question
stringlengths 18
1.2k
| facts
stringlengths 44
500k
| answer
stringlengths 1
147
|
|---|---|---|
In mythology, which creatures had the heads of women and the bodies of birds?
|
Bestiary | Theoi Greek Mythology
The fantastic creatures of Greek mythology and legend can be divided into eight broad categories :
1. MYTHICAL MONSTERS
Awful humanoid creatures. These included monsters such as the Gorgons and Echidna.
2. MYTHICAL HYBRIDS
Creatures which combine human and animal forms or various animals. These include creatures such as the Centaur (Horse-Man), Sphinx (Lion-Woman), Hippocamp (Fish-Horse), and Chimaera (Lion-Goat-Snake).
3. MYTHICAL ANIMALS
Normal animals with some fantastic attribute. Examples include the winged horse Pegasus, the giant Erymanthian Boar, the fire-breathing Bulls of Colchis, and the inescapable hunting-dog Laelaps.
4. DRAGONS
A breed of serpentine monsters, usually equipped with some magical power. They include creatures such as the Hydra, the Dragon of the Golden Fleece, Python, the Ethiopian Sea-Monster and the she-dragon Echidna.
5. GIANTS
Gigantic men, often with fantastic features or abilities. A few examples are the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires, the one-eyed Cyclopes, the water-walking hunter Orion, the wrestler Antaeus, and the monstrous Typhon.
6. GHOSTS & DEMONS
Creatures from the underworld which haunted the earth. They included the Empusae, Erinyes, Vampires and haunting ghosts of the dead.
Fabulous tribes of men which were believed to inhabit the lands of Terra Incognita, the "Unknown Earth." Examples of these are the Pygmies, the one-legged Sciapods, dog-headed Cynocephali, headless Blemmyae, and one-eyed Arimaspians.
BESTIARY
MEDUSA
Greek myth and legend is filled with a wide variety of monsters and creatures ranging from Dragons, Giants, Demons and Ghosts, to multiformed creatures such as the Sphinx, Minotaur, Centaurs, Manticores and Griffins. There were also many fabulous animals such as the Nemean Lion, golden-fleeced Ram and winged horse Pegasus, not to mention the creatures of legend such as the Phoenix, Unicorns (Monocerata). Even amongst the tribes of man, myth spoke of strange peoples inhabiting the far reaches of the earth such as the hopping Umbrella-Foots, the one-eyed Arimaspians, the Dog-Headed men, and the puny Pygmies.
AMPHISBAENAE see Beasts, African
AUTOMOTONS (Automotones) Creatures crafted out of metal and endowed with life by the smith-god Hephaestus.
BULLS, BRONZE (Tauroi Khalkeoi) Four fire-breathing, bronze bulls which Hephaestus crafted for King Aeetes of Colchis.
CELEDONES (Keledones) Golden singing maidens which Hephaistos crafted for the first temple of Apollo at Delphi.
DOGS, GOLD & SILVER (Kuones Khryseos Argyreos) A pair of gold and silver dogs which Hephaestus crafted for King Alcinous of the Phaeacians.
HORSES, CABEIRIAN (Hippoi Kabeirikoi) A pair of metallic, fire-breathing horses owned by the twin Cabiri gods.
MAIDENS, GOLDEN (Kourai Khryseai) Four golden maidens which Hephaestus crafted as his own attendants.
TALOS A bronze giant which Hephaestus crafted for Queen Europa of Crete to patrol the borders of her island.
BASILISCS see Beasts, African
BEASTS, AFRICAN (Theres Aithiopes) The semi-legendary land of Ethiopia (Sub-saharan Africa) was the home of many fabulous beasts.
AMPHISBAENAE (Amphisbainai) Saharan snakes with two heads, one at each end of the body.
BASILISCS (Basiliskoi) Deadly serpents which killed by touch.
BULLS, ETHIOPIAN (Tauroi Aithiopikoi) Gigantic African bulls whose red hides were impervious to steel.
CATOBLEPAS (Katoblepon) African hoofed animals whose downward looking head, when raised, could kill man with a gaze or with its noxious breath.
DRAGONS, ETHIOPIAN (Drakones Aithiopikoi) Gigantic African serpents.
LEUCROCOTAE (Leukrokota) An animals with a powerful jaw of bone in place of teeth, which could imitate human voices to lure it prey.
PEGASI, ETHIOPIAN (Pegasoi Aithiopikoi) The winged horses of Ethiopia who had a single horn growing from their forehead.
SATYRS, ISLAND (Satyroi Nesioi) Ape-like satyrs native to certain islands off the African coast.
SATYRS, LIBYAN (Satyroi Libyes) Monkey-like satyrs who lived in the forest of Mount Atlas.
SPHINXES, ETHIOPIAN (Sphinxes Aithiopikoi) Women-headed African lions.
BEASTS, INDIAN (Theres Indikoi) Legendary India was the home of many fabulous beasts.
ANTS, INDIAN (Myrmekes Indikoi) Gigantic ants which guarded the gold-fields of the Indian desert.
CETEA, INDIAN (Ketea Indikoi) Fabulous half-animal, half-fish sea-monster such as fish-tailed lions, bears, wolves, rams and even spiny-haired mermaids.
DRAGONS, INDIAN (Drakones Indikoi) Giant Indian serpents which preyed on elephants.
MONOCERATA (Hippoi Monokerata) The unicorns, magical single-horned equines native to India.
WORMS, INDOS Gigantic white worms which inhabited the Indos river.
BEASTS, PERSIAN & ARABIAN (Theres Persikoi) Various fabulous animals were believed to inhabit the lands of Arabia and Persia. See also Manticore and Phoenix.
SERPENTS, WINGED (Ophies Pteretoi) Feathery-winged serpents of Arabia which guarded the valuable myrrh fields.
BIRDS, OF ARES (Ornithes Areioi) Arrow-shooting birds which guarded the Amazonian shrine of the god Ares.
BIRDS, STYMPHALIAN (Ornithes Stymphalides) Man-eating which haunted lake Stymphalus in Arkadia. Heracles weas sent to drive them away as one of his Labours
BOAR, CALYDONIAN (Hus Kalydonios) A gigantic Aetolian boar slain by a band of heroes in the famed Calydonian Boar Hunt.
BOAR, CLAZOMENEAN (Hus Klazomenaios) A gigantic winged sow which ravaged the island of Clazomenae.
BOAR, CROMMYONIAN (Hus Krommyon) A gigantic sow which ravaged the region of Crommyon. It was slain by the hero Theseus.
BOAR, ERYMANTHIAN (Hus Erymanthios) A gigantic Arcadian boar which Heracles was sent to fetch as one of his twelve labours.
BULL, CRETAN (Tauros Kretaios) The bull which impregnated Pasiphae queen of Crete and which Heracles was sent to fetch as one of his labours.
BULL, OF EUROPA (Tauros Europaios) A bull which carried the Phoenician princess Europa across the sea to Crete. It was sometimes depicted as a fish-tailed animal.
BULL, SERPENT (Tauros Ophis) A black-skinned monster with the foreparts of a bull and the rearparts of a serpent. It was slain by the Sea-Titan Aegaeon during the Titan-War.
CATOBLEPAS see Beasts, African
CENTAURS (Kentauroi) A tribe of creatures who had the heads and torsos of men and the bodies of horses.
CENTAURIDES (Kentaurides) The female centaurs, women with the bodies of horses in place of legs.
CENTAURS, CYPRIAN (Kentauroi Kyprioi) A tribe of centaurs native to the island of Cyprus.
CENTAURS, DIONYSIAN (Kentauroi Lamoi) The centaur attendants of the god Dionysos.
CENTAURS, PELOPONNESIAN (Kentauroi Peloponnesioi) A tribe of Arcadian centaurs which battled Heracles for the wine of Pholus.
CENTAURS, THESSALIAN (Kentauroi Thessalioi) A tribe of Magnesian centaurs who battled the Lapith tribesmen at the wedding of King Pirithoos.
CHIRON (Kheiron) A wise, immortal Centaur, half-brother of Zeus. He was the mentor of many Greek heroes.
EURYTION 1 A Thessalian centaur who tried to abduct the bride of King Pirithoos.
EURYTION 2 A Pelopennesian centaur slain by Heracles.
ICHTHYOCENTAURS (Ikhthyokentauroi) Two marine centaurs, named Bythos and Aphros, with the upper torsoes of a men and the lower bodies of hippocamps (fish-tailed horses).
NESSUS (Nessos) A centaur slain by Heracles.
PHOLUS (Pholos) A goodly centaur who entertained Heracles.
CERBERUS (Kerberos) The three-headed, giant hound that guarded the gates of Hades. It had lion's feet, a mane of serpents and the tail of a viper.
CERCOPES (Kerkopes) A pair of mischievous monkey-like dwarfs.
CHIMERA (Khimaira) A three headed monster, with the foreparts of a lion, the hind-parts of a goat and goat's-head rising from its back, and the tail of a headed-serpent.
CRAB, GIANT (Karkinos) A giant crab which fought alongside the Hydra against Heracles.
DEER, CERYNITIAN (Elaphos Kerynitis) A golden-horned deer which Heracles was sent to fetch as one of his twelve labours.
DEER, GOLDEN-HORNED (Elaphoi Khrysokeroi) Five immortal golden-horned deer sacred to the goddess Artemis. Four of them drew the goddess' chariot.
DEMONS (Kakodaimones) Some of the personified spirits and demons of the underworld were monstrous in appearance.
ACHLYS (Akhlys) The demon of misery was a pale green hag with bleeding cheeks and tear-stained eyes, overgrown fingernails and dusty hair.
EMPUSA (Empousa) A flame-haired vampiric demon with a leg of bronze and a hoofed foot of an ass. Disguised as a beautiful woman she seduced men to feed on their flesh and blood.
EURYNOMUS (Eurynomos) A blue-black skinned demon of the underworld who fed on the flesh of corpses.
KERES Dark-winged death demons which haunted the battlefields of men and fed on the blood of dying men. They were pale ugly hags with clawed hands and gnashing teeth.
LIMOS The demon of hunger was a starved, wasted creature with parchment skin, and swollen joints.
MELINOE A spectral underworld demon who issued forth from the underworld to terrify men. One side of her body was ink-black and the other bone-white.
ZELUS (Zelos) The demon of jealousy was a monstrous hag that fed upon venomous serpents. Her body was shrunken, her teeth black, and her breasts covered in green venom.
DOG, GOLDEN (Kuon Khryseos) A golden hound which Rhea sent to guard the infant Zeus and his nurse the goat Amaltheia.
DOG, LAELAPS (Kuon Lailaps) A fabulous dog destined always to catch its mark.
DOG, ORTHROS (Kuon Orthros) A two-headed, serpent-tailed dog which guarded the cattle of Geryon. It was slain by Heracles.
DRACAENAE (Drakainai) Female-monsters with the head and torsos of women and serpentine-tails in place of legs.
CAMPE (Kampe) A monstrous Tartarean dracaena who had the body of a woman and a serpent's tail. Her head was wreathed in snakes and her serpentine body was arrayed with a thousand snake's tails for feet. She was armed with a giant scorpion's sting, black wings and around her waist were arrayed the heads of fifty wild beasts.
DRACAENA, POINE (Drakaina Poine) A monstrous child-devouring she-dragon sent by Apollo to punish the men of Argos.
DRACAENA, SCYTHIAN (Drakaina Skythia) A Scythian dracaena who seduced Heracles and bore him three sons.
ECHIDNA 1 (Ekhidna) An immortal Cicilian dracaena who mated with the monstrous giant Typhon and bore a brood of the most fearsome of monsters.
ECHIDNA 2 (Ekhidna) A monstrous she-serpent which ravaged Argos.
SYBARIS A Lamia demon which preyed on the men of Phocis.
DRAGONS (Drakones) A race of giant, toothed serpentine monsters.
DRAGON, COLCHIAN (Drakon Kolkhios) A gigantic Colchian dragon which guarded the famed golden-fleece.
DRAGON, HESPERIAN (Drakon Hesperia) A hundred headed dragon which guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides.
DRAGON, LYDIAN (Drakon Maionios) A Lydian dragon slain by the giant Damasen.
DRAGON, THEBAN (Drakon Ismenios) A monstrous Theban dragon slain by the hero Cadmus. From its earth-sown teeth were sprung a race of fully-grown, armed warriors.
DRAGON, THESPIAN (Drakon Thespiakos) A dragon which plagued the town of Thespia.
DRAGONS, MEDEAN (Drakones Medea) A pair of winged serpents which drew the chariot of the witch Medea.
DRAGONS, TROJAN (Drakones Troiades) A pair of monstrous sea-serpents sent by Poseidon to destroy Laocoon and his sons.
PYTHON A monstrous serpent that guarded the shrine of Delphi.
EAGLE, CAUCASIAN (Aetios Kaukasios) A gigantic Caucasian eagle which fed on the liver of the chained Titan Prometheus.
EAGLE, OF ZEUS (Aetos Dios) A gigantic golden eagle, the animal familiar of Zeus.
FISHES, OF APHRODITE (Ikhthyes) Two large fish which carried the goddess Aphrodite ashore following her sea-birth.
FOX, TEUMESSIAN (Alopex Teumesios) A gigantic fox which ravaged the kingdom of Thebes, preying upon the unfortunate children of the country.
GIANTS (Gigantes) A breed of oversized, mostly monstrous men.
AGRIUS & OREUS (Agrios, Oreios) A pair of man-eating Giants who were half man, half bear.
ALCYONEUS (Alkyoneus) The King of the Giants who was immortal within his homeland of Pallene. Herakles wounded him and dragged him incapacitated from his country to die.
ALOADAE (Aloidai) Twin giants who tried to storm Olympus by piling three mountains one upon the other. They were slain by the gods.
ANTAEUS (Antaios) A Libyan giant who drew his strength from the earth. He lifted and strangled to death by Heracles.
ARGUS PANOPTES (Argos Panoptes) A giant whose body was covered with eyes. He was slain by Hermes.
CACUS (Kakos) A fire-breathing Italian giant slain by Heracles.
