice sacking of the Qatari capital Doha during the third of which Qatar ruler's son Ali was killed and the multiple sackings of the sedentary communities of Abu Dhabi's western region of Al Dhafra and other towns between 1880 and 1892 the first extract is a full-text letter while the second consists of the last two paragraphs of a longer letter the first of which is as follows (No. 10, dated the 20th January 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. After compliments. I beg to send herewith a copy of a letter sent by Qasim Bin Thani (ruler of Qatar) to the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain with a special messenger who has also brought a number of other letters giving welcome tidings to Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab (Al-Faihani), Mugbil (Al-Thukair) and (Abdulrahman) Bin Aidan; and mentioning the number of people who were slain out of the inhabitants of Liwa (the Al Dhafra region is centred on the large Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi's westernmost domain); viz., 520 persons; and that they took from them large booty and numerous camels and that Sheikh Qasim returned safely with his army. I hear from reports that Sheikh Qasim lost 8 men killed. Others say 48, others again 110. But as yet there is no correct report as since the arrival of this messenger no one has come from Qatar owing to heavy "shemall" (northern gusty) winds. It is stated that Sheikh Qasim has not yet reached Al-Bidda (Doha). I hear that Isa Bin Ziyab a cousin of Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa (Al Nahyan) has arrived in Bahrain from Abu Dhabi and interviewed the Chief (ruler of Bahrain). According to what he says there are not so many people at Liwa and that Sheikh Zayed had not received any report of Sheikh Qasim's proceedings from Qatar to Liwa or any other place. I shall make further reports when I receive any fresh news) the second extract is as follows (No. 52, dated the 28th of March 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. I have seen a letter from Qasim (ruler of Qatar) to Mugbil (Al-Thukair) in which the writer says that he is prepared to meet Zayed (ruler of Abu Dhabi) and that he is not afraid of his advance; on the contrary that he will himself march out to attack Zayed in case the latter should not advance against him. In that letter he also wishes Mugbil to believe that Ibn Rasheed (ruler of Ha'il in northern Arabia) will not fail to fulfil his promise. The date of this letter is 17th March. It is apparent that Qasim wrote that letter before the arrival of Nafi (Ibn Rasheed messenger) My own opinion is that if the news about Zayed's advance be true and also that if Qasim be supported by the Turkish soldiers, Zayed's forces will have hard work before them; for Qasim is regardless of expense and the Turkish soldiers are greedy as is known. Their number at Al-Bidda (Doha) is 250) the previous references were among several in this special report to Al-Thukair's top-level intermediation in this particular bloody conflict a small sample of his early political intermediation in regional affairs that would last until he unwillingly left his second adopted homeland Bahrain in mid-1917 but in connection with his frequent interactions with the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula the most significant of those were Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) of Bahrain, Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) of Qatar and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (r. 1902-1953) ruler of Najd and its dependencies who was styled as such from the 13th of January 1902 onwards after the subtle young industrious scion of the House of Saud succeeded in recapturing the ancestral seat of power of his forefathers, the then small town of Riyadh from the bellicose Ottoman-backed Al Rasheed ruling clan of the northern Arabian region of Ha'il in an audacious dawn attack, the future king of what would become the sprawling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia perceptibly in the course of time Al-Thukair became such a revered sage that the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa asked him to be one of the signatories of a solemn pledge of allegiance deed to his eldest surviving son the 24-year-old newly appointed crown prince and future ruler Sheikh Hamad (r. 1932-1942) on 8th October 1896 following the untimely death of his eldest son and heir apparent Salman near Riyadh in Najd Central Arabia three years earlier on his exhausting perilous long land journey home from the Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca during the formal investiture ceremony for the crown prince an honour reserved for only a select few high-ranking merchants from the highest echelons of the Bahraini business community who were recognised as pillars of society outside the ranks of senior members of the ruling family, tribal chieftains and clergy leaders amongst whom were Hussain Bin Salman Matar (1817-1911) and Ahmed Bin Muhammed Kanoo (1835-1905) as for Al-Thukair's aforementioned special relationship with Ibn Saud the marriage of his niece Lulwa the daughter of his brother Yahya to Ibn Saud solidified that relationship enabling him to negotiate on behalf of Ibn Saud a favourable agreement with the Ottomans on the withdrawal of their garrison from the Al-Hasa Oasis and its environs in eastern Arabia which would become part of the future eastern province of Saudi Arabia as Ibn Saud was poised to take control of the oasis in mid-1914 soon before the outbreak of World War One given that by the year 1890 after more than a decade of his arrival in Bahrain Al-Thukair began to pursue in earnest his profound and ardent passion for spreading knowledge and learning an indelible lifelong characteristic of his initially by starting a literary salon at his house in Manama similar to that of his friend and first cousin to the ruler of Bahrain classical poet and intellectual Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa's literary salon in Muharraq and those of several educated and well-travelled merchants and ruling family members in both Manama and Muharraq Bahrain's former political capital from 1810 to 1923 however the literary salon of Al-Thukair was rather different from its local counterparts in that it was more educationally oriented than the others by allocating a well-furnished spacious room in his house as a permanent location for the salon equipped with a relatively sizable varied library whose contents were kept in its wall alcoves as it was the antecedent of his most ambitious cultural and educational project ever the "Bahrain Literary Society" twenty-three years later since those literary salons (clubs) collectively played a discernible educational role as they were haunts for the knowledge-hungry local literate young men prior to the