CYCLOPES, ELDER (Kyklopes) Three one-eyed giants who forged the weapons of the gods.
CYCLOPES, YOUNGER (Kyklopes) A tribe of cannibalistic giants who shepherded flocks of sheep on the isle of Sicily.
DAMASEN A gigantic Lydian hero.
ECHIDNADES (Ekhidnades) A serpent-legged giant slain by Ares.
ENCELADUS (Enkelados) A fire-breathing giant burried by Athena beneath Mount Etna.
GEGENEES A tribe of six-armed Mysian giants which were slain by the Argonauts.
GERYON A winged giant three-bodied giant. He was slain by Heracles.
GIGANTES, HECA- The one hundred giants of Phlegra who waged war on the gods. They were led by Alcyoneus, Porphyrion and Enceladus.
HECATONCHEIRES (Hekatonkheires) Three hundred-handed, fifty-headed giants who guarded the gates of Tartarus.
HYPERBOREAN GIANTS (Gigantes Hyperboreioi) Three gigantic sons of Boreas the god of the North Wind who were immortal priests of the virtuous Hyperborean tribe.
LAESTRYGONES (Laistrygones) A race of man-eating giants.
ORION A handsome giant who could walk on water.
POLYPHEMUS (Polyphemos) The greatest of the younger Cyclopes. He was blinded by Odysseus.
TALUS (Talos) A bronze giant who patrolled the island of Crete.
TITYUS (Tityos) A giant who tried to rape the goddess Leto and was sent to eternal punishment in Hades.
TYPHON (Typhoeus) A monstrous giant with one human and ninety-nine animal heads, two hundred hands each tipped with fifty serpents, a pair of serpent tails for legs, giant wings, and a fire-breathing maw. He was buried beneath Mt Etna by Zeus.
GORGONS (Gorgones) Three monstrous Libyan sisters with broad faces, staring eyes, flaring nostrils, wiry beards, tusks and protruding tongues. Their heads were wreathed in snakes, a pair of golden wings sprung from their backs, and in place of hands they had brazen claws.
GRAEAE (Graiai) Three old hags born with grey hair, wrinkled skin and only one tooth and one eye between them.
GRIFFINS (Grypes) Winged beasts with the foreparts of eagles and the bodies of lions.
HARPIES (Harpyiai) Three winged monsters with the bodies of birds and the heads and torsos of women.
HIPPALEKTRYON (Hippalektryon) A creature with the fore-parts of the rooster and the body of a horse.
HIPPOCAMPI (Hippokampoi) Sea-creatures with the fore-parts of horses and the tails of serpentine fish.
HORSES, IMMORTAL (Hippoi Athanatoi) A breed of swift-footed, immortal horses.
ARION (Areion) The immortal horse of the hero Adrastus.
BALIUS & XANTHUS (Balios, Xanthos) Two immortal horses owned by the hero Achilles.
HORSES, OF ARES (Hippoi Areioi) Four fire-breathing horses which drew the chariot of Ares.
HORSES, OF DIOMEDES (Hippoi Diomedios) Four man-eating horses owned by the Thracian King Diomedes. Heracles was sent to fetch them as one of his twelve labours.
HORSES, TROJAN A herd of immortal horses owned by the kings of Troy.
HYDRA (Hydra) The nine-headed serpent of Lerna who sprung two heads for every one which was decapitated. It was slain by Heracles.
LEUCROCOTAE See Beasts, African
LION, NEMEAN (Leon Nemeios) A gigantic Argive lion whose skin was impervious to weapons. It was strangled by Heracles.
MANTICORE (Mantikhoras) A winged Persian monster with the head of a man, the body of a lion and a spiked missile-throwing tail.
MEN, EARTH-BORN (Anthropoi Autokhthonoi) Unusual men sometimes sprouted from the earth itself.
CECROPS (Kekrops) An earth-born king of Athens who had the tail of a serpent in place of legs.
SPARTI (Spartoi) A race of earth-born warriors, which sprang fully grown, armed and ready for battle from the sown teeth of a dragon.
MEDUSA (Medousa) A mortal Gorgon slain by Perseus.
MEN, FANTASTIC Races of strangely-formed men were believed to inhabit the farthest reaches of the earth.
ARIMASPIANS (Arimaspoi, Monommatoi) A tribe of one-eyed men who battled the eagle-headed Griffins for their gold.
ARTABATITAE (Artabatitai) An African tribe of four-legged men.
ASTOMI (Astomoi) A hair-covered Indian tribe of men without mouths, who sustained themselves on the scent of aromatic plants.
BLEMMYAE (Blemmyai, Sternophthalmoi) A tribe of headless African men whose faces were set upon their chests.
CALINGI (Kalingoi) A short-lived Indian tribe who reached maturity at five and died of old age at eight.
CHOROMANDAE (Khromandai) A hair-covered Indian tribe, with dog's teeth and a horrible scream in place of speech.
CUNOCEPHALI (Kunokephaloi, Hemikunes) A tribe of dog-headed African men.
GORGADES An African tribe whose women were entirely covered in hair.
HIPPOPODES A northern European tribe with horse's feet.
MACHLYES (Makhlyes) A Libyan tribe whose bodies were female on one side and male on the other.
MACROBI (Makroboi) Long-lived Indian tribes never touched by old age.
MACROCEPHALI (Makrokephaloi) A tribe of African men with long, elongated heads.
MANDI (Mandoi) A race of Indians who grew old and wrinkled shortly after birth.
NULI (Nuloi) An African people with backward-turned, eight-toed feet.
PANDAE (Pandai) A tribe of long-lived Indian men with gigantic ears, eight fingers and toes, and white-hair covering their bodies which turned black with age.
PANOTII (Panotioi) A fabulous tribe of northern men with gigantic, body-length ears.
PYGMIES (Pygmaioi) A tribe of one and a half foot tall African men who rode goats into battle against migrating cranes.
SCIAPODS (Skiapodes, Steganopodes) A tribe of one-legged Libyan men who used their gigantic foot as shade against the midday sun.
SCIRITAE (Sikiritai) An Indian race with snake-like nostrils in place of a nose, and bandy serpentine legs.
STRUTHOPODES (Strouthopodes) An Indian tribe whose men had 18 inch long feet and whose women had tiny sparrow-like ones.
SYRBOTAE (Syrbotai) A tribe of twelve-foot tall Africans.
MINOTAUR (Minotauros) A Cretan monster with the head of a bull and the hairy body of a man.
NEADES Gigantic animals native to the island of Samos whose roar could split apart the ground.
PANES A tribe of nature-spirits which had the heads and torsos of men, the legs and tails of goats, goatish faces and goat-horns.
AEGIPAN (Aigipan) A demi-god with the fore-parts of a goat and the tail of a fish.
PAN The goat-legged, horned god of shepherds and flocks.
PEGASUS (Pegasos) A winged horse tamed by the hero Bellerophon and ridden into battle with the Chimera.
PHASMA Ghosts or phantoms which haunted the living. Some were corporeal in form, retaining their physical bodies, others were merely bodiless spirits.
GHOST, PHILINNION A dead Macedonian woman who rose up from her tomb at night to haunt a handsome young guest of her parents. She was probably a lamia (vampire).
GHOST, POLYCRITUS (Polykritos) A dead man who rose up from his grave and devoured his living hermaphroditic son.
LAMIAE (Lamiai) Vampiric demons whichy preyed on young men in the guise of a beautiful woman and drank their blood.
LAMIA CORINTHIAN (Lamia Korinthia) A vampiric Lamia who disguised herself as a wealthy Phoenician woman in order to seduce a handsome young man and drain his blood.
LAMIA LIBYAN (Lamia Libys) A vampiric Libyan demon which preyed on children. She could pluck out her own bleeding eyes.
PHANTOMS, EIDOLONES Evil man-possessing spirits or ghosts.
PHANTOM, EPHESIAN PLAGUE (Eidos Loimos Ephesios) A plague-bringing demon that haunted the town of Ephesus.
TARAXIPPI (Taraxippoi) Horse-frightening ghosts or daemones which haunted the race-courses of Olympia, Nemea and the Isthmus.
PHOENIX (Phoinix) A fabulous golden-red bird whose feathers shone with the light of the sun.
PYGMIES See Men, fantastic
RAM, GOLDEN-FLEECED (Krios Khrysomallos) A flying, talking, golden-fleeced Ram who rescued the children Phrixus and Helle from a sacrifice to the gods.
RIVER GODS & DAEMONES (Theoi Daimones Potamoi) The river-gods appeared either as men from the chest upwards, set upon the serpentine tail of a fish and crowned with a single bull's horn, or as horned man-headed bulls.
ACHELOUS (Akheloios) An Aetolian river-god who was wrestled by Heracles.
OCEANUS (Okeanos) The god of the great earth-encircling river Ocean. He had the tail of a serpentine fish and a bull's horn on his head.
SATYRS (Satyroi) A tribe of nature-spirits with the body of men, the tails of horses, pug noses and the ears of asses.
MARSYAS A satyr defeated by Apollo in a musical contest.
SATYR, ETHIOPIAN (Satyros Aithiopikos) A phantom satyr which plagued an African town.
SATYR, LEMNIAN (Satyros Lemnios) A satyr which consorted with a woman of the island of Lemnos.
SILENI (Seilenoi) A race of elderly Satyrs with the bodies of old-men, pug-noses, the tails of horses, and asses' ears.
SILENUS (Seilenos) An elderly Satyr companion of Dionysus.
SCORPION (Skorpios) A giant scorpion sent by Gaea to slay the giant Orion.
SEA GODS & SEA DAEMONS (Daimones Einalioi, Theoi Einalioi) Many of sea-gods appeared as fish-tailed mermen, or were otherwise fabulous in form.
CHARYBDIS (Kharybdis) A sea daemon whose inhalations formed a deadly whirlpool.
DELPHIN (Delphin) An immortal dolphin attendant of Poseidon.
EURYNOME A mermaid-like sea-goddess with the tail of a fish in place of legs.
GLAUCUS (Glaukos) A blue-skinned, green-haired, fish-tailed sea-god.
NEREUS An elderly sea-god with the coiled tail of a fish in place of legs.
SCYLLA (Skylla) A monstrous sea-dracaena with the upper body of a beautiful nymphe, the serpentine-tail of a sea-monster and sprung from her waist a ring of six dog foreparts.
TELCHINES (Telkhines) Sea-demons with the heads of dogs and flippers of seals in place of hands.
TRITON A sea-god with either a single or a pair of serpentine fish-tails in place of legs.
TRITONES A race of sea daemones with the upper bodies of men and the tails of fish. Some were fearsome, scaly monsters with sharp carnivore teeth.
SEA MONSTERS (Ketea) A race of gigantic, serpentine sea-dragons.
SCOLOPENDRA (Skolopendra) A gargantuan sea-monster with hair extending from its nostrils, a flat crayfish-like tail and rows of webbed feet lining each of its flanks.
SEA MONSTER, ETHIOPIAN (Ketos Aithiopios) A sea-monster killed by Perseus.
SEA MONSTER, TROJAN (Ketos Troios) A sea-monster slain by Heracles.
SHEEP, GOLDEN (Melai Khryseoi) A flock of aggressive and highly poisonous, golden-fleeced sheep.
SIRENS (Seirenes) Three winged sea-monsters whose irresistable song lured sailors to their deaths. They had the heads (or heads and torsos) of women and the bodies of birds.
SPHINX A Theban monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lioness.
TURTLE, GIANT A giant turtle preyed on the men cast into the sea by the bandit Sciron.
UNICORNS Fabulous Indian horses with a single magical horn. The Greeks called them Monocerata (One-Horned) which the Romans translated as Unicorni.
|
Harpy
|
Which song was written by Arthur Sullivan in sorrow at the death of his brother?
|
SIRENS (Seirenes) - Half-Bird Women of Greek Mythology
Entwiner, Binder (seiraô)
Odysseus and the Sirens, Athenian red-figure stamnos C5th B.C., British Museum
THE SEIRENES (Sirens) were three monstrous sea-nymphs who lured sailors to their death with a bewitching song. They were formerly handmaidens of the goddess Persephone and when she was secretly abducted by Haides , Demeter gave them the bodies of birds to assist in the search. They eventually gave up and settled on the flowery island of Anthemoessa.
The Seirenes were encountered by the Argonauts who passed by unharmed with the help of the poet Orpheus who drowned out their music with song. Odysseus later sailed by, bound tightly to the mast, while his men blocked their ears with wax. The Seirenes were so distressed to see a man hear their song and still escape that they threw themselves into the sea and drowned.
The Seirenes were depicted as birds with either the heads or entire upper bodies of women. In mosaic art they were depicted with just bird legs.
FAMILY OF THE SIRENS
[1.1] AKHELOIOS & MELPOMENE (Apollodorus 1.18, 1.63, Lycophron 712, Hyginus Fabulae 141)
[1.2] AKHELOIOS & TERPSIKHORE (Apollonius Rhodius 4.892, Nonnus Dionysiaca 13.313)
[1.3] AKHELOIOS & STEROPE (Apollodorus 1.63)
[1.4] AKHELOIOS (Pausanias 9.34.3, Ovid Metamorphoses 14.85)
[2.1] GAIA (Euripides Helen 167)
NAMES
[1.1] THELXIOPE-THELXINOE, MOLPE, AGLAOPHONOS (Hesiod Catalogues Frag 47)
[1.2] THELXIEPEIA, PEISINOE, AGLAOPE (Apollodorus E7.18)
[1.3] THELXIEPEIA, PEISINOE, LIGEIA (Suidas 'Seirenas')
[2.1] PARTHENOPE, LEUKOESIA (Strabo 5.4.7 & 6.1.1)
[2.2] PARTHENOPE, LIGEIA, LEUKOSIA (Lycophron 712)
ENCYCLOPEDIA
SIRE′NES or SEIRE′NES (Seirênes), mythical beings who were believed to have the power of enchanting and charming, by their song, any one who heard them. When Odysseus, in his wanderings through the Mediterranean, came near the island on the lovely beach of which the Sirens were sitting, and endeavouring to allure him and his companions, he, on the advice of Circe, stuffed the ears of his companions with wax, and tied himself to the mast of his vessel, until he was so far off that he could no longer hear their song (Hom. Od. xii. 39, &c., 166, &c.). According to Homer, the island of the Sirens was situated between Aeaea and the rock of Scylla, near the south-western coast of Italy. Homer says nothing of their number, but later writers mention both their names and number some state that they were two, Aglaopheme and Thelxiepeia (Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1709); and others, that there were three, Peisinoë, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia (Tzetz. ad Lycoph. 712), or Parthenope, Ligeia, and Leucosia (Eustath. l. c. ; Strab. v. pp. 246, 252; Serv. ad Virg. Georg. iv. 562). They are called daughters of Phorcus (Plut. Sympos. ix. 14), of Achelous and Sterope (Apollod. i. 7. § 10), of Terpsichore (Apollon. Rhod. iv. 893), of Melpomene (Apollod. i. 3. § 4), of Calliope (Serv. ad Aen. v. 364), or of Gaea (Eurip. Hel. 168). Their place of abode is likewise different in the different traditions, for some place them on cape Pelorum others in the island of Anthemusa, and others again in the Sirenusian islands near Paestum, or in Capreae (Strab. i. p. 22; Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1709; Serv. l.c.). The Sirens are also connected with the legends about the Argonauts and the rape of Persephone. When the Argonauts, it is said. passed by the Sirens, the latter began to sing, but in vain, for Orpheus rivalled and surpassed them ; and as it had been decreed that they should live only till some one hearing their song should pass by unmoved, they threw themselves into the sea, and were metamorphosed into rocks. Some writers connected the self-destruction of the Sirens with the story of Orpheus and the Argonauts, and others With that of Odysseus (Strab. v. p. 252; Orph. Arg. 1284; Apollod. i. 9. § 25; Hygin. Fab. 141). Late poets represent them as provided with wings, which they are said to have received at their own request, in order to be able to search after Persephone (Ov. Met. v. 552), or as a punishment from Demeter for not having assisted Persephone (Hygin. l. c.), or from Aphrodite, because they wished to remain virgins (Eustath. l. c. ; Aelian, H. A. xvii. 23; Apollon. Rhod. iv. 896). Once, however, they allowed themselves to be prevailed upon by Hera to enter into a contest with the Muses, and being defeated, they were deprived of their wings (Paus. ix. 34. § 2; Eustath. ad Hom. p. 85). There was a temple of the Sirens near Surrentum, and the tomb of Parthenope was believed to be near Neapolis. (Strab. i. p. 23, v. p. 246.)
Achelo′is. A surname of the Sirens, the daughters of Achelous and a muse. (Ov. Met. v. 552, xiv. 87; Apollod. i. 7. § 10.)
Ligeia or Ligea (Ligeia), (Ligeia), i. e. the shrill sounding, occurs as the name of a seiren and of a nymph. (Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1709; Virg. Georg. iv. 336.)
Parthe′nope (Parthenopê). One of the Seirens (Schol. ad Hom. Od. xii. 39; Aristot. Mir. Ausc. 103.) At Naples her tomb was shown, and a torch race was held every year in her honour. (Strab. v. p. 246; Tzetz. ad Lyc. 732.)
Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
NAMES OF THE SIRENS
PARENTAGE & NAMES OF THE SIRENS
The Sirens, Athenian black-figure oinochoe C6th B.C., Callimanopoulos Collection
Hesiod, Catalogues of Women Fragment 47 (from Scholiast on Homer's Odyssey 12. 168) (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"He [Apollonius] followed Hesiod who thus names the island of the Seirenes (Sirens) : ‘To the island Anthemoessa (Flowery) which the son of Kronos (Cronus) [Zeus] gave them. And their names are Thelxiope or Thelxinoe, Molpe and Aglaophonos. Hence Hesiod said that they charmed even the Anemoi (Winds).’"
Euripides, Helen 167 (trans. Vellacott) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"Winged maidens, virgin daughters of Gaia (Gaea, the Earth), the Seirenes (Sirens)."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 18 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"[The Mousa (Muse)] Melpomene bore to Akheloios (Achelous) the Seirenes (Sirens), whom we shall discuss in the course of the tale of Odysseus."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 63 :
"They [King Porthaon and his wife Euryte of Aitolia (Aetolia)] also had a daughter Sterope, who was alleged to be the mother by Akheloios (Achelous) of the Seirenes (Sirens)."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca E7. 18 :
"The Seirenes (Sirens). They were the daughters of Akhelous (Achelous) and the Mousa (Muse) Melpomene, and their names were Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia."
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 892 (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
"Lovely Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), one of the Mousai (Muses), had borne them [Seirenes (Sirens)] to Akheloios (Achelous)."
Lycophron, Alexandra 712 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"The triple daughters [Seirenes (Sirens)] of Tethys' son [Akheloos (Achelous)], who imitated the strains of their melodious mother [Melpomene] . . . One of them . . . the bird goddess Parthenope. And Leukosia (Leucosia) . . . and Ligeia."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 141 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"The Sirenes (Sirens), daughter of the River Achelous and the Muse Melpomene."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13. 313 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"Lake Katana (Catana) [in Sicily] near the Seirenes (Sirens), whom rosy Terpsikhore (Terpsichore) brought forth by the stormy embraces of her bull-horned husband Akheloios."
Suidas s.v. Seirenas (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek Lexicon C10th A.D.) :
"The names of the Seirenes (Sirens) : Thelxiepeia, Peisinoe, Ligeia."
SIRENS HANDMAIDENS OF PERSEPHONE
Euripides, Helen 167 ff (trans. Vellacott) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[Helene of Troy speaks :] ‘Winged maidens, virgin daughters of Gaia (Gaea, Earth), the Seirenes (Sirens), may you come to my mourning with Libyan flute or pipe or lyre, tears to match my plaintive woes; grief for grief and mournful chant for chant, may Persephone send choirs of death in harmony with my lamentation, so that she may receive as thanks from me, in addition to my tears, a paean for the departed dead beneath her gloomy roof.’"
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 892 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
"Lovely Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), one of the Mousai (Muses), had borne them [Seirenes (Sirens)] to Akheloos (Achelous), and at one time they had been handmaids to Demeter's gallant Daughter [Persephone], before she was married, and sung to her in chorus. But now, half human and half bird in form, they spent their time watching for ships from a height that overlooked their excellent harbour; and many a traveller, reduced by them to skin and bones, had forfeited the happiness of reaching home."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 141 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"The Sirenes (Sirens), daughter of the River Achelous and the Muse Melpomene, wandering away after the rape of Proserpina [Persephone], came to the land of Apollo, and there were made flying creatures by the will of Ceres [Demeter] because they had not brought help to her daughter. It was predicted that they would live only until someone who heard their singing would pass by."
Ovid, Metamorphoses 5. 552 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"The Acheloides [Seirenes (Sirens)], why should it be that they have feathers now and feet of birds, though still a girl's fair face, the sweet-voiced Sirenes? Was it not because, when Proserpine [Persephone] was picking those spring flowers, they were her comrades there, and, when in vain they’d sought for her through all the lands, they prayed for wings to carry them across the waves, so that the seas should know their search, and found the gods gracious, and then suddenly saw golden plumage clothing all their limbs? Yet to reserve that dower of glorious song, their melodies' enchantment, they retained their fair girls' features and their human voice."
CONTEST OF THE SIRENS & MUSES
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 34. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"[At Koroneia (Coronea) in Boiotia (Boeotia)] is a sanctuary of Hera . . . in her [the statue's] hands she carried the Seirenes (Sirens). For the story goes that the daughters of Akheloios (Achelous) were persuaded by Hera to compete with the Mousai (Muses) in singing. The Mousai won, plucked out the Seirenes' feathers and made crowns for themselves out of them."
Odysseus and the Sirens, Greco-Roman mosaic from Dougga, Bardo National Museum
SIRENS & THE DEATH OF THE CENTAURS
Lycophron, Alexandra 648 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Others [Odysseus] shall wander . . . the narrow meet of the Tyrrhenian Strait and the watching-place fatal to the hybrid monsters [the Kentauroi (Centaurs)] . . . and the rocks of the harpy-limbed nightingales [Seirenes]."
Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History Book 6 (summary from Photius, Myriobiblon 190) (trans. Pearse) (Greek mythographer C1st to C2nd A.D.) :
"In the Alexandra which Lykophron (Lycophron) wrote : ‘What sterile nightingale killer of Kentauroi (Centaurs) . . .’, these are the Seirenes (Sirens) who he called killers of Kentauroi (Centaurs)."
Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History Book 5 (summary from Photius, Myriobiblon 190) :
"The Kentauroi (Centaurs) who fled from Herakles (Heracles) through Tyrsenia [in Italy] perished of hunger, ensnared by the soft song of the Seirenes (Sirens)."
SIRENS & THE VOYAGE OF THE ARGONAUTS
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 135 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"As they [the Argonauts] sailed past the Seirenes (Sirens), Orpheus kept the Argonauts in check by singing a song that offset the effect of the sisters' singing. The only one to swim off to them was Butes, whom Aphrodite snatched up and settled at Lilybaeum."
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 892 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
"Before long they [the Argonauts] sighted the beautiful island of Anthemoessa, where the clear-voiced Seirenes (Sirens), Akheloios' (Achelous') daughters, used to bewitch with their seductive melodies whatever sailors anchored there. Lovely Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), one of the Mousai (Muses), has borne them to Akheloios, and at one time they had been handmaids to Demeter’s gallant Daughter [Persephone], before she was married, and sung to her in chorus. But now, half human and half bird in form, they spent their time watching for ships from a height that overlooked their excellent harbour; and many a traveller, reduced by them to skin and bones, had forfeited the happiness of reaching home. The Seirenes, hoping to add the Argonauts to these, made haste to greet them with a liquid melody; and the young men would soon have cast their hawsers on the beach if Thrakian Orpheos (Orpheus) had not intervened. Raising his Bistonian lyre, he drew from it the lively tune of a fast-moving song, so as to din their ears with a medley of competing sounds. The girlish voices were defeated by the lure; and the set wind, aided by the sounding backwash from the shore, carried the ship off. The Seirenes’ song grew indistinct; yet even so there was one man, Boutes the noble son of Teleon, who was so enchanted by their sweet voices that before he could be stopped he leapt into the sea from his polished bench. The poor man swam through the dark swell making for the shore, and had he landed, they would soon have robbed him of all hope of reaching home. But Aphrodite, Queen of Eryx, had pity on him. She snatched him up while he was still battling with the surf; and having saved his life, she took him to her heart and found a home for him on the heights of Lilybaion."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 14 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Butes, son of Teleon, though diverted by the singing and lyre of Orpheus, nevertheless was overcome by the sweetness of the Sirens' song, and in an effort to swim to them threw himself into the sea. Venus [Aphrodite] saved him at Lilybaeum, as he was borne along by the waves."
Seneca, Medea 355 ff (trans. Miller) (Roman tragedy C1st A.D.) :
"[On the voyage of the Argonauts :] What, when the deadly pests [Seirenes (Sirens)] soothed the Ausonian sea with their tuneful songs, when, sounding back on his Pierian lyre, Thracian Orpheus well-nigh forced the Siren to follow, though wont to hold ships spell-bound by her song?"
SIRENS & THE VOYAGE OF ODYSSEUS
Odysseus and the Sirens, Paestan red-figure bell krater C4th B.C, Antikensammlung Berlin
Homer, Odyssey 12. 39 ff (trans. Shewring) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"[Kirke (Circe) warns Odysseus of the dangers of the journey ahead :] ‘You will come to the Seirenes (Sirens) first of all; they bewitch any mortal who approaches them. If a man in ignorance draws too close and catches their music, he will never return to fine wife and little children near him and to see their joy at his homecoming; the high clear tones of the Seirenes will bewitch him. They sit in a meadow; men's corpses lie heaped up all round them, mouldering upon the bones as the skin decays. You must row past there; you must stop the ears of all your crew with sweet wax that you have kneaded, so that none of the rest may hear the song. But if you yourself are bent on hearing, then give them orders to bind you both hand and foot as you stand upright against the mast-stay, with the rope-ends tied to the mast itself; thus you may hear the two Seirenes' voices and be enraptured. If you implore your crew and beg them to release you, then they must bind you fast with more bonds again. When your crew have rowed past the Seirenes . . . [you reach the Wandering Rocks and the straight of Skylla (Scylla) and Kharybdis (Charybdis)].’"
Homer, Odyssey 12. 200 ff :
"Then with heavy heart I [Odysseus] spoke to my comrades thus : ‘Friends it is not right that only one man, or only two, should know the divine decrees that Lady Kirke (Circe) has uttered to me. I will tell you of them, so that in full knowledge we may die or in full knowledge escape, it may be, from death and doom. Her first command was to shun the Seirenes (Sirens)--their enchanting notes, their flowery meadow. I alone was to hear their song, she said. You for your part must bind me with galling ropes as I stand upright against the mast-stay, with the rope-ends tied to the mast itself; then I shall stay there immovably. And if I beg and beseech you to set me free, you must bind me hard with more ropes again.’
Thus I told my comrades and made things plain, point by point. Meanwhile the trim ship sped swiftly on to the island of the Seirenes, wafted still be the favouring breeze. Then of a sudden the wind dropped and everything became hushed and still, because some divinity lulled the waters. My men stood up, furled the sails and stowed them in the ship's hold, then sat at the thwarts and made the sea white with their polished oars of fir. I myself, with my sharp sword, cut a great round of wax into little pieces and set about kneading them with all the strength I had. Under my mighty hands, and under the beams of the lordly sun-god [Helios] whose father is Hyperion, the wax quickly began to melt, and with it I sealed all my comrades' ears in turn. Then they bound me fast, hand and foot, with the rope-ends tied to the mast itself, then again sat down and dipped their oars in the whitening sea.
But them, the Seirenes (Sirens) saw the quick vessel near them and raised their voices in high clear notes : ‘Come hither, renowned Odysseus, hither, you pride and glory of all Akhaia (Achaea)! Pause with your ship; listen to our song. Never has nay man passed this way in his dark vessel and left unheard the honey-sweet music from our lips; first he has taken his delight, then gone on his way a wiser man. We know of all the sorrows in the wide land of Troy that Argives and Trojans bore because the gods would needs have it so; we know all things that come to pass on the fruitful earth.’