establishment of formal education following the end of the First World War furthermore Sheikh Ibrahim requested Al-Thukair to be the principal supplier of Arabic periodicals in Bahrain by making use of his network of regional business agents to acquire popular newspapers and magazines from the Levant and Egypt, therefore he took it upon himself to supply all of the needs for published materials of other literary salons as a courtesy moving in the same vein he also vigorously sponsored the publication of seminal literary and theological works from the Arab Islamic mediaeval heritage as well as non-formal charity schooling and public libraries well-stocked with diverse books and respected periodicals largely from the Levant and Egypt (such as Al-Muqtataf, Al-Mu'ayyad, Al-Hilal, Al-Manar and so on) in both Bahrain and his birthplace Unaizah in addition to his educational and cultural dissemination efforts he was acutely sensitive to the daily hardships of ordinary impoverished and marginalised people as evidenced by the next edited excerpt from the 1910 British Gulf residency report (Almas, Negro the Confidential Adviser of Sheikh Isa (ruler of Bahrain) died on 11th January and was replaced by Ali Bin Abdullah (Al-Obaidli) on the advice of Ali Bin Abdullah, Sheikh Isa called upon house owners to produce the sanads (Arabic singular title deed: سند, Romanised English plural: sanads) in virtue of which they held their property on their failing to do so they were evicted and no consideration was paid to the period of possession, Sheikh Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair protested to Sheikh Isa against this measure as it pressed hardly on the poor the protest had the desired effect and the Sheikh (ruler) promised to refrain from such actions in the future) the rescinding of the ruler's decree in the past incident is the definitive indication of the unflinching deference accorded to Al-Thukair by everyone who came into contact with him from those in power to the ordinary man in the street he was also involved in a wide range of philanthropic activities that were not confined to the conventional charity act of almsgiving since he was a practical man who took a number of practical steps to assuage human suffering in any way he could defying common human prejudices among his various practical philanthropic contributions in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf was the commissioning of a water well next to his house in Manama around the year 1900 akin to the undertakings of prominent fellow local pearl merchants Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and Muhammad Bin Rashid Bin Hindi (1850-1934) of Muharraq who attempted to alleviate some of the freshwater supply predicament that plagued Bahrain's urban dwellers predominantly those of Manama and Muharraq the two main densely populated towns in the small island nation at the turn of the twentieth century where the majority of the population had difficulty securing their daily domestic supply of freshwater owing to the lack of potable drinking water infrastructure in Bahrain and much of the Near East as in many other parts of the globe including some of the underdeveloped regions of the Western world in the early part of the twentieth century despite the fact that Bahrain had abundant freshwater resources unlike some of its Arab Gulf neighbours a small example of the central socioeconomic roles that rich mercantile elites played throughout Arab polities in the Arabian Gulf before the discovery of oil and the subsequent establishment of the modern welfare state Al-Thukair also tended to the spiritual needs of the inhabitants of his neighbourhood in Manama at roughly the same time he commissioned the water well he financed the renovation of an old dilapidated bijou Mosque within the vicinity of his house dating back to the late seventeen hundreds placing a nearby shop he owned as a charitable endowment for the Mosque which the locals of the area after him affectionately called Mugbil Mosque even though he was not its original builder he was also instrumental in locally funding the construction of Bahrain's second hospital after the opening of the "American Mission Hospital" in Manama on 26th January 1903 at the request of the British to fulfil their envisaged "Victoria Memorial Hospital" between 1902 and its formal opening on 9th November 1906 to commemorate the late Queen Victoria (defunct since 1948) situated in the Ras Rumman area in Manama south of the British political agency (present-day British Embassy) by rallying other leading merchants to contribute to this vital medical project as Bahrain was in desperate need of a quarantine medical facility to combat the rampant spread of recurring deadly epidemics specifically plague, cholera and typhus as reported in the British Gulf residency report of 1902 this is a slightly edited excerpt from the detailed report dated 23rd August 1902 by J. C. Gaskin, Esq, Assistant Political Agent, Bahrain where Gaskin was delegated by his superiors in the British Indian government the task of securing funds for the proposed hospital locally by taking the pulse of the local mercantile elite through cosying up to rich local merchants chief among them Al-Thukair to enlist their financial assistance in building the hospital, stated as follows (I would venture to report that since the receipt of your communication I have spoken on the subject to some of the leading native merchants and from their replies to me I got the impression that they would give liberal donations towards the hospital: and subsequently Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair the leading Bahraini merchant called on me and offered to subscribe R1,000. (One thousand rupees) Haji Mugbil's handsome offer will influence the native merchants who usually follow his lead) in recognition of his role in securing local funding for the hospital British colonial authorities invited Al-Thukair along with other donors to the hospital opening ceremony, the following edited excerpt from the British Gulf residency report for the year 1906-1907 formulated by the British political agent in Bahrain Captain F. B. Prideaux sheds light on the event (on the 9th November 1906 advantage was taken of the presence of the Political Resident (Major P. Z. Cox) in the Arabian Gulf to hold a public meeting for the opening of the Victoria Memorial Charitable Hospital nearly all the contributors to the Rs. 21,000 which the construction had cost were present on the occasion as were also the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain and his sons after the Resident had delivered a short extempore speech, the leading Arab merchant Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair read a reply expressing gratitude to the British Government for their interest in and protection of Bahrain and wishing long