So they sang with their lovely voices, and my heart was eager to listen still. I twitched my brows to sign to the crew to let me go, but they leaned to their oars and rowed on; Eurylokhos (Eurylochus) and Perimedes quickly stood up and bound me with more ropes and with firmer hold. But when they had rowed well past the Seirenes--when music and words could be heard no more--my trusty comrades were quick to take out the wax that had sealed their ears, and to rescue and unbind myself. But the island was hardly left behind when I saw smoke above the heavy breakers and heard a great noise [the whirlpool of Kharybdis (Charybdis)]."
Homer, Odyssey 13. 322 ff :
"[Odysseus tells Penelope of his travels :] How he heard the Seirenes (Sirens) singing and came to the Wanderers, to grim Kharybdis (Charybdis) and to Skylla (Scylla)."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca E7. 18 - 19 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"[Odysseus] sailed past the island of the Seirenes (Sirens). They were the daughters of Akheloios (Achelous) and the Mousa (Muse) Melpomene, and their names were Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia. One played the cithara, the second sang, and the third played the flute, and in this manner they used to persuade passing sailors to remain with them. From the thighs down they had the shape of birds. As Odysseus sailed past, he wanted to hear their song, so, following Kirke's (Circe's) instructions, he plugged the ears of his comrades with wax, and had them tie him to the mast, When the Sierenes persuaded him to stay with them, he begged to be set free, but his men tied him even tighter, and thus he sailed past. An oracle had said that the Seirenes would die if a ship ever made it past them; and indeed they died."
Siren with cymbal (detail), Paestan red-figure bell krater C4th B.C, Antikensammlung Berlin
Lycophron, Alexandra 648 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Others [Odysseus] shall wander . . . the narrow meet of the Tyrrhenian Strait and the watching-place fatal to mariners of the hybrid monster [Skylla (Scylla)] . . . and the rocks of the harpy-limbed nightingales [Seirenes (Sirens)]."
Lycophron, Alexandra 668 ff :
"What Kharybdis (Charybdis) shall not eat of his [Odysseus'] dead? What half-maiden Fury-hound [Skylla (Scylla)]? What barren nightingale [Seiren (Siren)], slayer of the Kentauroi (Centaurs), Aitolis or Kouretis (Curetis), shall not with her varied melody tempt them to waste away through fasting from food?"
[N.B. The Kenaturoi who escaped Herakles were charmed by the song of the Seirenes and forgetting to eat all perished.]
Lycophron, Alexandra 712 ff :
"And he [Odysseus] shall slay the triple daughters [Seirenes (Sirens)] of Tethys' son [Akheloos (Achelous)], who imitated the strains of their melodious mother [Melpomene]: self-hurled from the cliff's top they dive with their wings into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the bitter thread spun by the Moirai (the Fates) shall draw them."
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1. 14d (trans. Gullick) (Greek rhetorician C2nd to C3rd A.D.) :
"The Seirens (Sirens) sing to Odysseus the things most likely to please him, reciting what would appeal to his ambition and knowledge. ‘For we know,’ say they, ‘all other things and all that shall befall upon the fruitful earth as well.’"
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 125 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"He [Odysseus] came to the Sirenes (Sirens), daughters of the Muse Melpomene and Achelous, women in the upper parts of their bodies but bird below. It was their fate to live only so long as mortals who heard their song failed to pass by. Ulysses [Odysseus], instructed by Circe, daughter of Sol [Helios the Sun], stopped up the ears of his comrades with wax, had himself bound to the wooden mast, and thus sailed by."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 141 :
"The Sirenes (Sirens), daughter of the River Achelous and the Muse Melpomene . . . It was predicted that they would live only until someone who heard their singing would pass by. Ulysses [Odysseus] proved fatal to them, for when by his cleverness he passed by the rocks where they dwelt, they threw themselves into the sea. This place is called Sirenides from them, and is between Sicily and Italy."
SIRENS & THE DEATH OF TELEMACHUS
Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History Book 7 (summary from Photius, Myriobiblon 190) (trans. Pearse) (Greek mythographer C1st to C2nd A.D.) :
"Telemakhos (Telemachus) was put to death by the Seirenes (Sirens) when they learned that he was the son of Odysseus."
SIRENS POETIC MISCELLANY
Alcman, Fragment 1 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (Greek lyric C7th B.C.) :
"She is of course not more melodious than the Serenides (Sirens), for they are goddesses."
Alcman, Fragment 30 :
"The Mosa (Muse) cries out, that clear-voiced Seren (Siren)."
Plato, Cratylus 403d (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"[Plato uses the Seirenes (Sirens) in a metaphor on the binding power of death :] He [Haides] binds with the desire which is the strongest of all, if he is to restrain them with the strongest bond . . . No one has been willing to come away from that other world, not even the Seirenes (Sirens), but they and all others have been overcome by his [death's] enchantments."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 21. 1 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"Down to the present day men are wont to liken to a Seiren (Siren) whatever is charming in both poetry and prose."
Aelian, On Animals 17. 23 (trans. Scholfield) (Greek natural history C2nd A.D.) :
"But for beauty and clarity of tone their [an Indian bird's] singing is unsurpassed; they might be, if the expression is not too strong, Seirenes (Sirens), for these fabled maidens as celebrated by poets and portrayed by artists had wings."
Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 2. 17. 12 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"[From a description of a painting of imaginary islands :] A parrot and a magpie in a woven cage sing like Seirenes (Sirens) on the island."
Ovid, Metamorphoses 14. 85 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"The fleet [of Aeneas] . . . cast off and left behind Hippotades' [Aiolos' (Aeolus')] domain, the smoking land of sulphur fumes, and the three Sirenes Acheloiades' (daughter of Achelous') rock."
Statius, Silvae 2. 1. 10 (trans. Mozley) (Roman poetry C1st A.D.) :
"The triple chant of the Sicilian maidens [Seirenes (Sirens)] wafted hither."
Statius, Silvae 5. 3. 82 :
"The Tyrrhenian winged maids [Seirenes' (Sirens')] chant to mariners from the fatal cliff."
Apuleius, The Golden Ass 5. 12 (trans. Walsh) (Roman novel C2nd A.D.) :
"Like Sireni (Sirens) they lean out over the crag, and make the rocks resound with the death-dealing cries!"
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 2. 10 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"When a sailor hears the Seiren's (Siren's) perfidious song, and bewitched by the melody, he is dragged to a self-chosen fate too soon; no longer he cleaves the waves, no longer he whitends the blue water with his oars unwetted now, but falling into the net of melodious Moira (Fate), he forgets to steer, quite happy, caring not for the seven starry Pleiades and the Bear’s circling course."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 22. 1 ff :
"Sang a melody of Sikelian (Sicilian) tune like the hymns which the minstrel Seirenes (Sirens) pour from their honeytongued throats."
Suidas s.v. Seirenas (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek Lexicon C10th A.D.) :
"Seirenes (Sirens) : Seirenes were women with lyric voices who, in bygone Greek myth, dwelled on a small island and so enticed passing sailors with their beautiful voices that crews steered in and perished there. From their chests up they had the form of sparrows, below they were women. Mythologers say that they were little birds with women's faces who beguiled sailors as they passed by, bewitching with lewd songs the hearing of those harkening to them. And the song of pleasure has no good consequence, only death. But the truth of the matter is this, that there are narrow straits in the sea created by certain mountains in which the compressed rush of water sends up a sort of melodious lilt; when those who sail by hear it, they trust their lives to the rushing water and perish, with crews and ships . . . Also in the Epigrams, ‘And that talking is sweeter than Seirenes.’ The names of the Seirenes : Thelxiepeia, Peisinoe, Ligeia; Anthemousa the island they inhabited."
Suidas s.v. Sereneion melos :
Decorative Siren, Apulian red-figure loutrophoros C4th B.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum
I. NAPLES (NEAPOLIS) Town in Campania (Kampania) (Southern Italy)
Lycophron, Alexandra 712 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"And he [Odysseus] shall slay the triple daughters [Seirenes (Sirens)] of Tethys' son [Akheloos (Achelous)], who imitated the strains of their melodious mother [Melpomene] : self-hurled from the cliff's top they dive with their wings into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the bitter thread spun by the Moirai (the Fates) shall draw them. One of them [Parthenope] washed ashore the tower of Phaleros shall receive, and Glanis wetting the earth with its streams. There the inhabitants shall build a tomb for the maiden and with libations and sacrifice of oxen shall yearly honour the bird goddess Parthenope. And Leukosia (Leucosia) shall be cast on the jutting strand of Enipeus and shall long haunt the rock that bears her name, where rapid Is and neighbouring Laris pour forth their waters. And Ligeia shall come ashore at Tereina spitting out the wave. And her shall sailormen bury on the stony beach nigh to the eddies of Okinaros (Ocinarus); and an ox-horned Ares shall lave her tomb with his streams, cleansing with his waters the foundation of her whose children were turned into birds. And there one day in honour of the first goddess [Parthenope] of the sisterhood shall the ruler of the navy of Popsops [historical Athenian admiral Diotimos] array for his mariners a torch-race, in obedience to an oracle, which one day the people of the Neapolitans shall celebrate."
Strabo, Geography 5. 4. 7 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"A monument of Parthenope, one of the Seirenes (Sirens), is pointed out in Neapolis [Naples in Italy], an in accordance with an oracle a gymnastic contest is celebrated there."
Strabo, Geography 5. 4. 8 :
"Surrenton [in Italy], a city of the Kampanoi (Campania), whence the Athenaion (Athenaeum, temple of Athena) juts forth into the sea, which some call the Cape of Seirenoussai (Sirenussae) (of the Sirens) . . . It is only a short voyage from here across to the island of Kaprea (Capri); and after doubling the cape you come to desert, rocky isles, which are the called the Seirenes (Sirens)."
Strabo, Geography 6. 1. 1 :
"Sailing out past the gulf [Poseidonian Gulf of Leukania in Italy], one comes to Leukosia (Leucosia), an island, from which it is only a short voyage across to the continent. The island is named after one of the Seirenes (Sirens), who was cast ashore here after the Seirenes had flung themselves, as the myth has it, into the depths of the sea [following their encounter with Odysseus]. In front of the island lies that promontory which is opposite the Seirenoussai (Sirenussae) and with them forms the Poseidonian Gulf."
Virgil, Georgics 4. 563 (trans. Fairclough) (Roman bucolic C1st B.C.) :
"I, Virgil, was nursed by sweet Parthenope [i.e. the town of Naples, where the Seiren (Siren) was worshipped], and rejoiced in the arts of inglorious ease."
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 3. 61 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"On the coast stands Neapolis (Naples) . . . [also] named Parthenope from the tomb of one of the Sirenes (Sirens)."
II. LEUCASIA (LEUKASIA) Island near Paestanum (Paistanon) (Southern Italy)
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 3. 85 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"[In southern Italy :] Opposite to the Bay of Paestanum is [the island of] Leucasia [la Licosa] after the Siren buried there."
ANCIENT GREEK & ROMAN ART
|
i don't know
|
Which Liverpool group was named after a John Wayne film?
|
JOHN MCNALLY - THE QUIET SEARCHER interviewed in 2000 by Ray Norris
HOME
JOHN MCNALLY - THE QUIET SEARCHER interviewed by Ray Norris
The hair that was once a reddish blond may now be a steely grey but there`s a full head of the stuff and the tight, wiry frame has barely acquired a pound or two over nearly four decades.
You`d find more fat on a butcher`s apron.
"I try to watch what I eat and I play five-a-side football ever Monday and Thursday when work allows it. It keeps the muscles in trim and gives me a chance to catch up with all the gossip from my old mates like Billy Kinsley and other musicians from Liverpool. It`s too easy to just indulge yourself while touring. Drink. Bad food. Lack of exercise. What you have to remember is that your health is important. And you also have to parade yourself on stage and you owe it to the people out front to look presentable."
As John talks it is quite apparent that this is someone who is not entirely at ease in the spotlight, preferring to take a back seat until the situation demands otherwise. A face that is quick to break into a boyish smile in the company of friends tenses up a tad when faced with the attention of the media. The eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. He has had a lifetime of such confrontation being an original in one of the most influential groups to emerge from the era known as Merseybeat and he is guarded when he speaks. He is well aware that the seemingly friendly interviewer often holds a lethal sword cleverly disguised as an innocent pen.
But 'original' is a moot point with McNally. To some it can signify any member who has appeared on one of their many hits. To others it is the four musicians who hit the charts with Sweets For My Sweet in the summer of `63. But he is at pains to point out that you can, if you wish, find a starting point much further back this.
"We really started out as a skiffle group way back in about 1959. We were all trying to learn guitar which had become popular through people like Lonnie Donegan and Elvis and then of course British pop stars like Tommy Steele. I had started to play on an old American instrument my brother, who was in the Merchant Navy, brought back from the States. I think I was fourteen and it was an old arch top jazz guitar called a Broadway.
At that time it was me and a couple of mates, Brian Dolan and Tony West. Tony played bass. He had just come out of the army being a bit older than us. Eventually they both decided they didn't really want to spend too much time in a group and they left. Mike Pender lived in the same road as me at that time and he played a bit so we started playing together. It was just about that time that Tony Jackson came in.
He was playing in a pub nearby and he not only had a bass guitar that he made himself but he had an amp as well, so he was in. In those days if you had an amp you could get in any group you wanted. Tony West is now a theatrical agent.
We had a drummer called Joe Kelly who was replaced by Norman McGarry but then but he left and that`s when we got Chris Curtis in the band. Mike had actually known him when they were at primary school together but they had lost touch for a while. We became a five piece when Johnny Sandon joined as lead singer. His mother had worked at a bakery with my mum and she suggested we became his backing group. He had a brilliant, deep country and western voice. A bit like Jack Scott. He was Billy Beck in those days, his real name. The Sandon part came from a pub of that name near Liverpool`s football ground. Someone thought Johnny Sandon and The Searchers sounded good and that`s how it stayed."