life to the Ruler Sheikh Isa Bin Ali) for some the antagonistic stance of Al-Thukair towards the British as expounded in detail further in the text seemed contradictory as he gladly collaborated with them in their efforts to secure funding for the construction of the said hospital in tandem with their other measures to improve public sanitation and hygiene to help curb the spread of virulent diseases in Bahrain's two major towns Manama and Muharraq as he saw his sporadic cooperation with the advanced British in a different light as he would endorse any attempt to better the lives of ordinary Bahrainis even if it meant occasionally cooperating with a foreign colonial power he vehemently opposed in that sense he was a modern practical man, it could not be denied that the least tangible of his philanthropic efforts but perhaps the most life-changing for those affected by it was the hidden assistance he rendered in paying off the debts of struggling insolvent merchants in Bahrain and across the Arabian Gulf with a special priority given to his own debtors who either had their debts temporarily reprieved or cancelled altogether as in this revealing slightly edited citation from the 1913 British Gulf residency report asserting the regional scope of his business interests dated 5th of May 1913 stating as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Thani (ruler) of Qatar has asked Yusuf Kanoo to use his influence with Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair in bringing about an amiable settlement between the latter and his Qatar debtors who are unable to pay their debts on account of the dullness of the pearl market) surpassed only by Bahrain's preeminent pearl merchant of all time dubbed by the Bahraini people "Father of orphans and protector of widows" for his unequalled altruism and magnanimity Salman Bin Hussain Matar, yet his most important legacy was the founding in mid-1913 of the first officially recognised Literary Society in Bahrain as touched upon earlier located in close proximity to the American Mission Bible Bookshop in Manama on what is now Sheikh Isa Al Kabeer (Isa the Great) Avenue in its own special-purpose premises inaugurated under his patronage and with the full endorsement of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa and the moral support of a number of local literary figures and dignitaries led by Bahrain's foremost literary figure in the early twentieth century the acclaimed classical poet Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa (1850-1933) in conjunction with Al-Thukair's younger and trusted energetic friend, the influential comprador merchant and shrewd entrepreneur founder and sole owner of Bahrain's first Western-style Bank in 1890 a true man of the world the maverick Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945) this society was not merely an ordinary Literary Society but a modern educational institution in the true sense of the word a wellspring of radiance for the Bahraini people at the time comprising a comprehensive library, a school for teaching Arabic, English, mathematics and Islamic theology and a lecture hall ably managed by the gifted 33-year-old Al-Azhar graduate educator Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) who would become the first chairman of the Directorate of Knowledge (Ministry of Education) in the newly-established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the future judge and Grand Mufti (jurisconsult) of Qatar handpicked by Al-Thukair to undertake the onerous task of transforming this institution into a beacon of enlightenment and forward-thinking in a short period of time one of the many cultural contributions of the educated and enlightened Bahraini business elite who were at the vanguard of modernity and progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their previously mentioned literary salons and also through their lesser-known but no less important financing of numerous free of charge non-formal local schooling initiatives as those were among the earliest semi-modern organised educational institutions to tackle the prevalent illiteracy in Bahrain other than the existing traditional Quranic schools strikingly among the several non-formal schools of the time one stood out as the first female-founded charity school in Bahrain and most likely the entire Gulf established on the island of Muharraq the former capital of Bahrain in 1887 by the noblewoman and philanthropist heiress Sheikha Saida Bint Bishr (1834-1892) who defied all expectations of traditional domestic roles for women in the highly patriarchal society of late-nineteenth-century Bahrain by allocating the revenue of a date palm orchard she owned in Manama as an endowment for the school eponymously named after her nevertheless some of the independent charity schools date back to the early part of the nineteenth century since the earliest recorded charity school in Bahrain was that of Sheikh Isa Bin Rashid in Muharraq in 1829 an eminent cleric of the Island of Muharraq predating the reign of Sheikh Isa by forty years however this proliferation of educational initiatives noticeably in the last third of the nineteenth century was the fruit of the long-lasting stability of Sheikh Isa's reign the role of the Bahraini business elite was not limited to just paving the way for the establishment of modern education but also was directly involved in the development of Western-influenced formal education leading to the opening of the first elementary school for boys in Muharraq in 1919 followed by another for girls in 1928 also in Muharraq with a nine-year gap where some of the senior members of the said elite (such as Matar, Algosaibi, Al-Zayani and Fakhro) served on the first governmental educational regulatory body in the modern history of the country the education supervisory committee (the forerunner of the Ministry of Education) which oversaw the development of the nascent government's educational system chaired by Sheikh Abdullah (1883-1966) the youngest son of the ruler of Bahrain in the honorary position of minister of education, the first and only local state official to hold such a position under British colonial rule in Bahrain this exception was made due to the high status of its occupant considering he was the son of the ruler since the office of a minister was a symbol of sovereignty in an independent sovereign state which was not the case with Bahrain an office he would continue to occupy until his death in 1966 the education committee continued as the main financial backer of education in Bahrain by financing the construction of schools across the country since its formation in 1919 until the mid-1930s when the Bahraini government became financially self-sufficient as a result of stable oil export revenues lastly allowing the government to replenish its empty coffers permanently resolving the protracted financial problems that had beset the Bahraini government for many decades rendering it a thing of the past simultaneously with the establishment of formal education in 1919 another milestone was the creation of the first partially elected municipal councils in both Manama and Muharraq which were dominated by elected and appointed senior members of the Bahraini business elite who played a crucial role in sponsoring a number of infrastructure projects in the country including the Manama port project in 1919 as happened in the pre-oil era throughout the Gulf as the 1920s and 1930s saw the gradual emergence of the modern Bahraini bureaucratic centralised state and good governance replacing the existing centuries-old obsolete mediaeval fiefdom system an inexorable obstacle to human development in its entirety anywhere in the world of the early twentieth-century industrial age, it would be misleading not to mention the facilitating quintessential role of Britain in bringing those reforms to fruition as represented by the four most influential British colonial administrators and officers in the British colonial history of Bahrain whose contributions to the establishment of modern Bahrain could not be ignored or underestimated under any circumstances serving consecutively one after the other starting with the delicate and focal preliminary task of the wily Arabist and orientalist military commander and intelligence officer Captain N. N. E. Bray (1885-1962) as a political agent in Bahrain from November 1918 to June 1919 with clear directives to "seek the amelioration of the internal government by indirect and pacific means and by gaining the confidence and trust of the Sheikh (ruler)" followed by Major H. R. P. Dickson (1881-1959) with a brief yet extremely productive tenure from 1919 to 1920 he would later serve as a political agent in Kuwait from 1929 to 1936 then succeeded by the demoted from Colonel to Major for recklessly violent behaviour in post-World War One Iraq, inadvertently responsible for single-handedly igniting the first spark of what would become "The Iraqi revolt against the British" also known as the 1920 Iraqi Revolt or the Great Iraqi Revolution, the disgraced Anglo-Irish Clive Kirkpatrick Daly (1888-1966) with his divisive and controversial tenure from 1921 to 1926 and finally Charles D. Belgrave (1894-1969) who served as an administrator and financial adviser to the ruler of Bahrain in the newly created office of the "Adviser" to purposefully overshadow the increasingly unpopular post of the political agent for its association with Daly's heavy-handed colonial rule, Belgrave's long tenure from 1926 to 1957 is seen by historians as a consolidation of the modernising reforms of his predecessors particularly Daly, whom Belgrave held in high esteem where the reforms gained more momentum following the steady flow of oil revenues after the discovery of the essential commodity in 1932 as all four carefully selected highly competent Arabist hardy tricenarian officers were assigned by the British Government with specific instructions to introduce all required administrative reforms based on their own discretion in line with the broader British regional strategy of placating the growing social discontent among the disenfranchised lower classes by redressing the pressing multigenerational injustices in Bahraini society specifically in the semi-feudal systems of pearl fishing indentured workers and agricultural farmers coordinating their reforms with the financial and moral support of the cooperative Bahraini business elite under such circumstances the first batch of reforms in education, municipal and fiscal sectors was implemented almost immediately after Bray's assisting initiative by Dickson, whereas customs, judiciary, police and land reform fell to the authoritarian Daly while Belgrave is credited with creating several new government departments including the "Directorate of Religious Endowments" in 1927 his first significant reform after assuming office as a financial adviser to stem the chronic unfettered corruption of some of the local clergy whom the government entrusted to administer religious endowments (waqf) without any supervision or legal accountability followed by the slow process of his decades-long vital initiative to develop modern public utility infrastructure for electricity, water and telephone services which commenced effectively in early 1928 he was also instrumental in securing the oil concession that led to the discovery of oil in 1932 but his everlasting achievement was the founding of the "Minors Funds Directorate" in 1932 to protect the inheritance rights of orphans and widows, a life-changing cross-sectarian institution in the service of the Bahraini people operating without interruption since its inception the first governmental institution of its kind in Bahrain and Belgrave's most enduring legacy however Belgrave faced fierce and persistent opposition from deeply conservative reactionary and corrupt elements within the Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian main religious composition of Bahrain who sought to obfuscate and obstruct the introduction of such a governmental institution as those elements had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, deeming such a move as tantamount to heresy but Belgrave's dedication and perseverance prevailed in the end, sadly for many Bahrainis this remarkable feat of his remains a little-known historical fact the upcoming excerpt is one of numerous recurring instances in Belgrave's diary on this motion from 20th February 1931 until it was ratified on 15th January 1932 by the deputy ruler Sheikh Hamad less than a year before his accession to the throne on 9th December after being put forward for public debate by the government involving the wonted religious and mercantile elites of Bahraini society as alluded to earlier illustrating the great lengths Belgrave went to for the creation of this totally new governmental regulatory body with no precedent at least in Bahrain (Sunday 17th Jan 1932 Called on Yusuf Kanoo in the morning and discussed with him the question of the Proclamation which we are issuing ordering all wills to be registered with the Government and no persons to administer estates without getting permission from Government. It will to a certain extent safeguard the rights of widows and orphans who at present are being robbed wholesale) but the timing of the urgency in implementing the reforms cannot be overlooked as it coincided with the execution on the ground of the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot agreement on dividing the legacy of the vanquished Ottoman Empire between the two main World War One victorious powers, Britain and France giving birth to the ubiquitous British coined term "Middle East" recognising the fact that the