How come The Searchers? The fact that it was lifted directly from the title of the classic John Ford film and starring John Wayne is well documented. But perhaps fewer people know that the suggestion came from a short-term singer with the group in those pre-Sandon days who went by the illustrious name of Big Ron. Big Ron`s surname is lost in the mists of memory and time and he was last encountered in Glasgow in the late seventies. His successor Johnny Sandon seemed a permanent fixture with The Searchers until he was offered a chance to sing with the Remo Four which was a highly rated Liverpool group at that time.
"He decided the prospects were better with them so he left. He was wrong. Actually, for a short while, when Tony Jackson had joined, we were called Tony and The Searchers. Almost at the same time Sandon left we were offered the chance to go to Germany to play at the Star Club. Much to the horror of our parents we jacked in our jobs and off we went. That was the line-up that a lot of people would think of as original. It was the group that had the first run of hits. But then Frank Allen joined a year after Sweets for My Sweet; he played and sang on Walk In The Room so for that and the hits that followed he was also an original because Tony didn't play on those and there were quite a few more. What Have They Done To The Rain?, Goodbye My Love, He`s Got No Love, Bumble Bee, Take Me For What I`m Worth and others. All good records and important in the history of the group. You can't deny Frank his place in the success story."
Sadly, many years later and wracked with the regrets of missed opportunity Johnny Sandon committed suicide. He had failed as a singer and then failed as a comedian on the club circuit.
It is quite obvious that Frank and John work well together as a team. They have run the group themselves ever since the departure of Pender at the end of 1985. Frank is happy in the spotlight where he has found his niche as the front man while John copes with the day-to-day organisation and business side of the band. It is not a role many people would relish but John copes with it efficiently. His man-management skills are a natural asset that stands The Searchers in good stead. He knows when to encourage and when to admonish. He is also very aware of the delicate balance between being a boss and a companion in dealings with the road crew. In the end sentiment takes a back seat to practicality when the good of the band is at stake.
"Our guys are very good and handle everything without too much interference from us. They are efficient, easy to get along with and fun to have around. But I never allow myself to get too close. You never know when you are going to have to come down hard and be a boss. It`s very important to keep a distance. Frank finds that side of it a bit harder than me. He enjoys their company and hangs around with them as a friend much of the time. When we need someone to be 'Mister Nasty' he prefers to leave that to me and I`m happy about that."
The engagements undertaken by the band are gathered into some sort of order by their agent Alan Field but the duties of a manager are largely undertaken by John. At the outset of their fame it was a native Scouser who held the reins.
In the early years of the sixties the tough seaport of Liverpool, still suffering the austere conditions brought about by a long and traumatic war, had by some process of a natural osmosis acquired its own music scene. It came complete with a hierarchy of local stars and a network of small but atmospheric venues, in which they could play, compete and intermingle. In this city the term 'underground' was not necessary an apocryphal one. Sweaty cellars like The Cavern and The Iron Door were indeed below ground level. Small, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. Today`s health and safety regulations would never have allowed such places to exist but things were more relaxed then. People had suffered and they needed their fun. In the pampered world of today when the pockets of much of the nation`s youth burst with coin of the realm waiting to be spent on inconsequential luxuries and indulgences these venues would never be considered fun. Too crude. Too primitive. No hi-tech strobing lights or mind-numbing sound systems with brain battering sub-bass frequencies pounding relentlessly for the dance generation.
Certain groups were allied to certain clubs. The Beatles' home ground was The Cavern, to become the best known of all the `Pool`s rock clubs. The Swinging Blue Jeans, one of the city`s oldest and most revered outfits, were regulars at The Mardis Gras, while The Searchers could be found at The Iron Door. The manager there was a certain Les Ackerly who grabbed onto his fifteen minutes of fame by taking John, Mike, Tony and Chris under his wing and organising a home recording that was to be the key to world-wide acclaim for the band.
"The Iron Door was our regular venue in Liverpool. It was run by Les Ackerly and he became our first manager. He didn`t do the job particularly well but none of us knew too much in those days. He had a tape recorder and he recorded eight or nine songs including Sweets For My Sweet. I don`t know why he chose to send the tape to Tony Hatch but Hatchy liked it and we went down to London to make some real recordings at the PYE studios just around the corner from Marble Arch. I can`t remember much about that first session or exactly which songs we recorded but they included Maggie May, I`ll Be Missing You, Sweet Little Sixteen and of course Sweets For My Sweet.
They released Sweets as a single and at first it wasn`t doing anything.
We thought we`d missed out while everyone else from Merseyside seemed to be making it. What changed everything was an interview in which John Lennon said that it was the best single to come out of Liverpool. It took off and we had to buy our way out of our contract at The Star Club to fly home and promote it. It shot to Number One, helped by an appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars, and our whole world changed.
Later on, as we got bigger and bigger, Les Ackerly was edged out by Tito Burns who was our London agent. He was big in the business and for a while handled Cliff Richard. He also had Dusty Springfield who we toured with a lot in those days. But Tito didn`t actually become our manager till we started to slide in popularity. He was just an agent. As our success grew less his income from us got smaller and eventually he put emotional pressure on us to give him a management fee and we were too insecure to argue although we could well have done with the money ourselves at that time.
We had a stroke of luck when Tito was offered an executive position with London Weekend Television. I believe his appointment required him to relinquish any bits of his business that could be considered a conflict of interest. Therefore he was forced to end his management agreement with us which made us very happy because we weren`t any better off than we had been before in terms of bettering our position and we were paying extra for the privilege. It was a bit of a lifeline and gave us the chance to sort out our own future, which was none too secure at the time."
Maybe, I suggested, things might have been better if the rumoured take-over by Brian Epstein had materialised. "Quite possibly. Eppy often said that he regretted not signing The Searchers. He came to see us at The Cavern but Johnny Sandon had drunk a bit too much in The Grapes that night. In fact we`d all had a bit too much. We played badly and Sandon managed to pull out all the guitar leads. Brian passed. Although later on he did try to sign us again. It was all over the newspapers that, unknown to us, Epstein had bought the Searchers` contract from Tito Burns. We knew nothing about it till we read it in the papers. We got a telegram from Tito saying that it was untrue and that he wouldn`t sell us 'like a can of beans'. Knowing Tito I think it`s likely that he would have sold us like a can of cat meat if the deal was right.
I think we would have got more respect if Epstein had been handling us. Although there is the possibility that we would have been lost in his 'stable of stars'. They were all demanding his attention and jealous when one group appeared to get more of his time than another. And of course The Beatles took precedence over everyone."
Despite pioneering the rich, jangly and distinctive sound of the twelve string guitar and influencing a wealth of legendary talent, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and most notably The Byrds who only ever reluctantly dispensed any credit to The Searchers, their fortunes teetered and waned before a new wave of respect washed over them at the beginning of the 80s. Two fine albums for SIRE records gained much attention but without the sales on which to capitalise. But the band was slowly emerging from an undeserved limbo. Things were looking up. But when Pender announced his imminent departure towards the end of `85 their position looked very shaky indeed.
"It was a scary time. Mike was an original member and the lead singer. It could have killed us. Frank and I almost decided to call it a day but the sheer effrontery and arrogance of the way he had gone about it made us dig our heels in. You see it was all organised behind our backs. In fact I heard about it from a club owner and had to confront Mike. But it would take ages to go through all that and we still get angry about it. It would take ages to explain. The court cases, which we won.
Every one of them. The fight to make sure our show was better so that we would retain our position and be able to command the money we needed to keep things going. In fact at a time when we might have pulled in the reins and cut down on spending we invested money into equipment and lights to make sure we had a great product. It worked. Better than we could have imagined. But at the time it was a gamble.
We also instituted the Solid Silver Sixties tours with Flying Music and we played Wembley Stadium with Cliff Richard who became a great supporter and ally. We were suddenly a pretty big deal again. Australia re-emerged as a territory for us. So did the States where we started to play casinos in Connecticut and Atlantic City. But it all took a lot of effort and guts. It all culminated in the Millennium New Year`s Eve show at Birmingham`s NIA with Cliff. What a way to end a century".
The inclusion of Eddie Rothe on drums, which now relieves the now long time serving Spencer James as the 'new boy', has brought a much needed breath of fresh air it seems. "Ed is such an amiable guy, always smiling, always happy, that the atmosphere within the band is at an all time high. We have a good unit these days. It should have been a hard job for Spencer to fill the shoes of such an important member as Mike, but it was so much easier than we could ever have imagined. It brought about a whole new era whereby we have a bunch of new converts for whom Spencer is an original. They have just discovered us and so this is The Searchers they know. But he is such a likeable person with an amazing voice that it is to his credit that he has slotted in so well. And Ed and Frank seem to have bonded brilliantly on bass and drums. We had been having a few problems in that area for some time but it has all sorted itself out as soon as Ed joined. And at last we have that important extra harmony voice to thicken out the vocals. In fact things are going so well you start to wonder when it`s going to go wrong."
And the future? "Who knows. Those things are partly in your own hands and partly in the lap of the gods.
We have some great plans and these days we tend to map out the next year way ahead of time as much as we can. We have a short tour of Denmark in January. Australia is going to be a little later than usual this time - mid February to mid March. And then we take on our solo tour which is going to be a well promoted cohesive set of dates as opposed to the random all evening shows we have been doing for the past few years. About forty dates through April, May and June have been set at the moment. These will be concerts in which we cover the whole spectrum of our history, more or less. The A sides. The album tracks. B sides and rarities. Of course the big dramatic ballads that are always a high point of the shows. And odds and ends that are there just because we like playing them.
The summer run we have been doing for the last couple of years has been so successful that we will definitely keep that going. A different seaside town one night each week throughout the Summer. We`ll probably do three or four resorts each week. With any luck we should be able to get over to America for a few days. We`d like to spend longer but it is very difficult to organise. Not here actually but from that end. And then in the Autumn it looks like a major package tour. If we get our way it should be very intriguing indeed. But I`m not saying any more yet. We have our ideas and it is all being mulled over at the moment. We can never afford to be complacent so we want people to sit up and take notice. Groups don`t have the advantage of solo names. They have to fight for attention and recognition. We`ve had to do that all through our career and it`s a bit of a sore point. That would be a nice position to get to. Where our individual faces and names are instantly recognised by the general public. Its something to strive for."
John McNally was interviewed in 2000.
|
Searcher
|
In which year did Josef Stalin die?
|
John Wayne: 10 surprising facts
John Wayne: 10 surprising facts
John Wayne in True Grit Credit: Rex
Martin Chilton , Culture Editor
12 June 2015 • 5:00pm
John Wayne, who died on June 11 1979 aged 72, made 162 feature films, was one of the 20th-century's biggest Hollywood stars. Here are 10 things we learned about the Oscar-winning actor from an impressive biography by Scott Eyman.
John Wayne cheated at chess
John Wayne was actually very good at chess (film director and experienced player Josef von Sternberg "was livid" when beaten by Wayne) and the actor had a chessboard permanently set up on his 136ft boat, The Wild Goose. Wayne once said of fellow actor Rock Hudson: "Who the hell cares if he's queer? The man plays great chess." Wayne repeatedly cheated when playing chess against Robert Mitchum (Wayne had huge hands and would carefully slide a piece into a different position as he made a separate move) and Mitchum eventually plucked up the courage to tell him he was cheating. Wayne replied "I was wondering when you were going to say something. Set 'em up, we'll play again."
He loved literature
Wayne liked the novels of Agatha Christie but his two favourite books were written by Arthur Conan Doyle and both are historical novels – The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906) – both set during the Hundred Years' War. Wayne was also a fan of Charles Dickens and if the actor agreed to a business deal, he would always say "Barkis is willing!", a phrase used by Mr Barkis when he tells David Copperfield that he is ready to marry Peggotty.
Christopher Lee's 10 best roles
Just call him 'Mmm' or Duke but never Marion
Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison (on May 26, 1907) and earned the lifelong nickname Duke, after Big Duke, the family dog. Big Duke, an Airedale, would chase fire engines, and the firemen christened Wayne Liitle Duke, which was shortened to Duke. Wayne said: "The guy you see on the screen isn't really me. I'm Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. I'm one if his closest students. I have to be. I make a living out of him."
John Wayne in The Searchers Credit: Warner Bros/Anonymous
John Ford called him 'a poached egg'
Ford's four Academy Awards for Best Director (1935, 1940, 1941, 1952) are a record but he missed out in 1939 for Stagecoach. His behaviour on set angered Wayne, who said of the director "I was so f--king mad I wanted to kill him". Ford kept baiting Wayne during filming, yelling at one point: "Don't you know how to walk? You're as clumsy as a hippo. And stop slurring your dialogue and show some expression. You look like a poached egg." Privately Ford said of Wayne at the time: "He'll be the biggest star ever".
Like the best people, Wayne was once a sports journalist
Wayne was born in Iowa but went to the Glendale Union High School in California, where he played for the football team. Although he was seen as sporty, he also did well academically. He was part of the high school debating team and president of its Latin Society. He graduated with an average score of 94/100. He was also a member of its newspaper staff and wrote sports reports under byline 'M.M.M'.
He was a strange political beast
John Wayne was known for his right-wing views (he was scathing about actress Jane Fonda's anti-Vietnam war pronouncements) and was a fervent supporter of President Richard Nixon, insisting in 1972 that "Nixon is too great a man to be mixed up in anything like Watergate." But Wayne also liked debating politics with the actor Paul Newman, who would send him political essays written by progressive liberal thinkers.
The story of The Conqueror: the film so toxic it killed John Wayne
And deeply superstitious
Among the many things (normally wives) that made a volatile Wayne fly off the handle was the act of anyone leaving a hat on top of a bed. Also, no one in his family was ever allowed to pass salt directly to Wayne, it had to be placed on the table instead and then he would reach for it. He was not superstitious about his smoking, though, getting through five packets of cigarettes a day, something that brought him first a persistent hacking cough and later lung cancer.