Hejaz western region of the Arabian Peninsula where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located was under direct Ottoman rule and the Peninsula as a whole was and still is an extension of Iraq and the Levant in addition to achieving sustainable political stability in the Gulf as the advanced western Arabian frontier of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the final analysis, the seemingly avowed altruistic goals of the reforms in Bahrain were part of the colonial "grafting process" reform assimilation policy of Britain through tactfully transplanting British hegemonic ideas into the newly formed Middle East as in other parts of the British Empire in contrast to its fellow draconian and pompous French to ensure the long-term strategic interests of Britain in the aftermath of World War One, thus everything the British undertook was to this end, Al-Thukair was concerned not only with the spread of modern learning and science but also with the introduction of modern technology in the region as he was either the first or second local to own a motor car in Bahrain in 1908 ten years before the supposed official arrival of the first motor vehicle in the country as depicted in the travel diary of international jeweller Jacques Cartier of the iconic Parisian Cartier jewellery house during his second visit to Bahrain in March 1912 moreover it is worth mentioning that among his numerous noble deeds was the utilisation of his high social status as a business doyen, arbiter of disputes and man of letters both locally and regionally in mustering financial and moral support for the Libyan resistance in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya in October of 1911 and Mussolini's subsequent genocidal fascist regime settler colonialism of this vast sparsely populated semidesert North African Arab nation where Al-Thukair successfully raised twenty thousand rupees in relief aid donations in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf with the effective collaboration of the motivated cleric and merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani (1863-1925) who travelled to Lengeh (an Arab coastal town in modern-day Iran) and Dubai as part of a Gulf-wide fundraising campaign for the embattled Libyans of Tripoli to be forwarded after the end of the subscription on the steamship SS. "Patiala" on 8th July 1912 to the Ottoman Red Crescent Society in the Iraqi city of Basra to be sent from there via Egypt to Tripoli, Libya as stated in the following are slightly edited excerpts from the 1912 British Gulf residency report concerning the Turco-Italian war and local and regional reactions to it from February and July respectively the first describes Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani's tireless zeal for collecting donations for the Libyan cause while the second describes Al-Thukair's delivery of those donations, it was clearly a collaborative effort rather than a single individual endeavour however this is not meant to diminish the efforts of Al-Thukair as he was either the driving force behind all of those initiatives or an integral member of the majority of them the first excerpt is as follows (The Arabs of Muharraq incited by an influential Mullah Sheikh Abdulwahab (Al-Zayani) have opened a subscription list for The Red Crescent Society in order to help it in bringing succour to the wounded in Tripoli. So far about Rs. 5,000 have been collected. This sum will be largely increased if the Arabs of Manama, Budaiya and Hidd join in as they have promised to do. The same Mullah is stated to have paid visits to Lengeh and Dubai about a month ago. At Lengeh he succeeded in collecting some 5,000 rupees but met with no success at Dubai where the people were sceptical as to the probability of the money ever reaching its ostensible destination) while the second as with the first shows the British meticulous documentation of the conclusion of the initiative (Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair forwarded on the 8th of July per SS. "Patiala" the sum of Rs. 20,000 being the total amount of subscription raised in Bahrain for the Red Crescent Society to Basra for transmission to Tripoli via Egypt) leading to the incensing of the British colonial authorities in Bahrain against him he also played a significant role in the Bahraini relief campaign to provide financial aid to the displaced Muslim refugees of the Balkan war precipitated by the raging Turco-Italian War over Ottoman Libya the "Balkan League" was formed in 1912 under the auspices of the Russians with the aim of putting an end to the Ottoman presence in the Balkans once and for all resulting in the ethnic genocide of nearly one and a half million Balkan Muslims with more than four hundred thousand refugees fleeing to Anatolia as news of the harrowing atrocities reached Bahrain cleric and pearl merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani referred to earlier one of Bahrain's most revered national figures in the early twentieth century the leader of the first Bahraini independence movement from Britain at the turn of the twentieth century set up a fundraising refugee relief committee with the full backing of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa who launched the donation fundraiser with the generous sum of ten thousand rupees appointing Al-Thukair as secretary-treasurer of the committee who rose to the occasion by exerting immense efforts to garner financial aid for the displaced Muslim refugees by exhorting the Bahraini populace to donate to their stranded Muslim brethren through his eloquent oratorical motivational skills, thus by the end of the fundraising the accumulated amount had risen to well over a hundred and four thousand rupees a sizable sum for a tiny country the size of Bahrain in the early twentieth century Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani and Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo were entrusted by the committee with the task of faithfully delivering the donations to the representative of the Ottoman Governor of Iraq in the Iraqi port city of Basra on 28th December 1912 according to the 1912 report of the British political agency in Bushehr compiled by a number of political agents in the region including Captain D. L. R. Lorimer and Major A. P. Trevor both of whom served in Bahrain the following edited excerpt is part of Major Trevor's section of this thorough report written after he succeeded Lorimer as Political Agent in Bahrain on 1st November 1912 (The subscription raised by the Arabs of Bahrain for the Turkish Red Crescent Society having reached the handsome figure of Rs. 1,04,100 the amount was taken to Basra by SS. "Bahrain" (of the Arab Steamers, Limited) on 28th December by Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani and Yusuf Kanoo for despatch to the Sultan. Yusuf Kanoo