John Wayne and James Stewart in The Shootist - 1976
But don't wet on his blue suede shoes
When he first met Michael Caine, Wayne gave him some friendly thespian advice. "Talk low, talk slow and don't say too f------ much". He then baffled the Brit by adding "and never wear suede shoes". When Caine asked "Why?", Wayne replied: "Because one day a guy in the next stall recognised me and turned towards me and said 'John Wayne you're my favourite actor! And p----d all over my suede shoes. So don't wear them when you're famous, kid."
Wayne was in awe of Churchill
Wayne would often tell friends how highly he thought of Winston Churchill and had a complete set of the British Prime Minister's prose on his bookself.
The Duke was a gracious winner
When he won his Best Actor Oscar for playing Rooster Cogburn in True Grit(1969), Wayne whispered in presenter Barbra Streisand's ear "beginner's luck". Wayne later spent the night drinking with Richard Burton (who had been nominated for playing King Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days), having knocked on the Welshman's door, thrust the Oscar statue at him and shouted: "You should have this, not me."
John Wayne, The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster, RRP £25) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £20 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Follow Telegraph Entertainment
|
i don't know
|
Which ship rescued most of the survivors of the 'Titanic'?
|
Titanic rescue ships | The Chronicle Herald
Rescuecarp1 (1 of 16)
The SS Carpathia with two Titanic lifeboats on its bow. The Carpathia was the only ship close enough to the Titanic at the time of its sinking to recover any survivors. In total, the SS Carpathia rescued 705 passengers and crew of the Titanic, taking them directly to New York, the original destination of Titanic. Used as a troop transport vessel during the First World War, in July 1918, the SS Carpathia was torpedoed by a German submarine and was sunk off the coast of Ireland. In 2000, it was announced that the wreckage of the SS Carpathia had been discovered. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The SS Carpathia with two Titanic lifeboats on its bow. The Carpathia was the only ship close enough to the Titanic at the time of its sinking to recover any survivors. In total, the SS Carpathia rescued 705 passengers and crew of the Titanic, taking them directly to New York, the original destination of Titanic. Used as a troop transport vessel during the First World War, in July 1918, the SS Carpathia was torpedoed by a German submarine and was sunk off the coast of Ireland. In 2000, it was announced that the wreckage of the SS Carpathia had been discovered. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Rescuecarp2 (2 of 16)
Survivors of the Titanic approach the Carpathia in this April 15, 1912 photo. (The New York Times)
Survivors of the Titanic approach the Carpathia in this April 15, 1912 photo. (The New York Times)
Rescuecarp3 (3 of 16)
This photo of Titanic survivors aboard the SS Carpathia was originally published in Halifax’s Evening Mail newspaper on April 26, 1912. The original cutline read: Photograph by Miss Bernice Palmer. A passenger aboard the Carpathia. – 'The woman on the right,' says Miss Palmer, 'Is a survivor of the Titanic, telling the story of her terrible experience to Carpathia passengers. All the way from the ice field to New York scenes like the above were frequent on our ship.' (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
This photo of Titanic survivors aboard the SS Carpathia was originally published in Halifax’s Evening Mail newspaper on April 26, 1912. The original cutline read: Photograph by Miss Bernice Palmer. A passenger aboard the Carpathia. – 'The woman on the right,' says Miss Palmer, 'Is a survivor of the Titanic, telling the story of her terrible experience to Carpathia passengers. All the way from the ice field to New York scenes like the above were frequent on our ship.' (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Rescuecarp4 (4 of 16)
A scene from aboard the SS Carpathia in the aftermath of the Titanic sinking. This photo shows some of the 705 rescued Titanic crew and passengers as they are transported to New York in April 1912. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
A scene from aboard the SS Carpathia in the aftermath of the Titanic sinking. This photo shows some of the 705 rescued Titanic crew and passengers as they are transported to New York in April 1912. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Rescuecarp5 (5 of 16)
Mrs. J.J. 'Molly' Brown presents a trophy cup award on May 29, 1912, to Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron, captain of the SS Carpathia, for his service in the rescue of Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Mrs. J.J. 'Molly' Brown presents a trophy cup award on May 29, 1912, to Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron, captain of the SS Carpathia, for his service in the rescue of Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Rescuecarp6 (6 of 16)
The officers of the SS Carpathia after the May 1912 award ceremony in which Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron was honoured for the SS Carpathia's efforts in the rescue of the RMS Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The officers of the SS Carpathia after the May 1912 award ceremony in which Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron was honoured for the SS Carpathia's efforts in the rescue of the RMS Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
MacKay1 (7 of 16)
The CS MacKay-Bennett was contracted by the White Star Line in the aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking to recover the bodies of the dead. Labelled by Halifax newspapers as the 'Death Ship', the MacKay-Bennett recovered 306 bodies from the icy waters of the Atlantic. The MacKay-Bennett, at 270 feet long and 40 feet wide, had been built in 1884 to maintain the 6,500 nautical miles of communication cables laid in the ocean between Europe and North America. The MacKay-Bennett was broken up in 1965. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
The CS MacKay-Bennett was contracted by the White Star Line in the aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking to recover the bodies of the dead. Labelled by Halifax newspapers as the 'Death Ship', the MacKay-Bennett recovered 306 bodies from the icy waters of the Atlantic. The MacKay-Bennett, at 270 feet long and 40 feet wide, had been built in 1884 to maintain the 6,500 nautical miles of communication cables laid in the ocean between Europe and North America. The MacKay-Bennett was broken up in 1965. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
mackay2 (8 of 16)
The MacKay-Bennett officers (pictured) and crew managed to recover 306 bodies from the Titanic site, 116 were buried at sea. The ship arrived in Halifax on April 29, 1912, with 190 bodies aboard. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The MacKay-Bennett officers (pictured) and crew managed to recover 306 bodies from the Titanic site, 116 were buried at sea. The ship arrived in Halifax on April 29, 1912, with 190 bodies aboard. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
mackay3 (9 of 16)
The body of John Jacob Astor IV (Body No. 124), was recovered by the MacKay-Bennett. This photo shows Astor's funeral in New York. Astor’s body had been given to the care of a Mr. N. Biddle and forwarded to New York on May 1, 1912. J.J. Astor was the richest person aboard Titanic. At the time of the sinking, his young wife, 19-year-old Madeleine Force, was pregnant, she gave birth to a son, John Jacob Astor VI, Aug. 14, 1912, exactly four months after the sinking of Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The body of John Jacob Astor IV (Body No. 124), was recovered by the MacKay-Bennett. This photo shows Astor's funeral in New York. Astor’s body had been given to the care of a Mr. N. Biddle and forwarded to New York on May 1, 1912. J.J. Astor was the richest person aboard Titanic. At the time of the sinking, his young wife, 19-year-old Madeleine Force, was pregnant, she gave birth to a son, John Jacob Astor VI, Aug. 14, 1912, exactly four months after the sinking of Titanic. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
minia1 (10 of 16)
The CS Minia was built in 1866 in Glasgow, Scotland. Used to lay telegraph cables in China and Panama, she was hired by the White Star Line to relieve the MacKay-Bennett. The Minia recovered 17 bodies, returning all to Halifax. She was broken up in 1922. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
The CS Minia was built in 1866 in Glasgow, Scotland. Used to lay telegraph cables in China and Panama, she was hired by the White Star Line to relieve the MacKay-Bennett. The Minia recovered 17 bodies, returning all to Halifax. She was broken up in 1922. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
minia2 (11 of 16)
A body of a Titanic victim is picked up at sea by an unidentified ship's whaler from the Minia. The most prominent figure recovered by the Minia was Charles Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Hays, who was an American, but lived in Montreal, was buried at Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal. Of the 35 first-class passengers recovered after the sinking, only two were buried in Halifax. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
A body of a Titanic victim is picked up at sea by an unidentified ship's whaler from the Minia. The most prominent figure recovered by the Minia was Charles Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Hays, who was an American, but lived in Montreal, was buried at Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal. Of the 35 first-class passengers recovered after the sinking, only two were buried in Halifax. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
minia3 (12 of 16)
The body of a Titanic victim aboard the Minia is being readied for a makeshift coffin. The body is in the process of being embalmed (the equipment is near the body; tubes are held by the embalmer). Like the MacKay-Bennett, a professional undertaker and minister accompanied the crew on their morbid mission. Rev. H.W. Cunningham of St. George’s Church was the assigned minister for the Minia. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
The body of a Titanic victim aboard the Minia is being readied for a makeshift coffin. The body is in the process of being embalmed (the equipment is near the body; tubes are held by the embalmer). Like the MacKay-Bennett, a professional undertaker and minister accompanied the crew on their morbid mission. Rev. H.W. Cunningham of St. George’s Church was the assigned minister for the Minia. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
minia4 (13 of 16)
The Minia arrived at Halifax on May 6, 1912, docking at the pier near the present jetty 4 in HMCS Dockyard. Hearses and additional coffins awaited the Minia and its cargo, ready to transfer Titanic victims to the makeshift morgue at the Mayflower Curling Rink. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
The Minia arrived at Halifax on May 6, 1912, docking at the pier near the present jetty 4 in HMCS Dockyard. Hearses and additional coffins awaited the Minia and its cargo, ready to transfer Titanic victims to the makeshift morgue at the Mayflower Curling Rink. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
montmagny (14 of 16)
CGS Montmagny was built by the Canadian government as a lighthouse supply and buoy tender. Her crew managed to recover four bodies, three of whom were brought to Halifax and buried here, the fourth was buried at sea. In September 1914, on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Montmagny sank after a collision with the collier Lingan, killing 14 people aboard, including 11 children. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
CGS Montmagny was built by the Canadian government as a lighthouse supply and buoy tender. Her crew managed to recover four bodies, three of whom were brought to Halifax and buried here, the fourth was buried at sea. In September 1914, on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Montmagny sank after a collision with the collier Lingan, killing 14 people aboard, including 11 children. (NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES)
Rescue (15 of 16)
Crowds gather around the bulletin board of the New York American, in New York City, where the names of people rescued from the Titanic are on display. (THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE)
Crowds gather around the bulletin board of the New York American, in New York City, where the names of people rescued from the Titanic are on display. (THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE)
Rescue2 (16 of 16)
A huge crowd gathers in front of the White Star Line office on New York City's Broadway, waiting for the latest news about the Titanic. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE)
A huge crowd gathers in front of the White Star Line office on New York City's Broadway, waiting for the latest news about the Titanic. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE)
In the wake of the sinking of the Titanic, four Canadian ships helped in the rescue efforts: the Carpathia, the Minia, the Montmagny and the MacKay-Bennett. The Minia and MacKay-Bennett were sent from Halifax, while the Montmagny dispatched from Sydney. Carpathia was sailing from New York City to Europe, when it received wireless messages about the disaster.
|
RMS Carpathia
|
Which is the largest rodent in the world?
|
RMS Carpathia Rescues Titanic Survivors
Contact
RMS Carpathia: The Ship That Saved 700 Titanic Survivors
Many are familiar with the RMS Titanic, a British transatlantic cruise line that struck an iceberg and sunk on its way to America. However, fewer people are aware of the story’s main hero — the RMS Carpathia. This cruise liner saved a large portion of the people who had escaped from the ship as she sank. Carpathia’s own history, of course, is also interesting.
RMS Carpathia: The Early Days
The RMS Carpathia began life in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. Built by Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, her launch was on the sixth of August 1902. Sea trials took place in 1903. It was only in May of 1903 that Carpathia began her maiden voyage. Since then, she serviced a wide number of different ports from New York City to the Mediterranean.
Carpathia To The Rescue
It was April 11 that the Titanic was furthest from the coast of Ireland. Already, the RMS Carpathia was heading for the Mediterranean. Four days later, news reached the ship that the Titanic was in trouble. This was received via the wireless operator, Harold Cottam, who worked on the ship. Captain Rostron was the one to turn the ship around and set a course for the Titanic’s last known location. Cottam had missed previous distress messages from the Titanic. He later received messages from Cape Race, Newfoundland, a ship that had intercepted traffic from the Titanic. After sending the Titanic a message that Cape Race had traffic available for them, it was then that they received their distress message.
After receiving the distress signal, Captain Arthur Henry Rostron began moving at the boat’s maximum speed, and through by shutting down all heating and hot water to non-essential areas of the boat, was able to achieve a speed of 17 knots, several knots beyond the rated maximum speed of the ship. Even at this speed, it took nearly 4 hours to reach the Titanic. However, the Titanic itself only stayed afloat for two hours and subsequently sank before the Carpathia even arrived. The ship worked through dangerous ice fields in order to save nearly 700 survivors who were in life boats in the surrounding water.
During the race to the Titanic, the crew of Carpathia were given instructions and forced to prepare for the arrival of around two thousand new passengers. What is interesting to note is that most of the passengers on the Carpathia were not informed of the disaster that was taking place. In spite of this, they were all incredibly accommodating to the new arrivals. Survivors of the Titanic stated that they had been received with the utmost kindness and sympathy by the passengers of the Carpathia. Food, toiletries and clothing were given to those who happened to need it.
After the disaster, the crew of the Carpathia was awarded medals by the survivors of the Titanic. Crew members received bronze medals, officers received silver and Captain Rostron earned both a gold medal and silver cup. He also was knighted by King George V and was also presented with a Congressional Gold Medal by President Taft for his courage and ability to save so many lives.
Life After the Titanic
The RMS Carpathia saw her final day when she set out from Boston en route to Liverpool. On the seventeenth of July 1918, an Imperial Germany Navy submarine torpedoed the ship. Several people were killed but as the ship sank, the Captain gave orders to abandon. There were fifty-seven passengers currently on board the Carpathia but over two hundred members of staff. Life boats managed to save all of them and they were brought to safety. However, the German Navy continued to torpedo the ship. Eventually she sank beneath the waves. According to Snowdrop, the ship that rescued the passengers, she sank at eleven in the morning near Fastnet.
|
i don't know
|
In which part of southern Afghanistan are most of the British troops deployed?
|
U.S. Troops To Take Over From British In Southern Afghanistan
U.S. Troops To Take Over From British In Southern Afghanistan
March 11, 2010
British soldiers take up positions during a major offensive in Helmand Province.
Share
Email to a Friend
Print
LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. soldiers will take over security from British troops in the Musa Qala area of southern Afghanistan as Washington builds up its force as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy, Britain said today.