stated that it was their intention to land at Bushehr and send a telegram to the Sultan stating the amount of the sum raised for the Red Crescent Fund and mentioning that it had been subscribed by the Sheikhs and people of Bahrain for the sick and wounded. The object of this telegram of course was to prevent hanky-panky on the part of the Wali (Ottoman Governor) of Basra) it should be pointed out that Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani was exiled to the Indian port city of Bombay by the British colonial authorities in Bahrain in 1923 along with several of his comrades in the Bahraini independence movement where he died and was buried in less than two years in 1925 on a similar note an oblique account related to a letter dated 11th April of the same year sent by an anonymous Indian Muslim leader requesting Al-Thukair to organise an unspecified cause relief aid campaign for the Muslims of an unnamed Indian province was included in the 1913 report of the British political agency in Bahrain demonstrating the widely acclaimed reputation he achieved through the efficacy of his fundraising campaigns however by the middle of the Great War Al-Thukair had suffered considerable losses in his pearl business wrought in part by the dire effects of war particularly on the luxury goods market but mainly attributed to British interventions aimed at undermining his business interests primarily in Bahrain as some Bahraini historical researchers concluded as a consequence of his active role in supporting the Libyan resistance movement against Italian colonialism as previously stated, needless to say from the British point of view the uncompromising character of Al-Thukair and his unequivocal stance against Western colonialism in all of its forms constituted a threat to British colonial economic hegemony in the region that needed to be addressed decisively by thwarting any attempt to achieve any form of economic independence no matter how insignificant or trivial it might seem as in Al-Thukair's participation as a founding major shareholder with a five percent stake with a number of other wealthy pearl merchants from Bahrain and Kuwait together with the rulers of the said countries and those of Qatar and Oman led and chaired by the regionally famous Kuwaiti pearl merchant Jassim Bin Muhammad Al-Ibrahim (1869-1956) and his fellow leading Bahraini pearl merchant Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab Al-Mishari (1864-1922) in the position of general manager in establishing the first truly regional Arab shareholding firm and the first fully Arab-owned ocean liner shipping company in the Arabian Gulf on 30th April 1911 "The Arab Steamers, Limited" made up for the first time in the modern history of the Gulf of a medium-sized fleet of Western-built passenger steamships the moderately edited following extract from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency in the Persian (Iranian) coastal city of Bushehr gives an inkling of the size of the company's fleet (The Arab Steamers, Limited-This company started a service to the Arabian Gulf in July 1911 and during the past year, 18 of their steamers have called at Lengeh outwards from Bombay while 10 steamers called on the return journey from Basra) one must note that the fleet included the passenger and cargo ship "Tynesider" renamed "Faris" in early 1912 on which the Parisian jeweller Jacques Cartier (1884-1941) travelled to India and the Arabian Gulf the same year as the company's board named the previously mentioned respected Bahraini banker and merchant Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo as its agent in Bahrain since he was friends with most of the board members incidentally it was Yusuf Kanoo's first shipping agency in 1911, thus launching his shipping agency business which would become the posthumous cornerstone of the eponymous regional multinational Y.B.A. Kanoo conglomerate in the post-World War Two Arabian Gulf oil economy, the following excerpt from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency describes the sense of jubilation and pride of the Bahraini people at the arrival of the first passenger steamship of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" to bear the name Bahrain on its maiden voyage (SS. Bahrain a new acquisition of the Arab company, arrived at Bahrain on 1st March, fully dressed with flags. It was explained that the decoration was in honour of the first visit of the ship to its name-place. The name is a source of great delight to the local Arabs) apart from the legitimate premise of economic independence the real reason for the establishment of this firm was a response to the monopolistic exploitative practises and racially discriminatory colonial policies of the "British India Steam Navigation Company" (B.I.) against non-European passengers in general and Arabs in particular as attested by the exorbitant ticket prices of Arab travellers not to mention the additional cargo charges exacted on Arab-owned goods exacerbating the whole situation by barring affluent Arab first-class passengers from eating in the dining rooms and halls of its ships rightfully regarded as a disparaging and demeaning hierarchical colonial policy that posed an egregious affront to human dignity irrespective of race, colour, ethnicity or creed commonly practised by Western colonial powers of divesting non-white peoples of their humanity in order to legitimise their subjugation on the other hand unfortunately the fate of this pioneering highly successful company was tragically sealed unceremoniously in 1915 when it was sold to the "Bombay & Persia Steam Navigation Company" (The Mogul Line) as a direct result of insurmountable British pressure after less than five years of operation a pressure that began by dissuading Gulf Arab rulers from investing in such a venture while the company was still in formation under the usual infantilising colonial mendacious pretenses of catastrophic financial losses and no practical feasibility for themselves and their peoples whether in the near or distant future but their spurious discouraging attempts were in vain with the British-owned (B.I.) resorting to an all-out price war immediately after the start of the company's operations all these flagrantly malicious actions by the British helped stoke the flames of Arab patriotic sentiments to the fullest against them in the Gulf by causing Gulf Arabs including Iraqis to travel almost exclusively on the ships of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" still the company managed to command the substantial sum of three-quarters of a million British Indian silver rupees as a sale price exactly threefold the paid-in capital just over four years earlier given the geopolitical situation of the Great War adverse international economic conditions, sending the pearl-based mono-cultural economies