The British government said the move was a first step in a "rebalancing" of forces in the southern province of Helmand to ensure NATO forces are fully effective in countering Taliban insurgents and protecting civilians.
Helmand is the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between U.S. and NATO forces and a resurgent Taliban.
About 500 British troops based in the Musa Qala district, in the northeast of the province, will move in the coming weeks to central Helmand, the most heavily populated part of the province where most British troops are already based.
There will be no change to Britain's overall force of around 9,500 troops in Afghanistan.
Twenty-three British troops have been killed in Musa Qala since British forces first deployed there in 2006. Control of the town of Musa Qala has passed back and forth between British forces and the Taliban in recent years.
U.S. President Barack Obama is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to seize insurgent-held areas before a planned 2011 troop drawdown.
The new strategy, designed by U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal, puts greater emphasis on securing Afghan population centers and on training Afghan security forces so that they can gradually assume control.
The arrival of U.S. reinforcements "allows us to rebalance all our forces to achieve much improved force densities in central Helmand delivering better protection of the Afghan people," Major General Nick Carter, the British commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, said in a statement.
The improving situation in Musa Qala and nearby Now Zad had also made the move possible, he said.
Further changes in how the forces are deployed were likely "in due course," the government said.
Mainly due to the U.S. surge, troop numbers in Helmand have risen from around 7,700 to more than 20,000 over the last year.
Britain's opposition Conservatives, favorites to win an election due within weeks, have said British troops in Helmand could be stretched too thin to conduct a successful counterinsurgency strategy.
British, U.S., Afghan and other troops last month launched a major offensive in the Marjah area of Helmand -- the biggest since U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.
The hotspot for British forces in Helmand in recent weeks has been the Sangin area in the east of the province, where six British soldiers were killed in the first week of March, bringing their total losses to 272 since 2001.
Related
|
Helmand Province
|
Which product was advertised as 'cleans and polishes in one go'?
|
Most New U.S. Forces for Afghanistan Will Be Sent to Taliban Stronghold in South - The New York Times
The New York Times
Asia Pacific |Most New U.S. Forces for Afghanistan Will Be Sent to Taliban Stronghold in South
Search
Continue reading the main story
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military official said Wednesday that the bulk of new combat forces approved by President Obama would be sent to southern Afghanistan, an area including Helmand and Kandahar Provinces that is the financial and spiritual base of the Taliban as well as the deadliest part of the country for American troops.
Two combat brigades, one from the Marines and one from the Army, will go to the south, while another Army brigade will be sent to eastern Afghanistan, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Army combat brigades usually comprise about 5,000 soldiers.
The flow of forces will begin “in earnest” next month, the official said, and a majority of troops will be deployed by next summer.
In Helmand, the new Marine brigade will nearly double the Marines’ 10,000-strong force. When these troops are combined with British forces, Helmand may end up with well over 20,000 troops, as many as were typically deployed in Baghdad. Helmand covers a far larger territory than Baghdad but has about one-fourth of the population.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The boost will give the Marines the troops they believe they need to attack Taliban sanctuaries that safeguard drug runners, bomb makers and fighters in Helmand, the official said.
Speaking to reporters at his headquarters in Kabul on Wednesday, the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal , said the new American deployment, along with expected NATO reinforcements, was “sufficient.”
Photo
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal briefed officers on Wednesday in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Credit Kevin Frayer/Associated Press
“I think that we’re going to have exactly what we need to move forward,” said the general, who had earlier sought a fourth brigade.
Excluding support units, about one-quarter of the new forces will serve as trainers for Afghan forces. The rest will be traditional combat units teamed with Afghan security forces.
The three new brigades will join the equivalent of what are now roughly five United States combat maneuver brigades and two training brigades, and bring the total number of American troops in Afghanistan to almost 100,000.
Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box.
Invalid email address. Please re-enter.
You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.
Sign Up
Privacy Policy
The biggest troop increase will be in Helmand, where Marines and British troops are battling insurgents skilled at using fertilizer and diesel fuel to manufacture bombs that tear apart armored vehicles. Almost one of three NATO and American fatalities this year was in Helmand.
The huge increase in troops there also underscores the difficulty of the counterinsurgency battle compared to Iraq. The population in Helmand is spread out over wide, and often rugged, geographic regions, compared with Iraq’s more urban populace.
Much of Helmand Province, which is the size of West Virginia, is a moonscape of dust and hardened clay baked by 130-degree summer heat. But it is bisected by a ribbon of lush and arable land that produces a majority of Afghanistan’s opium — and a good deal of the Taliban’s operating budget.
In interviews in Helmand this summer, Marine officers said they did not have anywhere near the troops needed to seize sanctuaries where Taliban fighters fled after the Marine offensive. Those include Baramcha, a major smuggling hub on the Pakistani border, and Marja, which is believed to harbor perhaps a thousand members of the Taliban.
A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2009, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Most New U.S. Forces for Afghanistan Will Be Sent to Taliban Stronghold in South. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe
|
i don't know
|
Who became a monarch after the death of Henry VIII?
|
BBC History - Henry VIII
Henry VIII
Henry VIII
Henry VIII is one of the most famous kings in English history. He was the second Tudor monarch and was well-known for having six wives. His break with the papacy in Rome established the Church of England and began the Reformation.
Image: Henry VIII (1491–1547) by Hans Holbein the younger (Getty Images)
More information about: Henry VIII
Henry, the second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. After the death of his elder brother Arthur in 1502, Henry became heir to the English throne.
King of England
When Henry VII died in 1509, this popular eighteen-year-old prince, known for his love of hunting and dancing, became King Henry VIII. Soon after he obtained the papal dispensation required to allow him to marry his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
In the first years of his reign Henry VIII effectively relied on Thomas Wolsey to rule for him, and by 1515 Henry had elevated him to the highest role in government: Lord Chancellor.
In 1521 Pope Leo X conferred the title of Defender of the Faith on Henry for his book 'Assertio Septem Sacramentorum', which affirmed the supremacy of the Pope in the face of the reforming ideals of the German theologian, Martin Luther.
Military might
Henry VIII's early military campaigns began when he joined Pope Julius II's Holy League against France in 1511. Wolsey proved himself to be an outstanding minister in his organisation of the first French campaign and while the Scots saw this war as an opportunity to invade England, they were defeated at Flodden in 1513. However war with France ultimately proved expensive and unsuccessful.
Henry VIII is known as the 'father of the Royal Navy.' When he became king there were five royal warships. By his death he had built up a navy of around 50 ships. He refitted several vessels with the latest guns including the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.
Henry also built the first naval dock in Britain at Portsmouth and in 1546 he established the Navy Board. This set up the administrative machinery for the control of the fleet.
A male heir
Henry was acutely aware of the importance of securing a male heir during his reign. He was worried that he had only one surviving child, Mary, to show for his marriage to Catherine, who was now in her 40s. So the king asked Cardinal Wolsey to appeal to Pope Clement VII for an annulment and it soon became clear he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, who had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife.
But, unwilling to anger Catherine of Aragon's nephew – the most powerful ruler in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – the Pope refused. Thomas Wolsey's ascendancy was cut short by this failure.
In 1533, Henry VIII broke with the church and married the now pregnant Anne Boleyn in a secret ceremony. Henry was excommunicated by the Pope. The English reformation had begun.
Head of the Church
After Wolsey's downfall, Thomas Cromwell became Henry's chief minister and earned the confidence of the King by helping him to break with Rome and establish Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. This act also brought him much needed wealth through the dissolution of the well-funded monasteries. Over four years Cromwell ordered that 800 monasteries be disbanded and their lands and treasures taken for the crown.
The cultural and social impact was significant, as much of the land was sold to the gentry and churches and monasteries were gutted and destroyed. Henry's personal religious beliefs remained Catholic, despite the growing number of people at court and in the nation who had adopted Protestantism.
Anne Boleyn
In September 1533 Anne gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth I). Henry had grown tired of her, and after two further pregnancies ended in miscarriages, she was arrested in 1536 on trumped up charges of adultery and publicly beheaded at the Tower of London.
Henry's third marriage, this time to lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, finally produced the son he so desperately desired with the birth of Edward in 1537. Jane Seymour died after childbirth and Henry ordered that she be granted a queen's funeral.
In an attempt to establish ties with the German Protestant alliance, Thomas Cromwell arranged a marriage between the king and German princess Anne of Cleves. The marriage was a disaster and Henry divorced Anne a few months later. Henry blamed Cromwell for this mismatch and soon afterwards had him executed for treason.
Final Years
The final years of his reign witnessed Henry VIII's physical decline and an increasing desire to appear all-powerful. Henry continued with fruitless and expensive campaigns against Scotland and France.
In 1540, the aging King married the teenage Catherine Howard. Their marriage was short lived. It was alleged that she had a previous relationship with Henry's courtier Francis Dereham and an affair with another courtier Thomas Culpeper. Catherine was executed for adultery and treason in 1542.
Henry's final marriage to Catherine Parr, who acted like a nurse, was more harmonious and she would go on to outlive him.
Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547 and was succeeded by his son, Edward VI. He was buried next to Jane Seymour in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.
|
Edward VI of England
|
Which country was the first to win football's African Nations Cup?
|
Henry VIII: An Image of Monarchy | The Tudors
You are here: Home › AS/A2 Level › Henry VIII: An Image of Monarchy
Henry VIII: An Image of Monarchy
Those of you who have visited the Van Dyck Exhibition will know why it is said that in the reign of Charles I, connoisseurship was the highest compliment that power can pay to art.
I don’t think this is really so in the reign of Henry VIII. Henry VIII has an instantly recognizable image. An image that modern public relations consultants would call a ‘brand’. It is so powerful, that it has become an icon of the British Monarchy itself.
But it was not always so, and the fact that it became so had little to do with connoisseurship. There was a connoisseur in the reign of Henry VIII: his name was Thomas More. I will say more about him later.
In the early years of Henry VIII’s reign, there were two related sets of values that defined the image of the monarchy: chivalry and magnificence.
1. Chivalry
Henry VIII began and ended his reign with a series of ruinous military campaigns in France and Scotland. The Court was infused by martial and chivalric values which were one of principal’s mainsprings of aristocracy. Henry VIII’s wars: (1) Battle of the Spurs (1513); (2) Paris (1523); (3) Boulogne (1544).
The King exploited his role as the leader of the chivalric élite. The Tudors grasped the possibilities of chivalrous propaganda, wooing and overawing their subjects with the magnificence of tournaments and displays of knightly prowess.
Revival of the 100 Years War: this was ‘policy’. The nobility loved it and profited from it. The rise of the early-modern state is also closely related to the harnessing of men, supplies and taxation for war. Henry VIII saw himself as Henry V, a strong, active and charismatic King, unlike Henry VI: the wimp who prayed, founded Eton and King’s College Cambridge, and wandered through the streets of London in an old blue coat because he had nothing better to wear.
Martial values closely linked to feudal values: military conscription is feudal in this period and claims to territory (e.g. Scotland) in the British Isles justified on feudal grounds. A feudal lord has dominium, but if you have dominium you also have jus. And if you have enough jus, you have an imperial claim. You have a (territorial) imperium: it was held in the Middle Ages that the sum of the King’s feudal rights amounted to a right of ‘empire’. These rights were represented symbolically by the arched or ‘imperial’ Crown. By 1500 the shift from the medieval doctrine of ‘suzerainty’ to the early-modern theory of ‘sovereignty’ was under way. In England the royal supremacy and Reformation statutes accelerated a process which had already begun. Feudal and ‘imperial’ vocabulary worked in apposition, not in opposition. The classic instance is the Statute of Uses (1536): Henry VIII’s attempt to re-endow his ‘imperial’ Crown by the revival of a feudal tax. Similar ambiguities characterized the rise of the dynastic states in Europe. The occupation of Tournai between 1513 and 1519 represented Henry VIII’s earliest vision of a territorial empire. Not same as royal supremacy, but a stage on the road to it…..
2. Magnificence
Royal and aristocratic culture stressed the importance of princely ‘magnificence’ and display.
This followed the Secreta Secretorum: pseudo-Aristotelian hotch-potch given to kings on their coronations (see BL). Aristotle tells Alexander the Great: ‘It sitteth to his dignity honourably to be clothed, and ever in fair garments and robes passing other in fairness. And he should wear dear, rich and strange ornaments. Fitting also it is for a King to have a prerogative in his array above all others, whereby his dignity is worshipped and made fair, his power or might not hurt, and due reverence to him at all times given.
Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King’ Bench in the reign of Henry VI, writing in the 1460s and early 1470s, developed this theme in The Governance of England. In addition to dressing splendidly, the monarch should construct new palaces, furnish them lavishly, ensure that his ambassadors were sent abroad properly equipped, and that foreign ambassadors visiting England were suitably received and entertained. If the king could not manage this, then, said Fortescue, he lived not according to his princely status, ‘but rather in misery, and in more subjection than doth a private person’.
A key model for the functioning of the royal household is King Solomon, the ‘exemplar of householding’, who astonished the Queen of Sheba by the abundance of his table, by the order within which his magnificence was manifested and by the splendour and quality of those who served him. Solomon became the ideal for the Black Book of the Household, the Guide Michelin or Egon Ronay guide to how to run a royal court with three red rosettes and the star for a visual panorama. Magnificence was obligatory for effective Kingship, so was the ritual display of that magnificence. The Queen of Sheba had been particularly impressed to see nobles who in her own land would have ranked among Kings, acting as servants at the table of the King. And the culture of noble service at Court which is a hallmark of the governments of the Yorkists and Tudors, is another milestone in the subordination of the magnates to the power of the Crown that Lawrence Stone famously called ‘the Crisis of the Aristocracy’. I will return to Solomon later.
The Court of Henry VIII became the focus for both ritualized demonstrations of chivalry (tournaments and Court entertainments) and magnificence. The monarchy of Henry VIII was a personal monarchy centred on the Court and bolstered by the rituals and values conventionally deployed in the Renaissance to achieve the ‘imagination’ of majesty. A change was that under Henry and Wolsey, Renaissance artistic and architectural values permeated the Court circle in a significant way. Wolsey first commissioned Benedetto da Rovezzano to construct his tomb and design the high altar of Cardinal’s College, Oxford.