of the Gulf into a tailspin along with wartime restrictions on sea travel, to compound matters further, the British Admiralty requisitioned one of the company's vessels, the passenger and cargo ship SS. "Budrie" originally named SS. "Golconda" for the war effort where it ended up being scuttled as a blockship at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland on 3rd October 1915 a clear testament to the enormous success that this ill-fated company enjoyed in its short-lived existence, the following excerpt is from a thoroughly detailed report on the trade movement of Oman by Major S. G. Knox the British consul in Muscat, Oman and its de facto ruler dated 13th April 1912 on sea trade and shipping movement in and out of the country, refers to the effect of the launching of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" on freight shipping rates (The British India Company who have got the contract for the carriage of mails from and to India provide one weekly fast mail service up and down and 1 fortnightly coasting slow mail service both ways. The vessels of the Arab Steamers, Limited have also maintained a weekly service. In consequence of the weekly service maintained by the Arab Steamers, the freights to India, etc., were greatly reduced during the year and those for United States of America enhanced) the doomed fate of this company became a cautionary tale for anyone attempting to challenge British colonial economic hegemony in the region for many decades to come until the defining watershed historical moment of Britain's future role as a global power in the outcome of the new harsh bipolar world order realities of the 1956 Suez crisis (known as the "tripartite aggression" in the Arab world) marking the beginning of the end of the British imperial presence in the Middle East incrementally superseded by American influence in all aspects nevertheless on the positive side racial discrimination, unwarranted prices and mistreatment of Arabs and non-Europeans on British passenger ships came to an end as the British realised though belatedly that such discriminatory practises could impinge on their long-term economic interests in the region epitomising British pragmatism at its finest one of the most contributing factors to the British Imperial enterprise's resounding successes over the centuries in comparison to its other European counterparts and finally culminating in the straw that broke the camel's back Al-Thukair's staunch allegiance to the sworn enemy of Great Britain in the region the Ottoman Turks on the eve of World War One demonstrably embodied itself in his spearheading of a very large Gulf-wide fundraising campaign comparable to, if not larger than his previous ones to raise financial aid for the Ottomans with a special emphasis on enlisting the financial assistance of Arabian Gulf heads of state, leading merchants and clerics where it attained a resounding success under the watchful eye of the British colonial authorities in the region confirmed by a concise reference in the British Archives to the recently deceased ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani who died on 17th July 1913 in relation to the worrying antagonistic fundraising activities of Al-Thukair the British in anticipation of the looming global conflagration of World War One (as it would be known in the West as the Great War or perhaps more idealistically as "the war to end war" the paradoxical catchphrase created by prolific English author H. G. Wells) as an inevitable conclusion in light of the fraught international situation of the escalating crisis in Europe among the newly allied powers of Britain, France and Russia since the turn of the twentieth century in the face of rising militaristic and economic power of Germany as leader of the central powers mainly the Austro-Hungarians and the beleaguered Ottomans in the same previously referred to 1913 report of the British Gulf residency stated as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani has sent 25 thousand rupees to Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo here with instructions to send the amount to Basra. It is the subscription of the Qatar people for the Turkish relief) a war of the kind that the ailing Ottoman Empire dubbed "The Sick Man of Europe" in the West would be playing its definitive role in deciding the future of the Middle East after four centuries of imperial dominance just as war-weary Britain would be playing itself forty years later in the face of the growing new American influence in the region in the aftermath of the Second World War though in a peaceful conciliatory mode as should be the norm between close strategic partners ultimately Al-Thukair's relentless and far-reaching fervour on all fronts caught up with him forcing the venerable septuagenarian merchant to reluctantly relinquish his most rewarding and cherished achievement the "Bahrain Literary Society" resulting in its permanent closure in 1917 due to the unfortunate fact that he was the sole benefactor of this progressive institution where he spared no expense on his beloved creation during its fruitful albeit brief existence followed soon thereafter by the selling of almost all of his assets in Bahrain starting with the sale of virtually all his Manama properties including his commercial buildings and four houses in early 1917 to his friend and equal in character and exalted social stature prominent pearl merchant Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and ending with his most prized possession his huge date palm orchard named "Tinar" on the outskirts of Manama near the historic Al-Khamis Mosque which he sold to his fellow countryman and successor in heading the Najdi community of Bahrain and Ibn Saud's representative notable pearl merchant Abdulaziz Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1876-1953) shortly before his final departure to his birthplace Unaizah where he would die less than six years later in 1923 at the age of 79 this is undoubtedly the clearest manifestation of his unwavering loyalty to his Central Arabian Najdi roots in spite of making Bahrain his home in every sense for forty years however some of his descendants chose to remain in Bahrain namely his Bahraini-born youngest son Abdulrahman who spent the best part of his life moving back and forth between Bahrain and the birthplace of his ancestors Unaizah and whose descendants still live in Bahrain remarkably those last few years of his life were not spent idly on the contrary notwithstanding his financial woes Al-Thukair rose above it all by erecting a charity school complex with free lodging for teachers in his beloved hometown of Unaizah he also funded the publication of two classical Islamic theological works to be distributed gratuitously among its literate residents as a last token of gratitude to the place that played a pivotal role in shaping his formative years the ultimate proof of his noble unfaltering magnanimous nature in the face of overwhelming vicissitudes of fortune in other words for Al-Thukair moral agency and altruism took precedence over expediency, personal gain and selfish interest this idealised narrative might be viewed by some with incredulity however the veracity of the preceding portrait of Al-Thukair was corroborated by an independent foreign source free of any cultural affiliation to the region represented in the travel diary of the young French jeweller Jacques Cartier who painted a more poignant portrait of him than even some of his local and regional contemporaries devoid of duplicity and guile (such values and principles as some commentators suggested were detrimental to Al-Thukair's business activities of course from a pragmatic unscrupulous perspective) as expected at the death announcement of Al-Thukair at dawn on the 13th of May 1923 in his then small sleepy rural hometown of Unaizah thousands of mourners of all genders and walks of life thronged to join the sombre funeral procession of one of Unaizah's most illustrious natives while paying their respects to the family of this noble pious benevolent man the least honour they could afford for someone who gave so much to his people as word of his passing spread beyond Unaizah, cables and letters of condolence started to pour in from regional potentates, political leaders, notables and leading merchants from around the Arabian Peninsula he was also mourned and deservedly eulogised in Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian journals and periodicals by clerics, writers and intellectuals from the Gulf to Iraq and all the way to Egypt some of whom were personal friends such as the loyal Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) the published author, judge and future Grand Mufti of Qatar and at one time the semi-adopted son and business assistant of Al-Thukair who wrote a heart-wrenching eloquently effusive obituary for Al-Thukair titled "The death of a great man and a famous philanthropist" in the respected Egyptian Magazine Al-Manar on 9th June 1923 less than a month after his death the unique closeness of Al-Mana to Al-Thukair in all respects including their shared birthplace allowed him to serve as a key link between Al-Thukair and all of his regional friends another personal friend was Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Khonji (1880-1967) the esteemed Bahraini multi-talented cleric, poet, writer, intellectual, historian, administrator and educator the second Bahraini to graduate from the reputable Al-Azhar Islamic University of Cairo, Egypt in 1902 a worthy member of the 1919 prestigious education supervisory committee and a regular patron of the "Bahrain Literary Society" the brainchild of Al-Thukair before and after its official inauguration in 1913 a prolific correspondent with Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida the owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo who also happened to be an epistolary friend of Al-Thukair as noted further down in the text curiously enough Khonji's upcoming literal translated description of Al-Thukair was the least ornate of his contemporaries written in a plain stoic unrhetorical spare style displaying the typical ascetic attributes of his writings (Mugbil was a well-educated big merchant who had correspondence through his many agents in India, East Africa, Arab countries and Europe may God Almighty rest his soul) Al-Thukair also formed abiding epistolary friendships throughout his adult life which began as a means to quench his lifelong thirst for intellectual knowledge by forming long-standing literary correspondents that evolved into genuine epistolary friendships as in the case of Mahmud Shukri Al-Alusi (1856-1924) the revered multidiscipline Iraqi Islamic thinker, linguist, historian and reformer editor-in-chief of the first Iraqi periodical the renowned weekly newspaper Al-Zawra'a and once professor and mentor to Al-Mana during his student days in Baghdad however there is strong evidence that the friendship of Al-Alusi and Al-Thukair was not solely epistolary as it was perfectly possible for both gentlemen to meet several times during Al-Thukair's numerous business trips to Iraq particularly in the 1890s there was also occasional specific correspondence between the two concerning the latter's generous and varied assistance to Al-Alusi including the forwarding of several batches of books each containing hundreds of copies of a newly printed first edition of an Islamic theological work by Al-Alusi printed and shipped to Iraq from India one batch at a time at Al-Thukair's expense in addition to financial assistance this was the main topic of a series of letters between the two parties dating back to the year 1893 but for the sake of historical accuracy some of the batches in question were consigned by the ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani to be delivered to Al-Alusi by Al-Thukair a trusted friend of the ruler as was the case with other Arabian Gulf rulers mentioned earlier the other distinguished epistolary friend of his was Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida (1865-1935) the eminent Levantine-Egyptian Islamic theologian reformer, Quranic exegete, author and journalist founder and owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo, Egypt to whom he regularly wrote seeking his scholarly counsel on Islamic jurisprudence issues who was alerted to the demise of Al-Thukair by their mutual friend Al-Mana, eliciting a brief yet meaningful obituary by Rida in his own Al-Manar Magazine; the following text is a literal translation of the obituary (we beseech thee Almighty God to bless the life of our mourning brother the just judge of Qatar and to bestow his mercy and blessings upon our departed brother and to unite us with him {In an Assembly of Truth, in the Presence of a Sovereign Omnipotent} (The Moon Surah (chapter) "verse 55" Quran) and to mitigate the grief of his family and offspring and to guide them in following his righteous path) the first impression of this final example of his lasting correspondence is that it was arguably the only one of his consequential epistolary friendships that remained exclusively epistolary since there is no record of any meeting between Al-Thukair and Rida that had ever occurred since their first correspondence at the end of the nineteenth century until the death of Al-Thukair a premise reinforced by an excessive degree of formality and reserved mutual respect a constant feature mirrored in their writings for each other over the years these are the most noteworthy examples to name a few of the monumental veneration that Al-Thukair received upon his death, an explicit attestation of the high standing that he enjoyed at all levels)