Wolsey took a critical interest in the preparations for the Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), where the English temporary palace was marked by its classical embellishment (and fountains of wine!). In 1527, in readiness for the entertainment of the ambassadors sent to finalize the terms of the treaty of Amiens, a spectacular banqueting house and theatre were constructed next to the tiltyard at Greenwich. At the heart of the banqueting house was a gilded triumphal arch on the back of which Hans Holbein the Younger, newly arrived in England, had painted a reconstruction of the Battle of the Spurs. The theatre was surmounted by a spectacular canvas ceiling, also by Holbein, which showed the planets in human form in their ‘houses’ as well as the stars and signs of the zodiac.
Henry VIII built on a massive scale, drawing in the last years of his reign on the proceeds of the dissolved religious houses. When he died in January 1547 he possessed over sixty houses the furnishings of which included over two thousand pieces of tapestry, over a hundred and fifty panel paintings and over two thousand items of plate.
But chivalry and ‘magnificence’ or even Renaissance artistic ideals are NOT a ‘brand’: nor is the Court itself distinctive except in the scale of its sumptuousness and hospitality. These are just aristocratic values in general.
The big change came with Henry VIII’s divorce, which also coincides with his approaching middle age, and cessation of his personal participation in the tournament.
3. Divorce and Royal Supremacy
A novel and comprehensive theory of monarchy was announced by the Acts of Appeals and Supremacy. The catalyst was the first divorce campaign of 1527-33, when Henry VIII annexed the language of ‘imperial’ kingship in order to break with Rome and declare his supremacy over the English church.
A clear line of argument had emerged on the divorce by the autumn of 1527, when Thomas More returned from Amiens and the ratification of the Anglo-French treaty. These were:
the ‘Levitical’ injunction was divine law which no pope could dispense;
sexual relations with a brother’s widow were an unnatural act which was also forbidden by the church. Such unions were forbidden and would be childless (= male childless according to Henry VIII).
A new project was started in parallel with the old: this culminated in the Collectanea satis copiosa, which was first presented to Henry VIII in the autumn of 1530 and annotated by the king in forty-eight places. 3 principles:
Secular ‘imperium’
spiritual supremacy = ecclesiastical ‘imperium’
provincial autonomy of the Church of England.
In other words: the kings of England from the second century AD had enjoyed secular imperium and spiritual supremacy over their kingdom and national church; and the English church was an autonomous province of the Catholic church independent from Rome and the papacy (i.e not schism). Bracton was glossed to say ‘king is under God but not the law, because the king makes the law’.
4. Role of regal (theocratic) prototypes
Henry VIII’s regal prototypes were the Kings of Israel and the Christian Roman emperors, who wielded authority over clergy and laity alike, and ordered every aspect of the church’s external life. (NB The models in the Collectanea were David and Solomon, Constantine and Justinian.)
There was a debate over whether or not the kings of Israel had been able to define the articles of faith. Henry VIII certainly thought at the very least he could preside over the compilation of doctrinal formularies. NB 1531, Henry claimed the ‘cure of souls’ as integral to royal supremacy – cf. Hobbes.
It was this theory which Cromwell implemented in the Acts of Appeals (1533) and Supremacy (1534). He was responsible for the practical implementation, but not the theory itself. Henry’s political theology was proclaimed in the preamble to the Act of Appeals (1533): ‘Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience; [the king] being also institute and furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with plenary, whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction …’
Henry VIII defined his prerogative in terms of his imperium. He argued, first, that the kings of England from the second century AD had enjoyed secular imperium and spiritual supremacy over their kingdom and national church; and, second, that the English church was an autonomous province of the Catholic church independent from Rome and the papacy. The Act of Supremacy proclaimed the king’s new style in 1534. Moreover, the role of Parliament should not be misinterpreted. The Tudor supremacy was never equivalent to a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. It was modelled on the prototypes of ancient Israel and the late-Roman empire: the Crown assumed full responsibility for the doctrine and ordering of the church. It was not for nothing that Henry VIII’s favourite kings were David and Solomon, and that he could quote verbatim from the Old Testament and Code and Institutes of Justinian.
So the King is God’s ‘vicar’ or immediate deputy on earth. He is Supreme Head of Earth of the Church of England. Henry VIII is an ‘imperial’ King. His power is ‘entire’ and ‘complete’.
Henry VIII had largely orthodox views on sacraments (cf. Act of Six Articles), apart perhaps from baptism and auricular confession. The focus was on Bible as the Word of God, i.e. ‘efficacious Word’ which is itself a sacrament and doesn’t need the clergy to mediate or work a miracle. Overall, Henry wants Catholic doctrine BUT without a mediating clergy. Therefore, although Catholic, he is against cults of saints, intercessions to saints and therefore images and pilgrimages for the people at large (not chapels royal – Henry VIII is not misled since he stands directly beneath God).
Cromwell, Henry’s second minister and vicegerent in spirituals, who had succeeded as minister Wolsey by the spring of 1532, wants Bible, but wants it as the supreme authority by which the church and clergy should be judged. Wants abolition of superstition. Against oral tradition: the church should be judged by scripture, not vice-versa. NB Cromwell is ‘reformed’ on issue of authority, but he did not deny real presence in the Eucharist nor teach ‘justification by faith alone’. Still, his emphasis on faith, the Bible, and preaching put him in the ‘reformed’ camp. Best term is evangelical.
No problem at first, because both Henry and Cromwell want the English Bible, but for different reasons:
Great Bible, 1539, repr. 1540. In every church by the death of Henry VIII. But there are earlier ones:
Coverdale’s (1535, 5 editions or reissues by 1539)
Matthew Bible (1537)
Bible by Richard Taverner (1539): short print run
5. Impact of the new regal prototypes
Henry VIII’s new understanding of the theory of kingship made an immediate impact on the mise-en-scène of Court ceremonial. Whereas before the Act of Supremacy the emphasis was on chivalric displays – ‘disguising’, ‘maskings’, interludes, dances, tournaments and other sports staged at each of the traditional festivals – after 1534 Henry jettisoned such spectacles in favour of his anti-papal campaign (and mainly classical images). It has been said that in 1533-4 ‘the Renaissance prince’ was transformed into the ‘Reformation patriarch’. A new iconography of kingship was required for which the gold standard was set by Holbein.
Holbein’s engraved title-page to Coverdale’s Bible in 1535 showed Henry VIII enthroned in State at the foot of the page, handing the scriptures to three mitred bishops. The page is decorated by a series of Old and New Testament models for sacred Kingship: Esdras reading the Law to the Jews, Christ sending the Apostles into the world, and Peter preaching to the Jews after Pentecost. Henry VIII is flanked on the left by King David, representing the icon of theocractic kingship, and on the right by St Paul, representing the ‘freedom’ in Christ promised in Scripture (e.g. Acts of the Apostle) as against the tyranny of Rome and the papacy.
In Cromwell’s Great Bible of 1539 Henry was depicted at the top of the page with the Word of God in each hand, almost like Christ himself (Henry is ‘vicar of Christ’) dispensing the ‘efficacious Word’. He gives a copy to Cranmer and one to Cromwell, and the Word is passed down the line to his subjects, who loyally cry ‘Vivat rex’ and ‘God save the king’. By the end of the reign there was a copy of this Bible in almost all the 9000 parishes churches: in this way was the King’s image as God’s deputy on earth disseminated in the country.
Further insights into Henry VIII’s perception of his image can be derived from his personal psalter, where the use of David as a prototype for the first Supreme Head of the Church of England is most clearly worked out:
David had been the first convincing king of Israel, and was recognized in the sixteenth century as the leading prototype of the theocratic model of kingship. (Francis I also had himself represented as David, and Philip II as Solomon).
David had been a famous warrior. He had slain Goliath and routed the Philistines (i.e. Not only had Henry VIII defeated the French (in his opinion!), but he had confounded the pope and the enemies of the God’s Word).
David had restored the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and planned the building of the Temple (i.e. founded the Church of England) which was carried out by Solomon, his son;
David was an author (he was reputed to have composed the Psalms; Henry VIII had written the Defence of the Seven Sacraments [1521] winning the title defensor fidei from the pope; also ‘king’s books’). David was a musician (he had played the lyre; Henry VIII played the lute and composed a number of instrumental and choral pieces);
David showed magnanimity to his enemies (Henry VIII believed he did so too!);
In the Hebrew tradition, David was the king whose house and dominion were to stand for ever. He had delivered his nation from tyranny (i.e. the pope and popish clergy), and the re-establishment of the full sovereignty of the ‘house of David’ was to be accomplished through a future prince of that house (i.e. Edward VI!);
David had attacked false worship and idols (i.e. in Henry’s case by means of the Ten Articles, dissolution of the monasteries and attacks on pilgrimages and purgatory);
David had sinned: e.g. Bathsheba, Uriah (NB Henry emphatically did not like to be reminded of this, but his subjects understood the comparison very well).
Henry’s psalter began with Psalm 1: ‘Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly nor stand in the way of sinners … his delight is in the law of the Lord’. To this Henry added the marginal annotation, ”Note who is blessed’. And the nearby illustration shows the royal bedroom, with a king meditating on a book; a king who is both an Old Testament theocrat and a Tudor monarch and supreme head, clad in the clothes worn by Henry VIII!
The illustration to Psalm 27 depicts Henry VIII as David slaying Goliath. That to Psalm 53 depicts Henry VIII playing the lyre in the guise of David. It also portrays the king’s fool, Will Somers, who stands at the king’s left and provides the link with the text: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God”.
By the 1540s Henry no longer thought of David and Solomon as analogues for his monarchy. He was David or Solomon. They were the ideals of his own model of Kingship. And they were fundamental to the BRAND.
The chief architect of the ‘brand’ was Holbein. His classic statement of Henry VIII’s monarchy is the dynastic fresco at Whitehall = family portrait of the Tudors. The Whitehall mural was intended to convey the ‘real presence’ of the Supreme Head of the Church in his dynastic setting. The mural was a display of charismatic power: those who viewed it said it left them feeling ‘abashed and annihilated’. It stuck terror into those who penetrated the Privy Chamber 40 years after the King’s death. The King acquired a supernatural presence. The mural was destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1698, but the composition is known from the Holbein cartoon of the left hand side and from copies of the frescoes made for Charles II. The legend which appeared on the tablet at the centre of the composition read:
If you find pleasure in seeing fair pictures of heroes
Look then at these! None greater was ever portrayed.
Fierce is the struggle and hot the disputing: the question [is]
Does the father, or does the son – or do both – have the preeminence?
One ever withstood his enemies and his country’s destruction,
Finally giving his people the blessing of peace;
But the son, born to greater things, drove out of his councils
His worthless ministers and ever supported the just.
And in truth, the overweening power of the Pope bowed to his resolve,
When the sceptre of power was wielded by Henry VIII,
Under whose reign the true religion was restored to the nation
And pure doctrine began to be held in honour.
Holbein also did a watercolour miniature of Henry VIII as Solomon receiving the homage of the Queen of Sheba. By far the most compelling image of the Henrician royal supremacy, the figure of Solomon is a portrait of Henry VIII. The Queen of Sheba was a traditional emblem of the Church, and the composition illustrates Henry VIII as Supreme Head receiving the homage of the Church of England. The cloth of estate behind the throne bears a Latin inscription based on verses from the Old Testament (I Kings 10:9; II Chronicles 9:7-8), announcing that Henry VIII is appointed directly by, and is accountable only to, God. (To cement this point, in a place where the text of Holbein’s inscription differed from the text of the Vulgate edition of the Bible as it was traditionally cited, the word ‘constitutus’ has been bracketed in order to remove any ambiguity that might imply that Henry VIII had been ‘elected’ or ‘acclaimed’ king by popular consent.
The inscription reads:
‘Happy are your men and happy are these your servants, who stand in your presence, and hear your wisdom. Blessed is the Lord your God, who delighted in you, to set you upon his throne, to be King (‘constitutus’) by the Lord your God.’
NB The fear was that ‘constitutus’ might be read as ‘elected’ or ‘acclaimed’ rather than directly appointed by God.
The inscription on the steps of the throne read:
‘By your virtues you have exceeded your reputation.’
So this is the BRAND: the most potent images of Henry VIII are the Holbein images: the cartoon, the Thyssen half-length portrait, the image of Henry as Solomon, the image on the title page of the Coverdale Bible. (There are other images – we will look at these and some of the Holbeins in a moment…)
By establishing the ‘brand’ Holbein conveyed in colour the charismatic ‘real presence’ of Henry VIII as dynastic monarch and theocrat: the new Constantine, the new Justinian, the new Solomon, the new David!
FREE BOOK INTRODUCTION
|
i don't know
|
In an opera by Wagner, which eponymous group held a song contest, the prize being the hand of 'Eva'?
|
Opera Today : Wagner Tannhäuser: Royal Opera House, London
Send to a Friend
Perhaps Tim Albery’s inspiration came from the prize-singing contest. Dominating the stage in the First Act is a fake Royal Opera House proscenium, complete with fake velvet curtains and gold trimmings. It’s absolutely stunning. But beware! The fact remains, Tannhäuser is not Adriana Lecouvreur.
For Wagner, Tannhäuser is torn between extremes. Venusberg represents orgiastic excess and abandonment, Wartburg ascetic self denial. Wartburg wins. Venusberg doesn’t. If Albery thinks Tannhäuser is a metaphor for opera and for the Royal Opera House in particular, maybe he should get out more and see the real world. Prize song contests aren’t just about “singing”, as we know from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and it is even closer to medieval morality tales. For Wagner (who personally liked velvet and excess) what is at issue is a new sensibility built on rigorous conceptual thinking. Wagner’s deliberately distancing himself from Meyerbeer and what he thought of as feelgood, but brainless, glitz.
Hence, the ballet that portrays Venusberg. It’s a pointed dig against the kind of entertainment Wagner rejected, and at the kind of audiences who used to flock to see ballerinas’ legs, ignoring the music and drama. Here the ballet is presented completely devoid of irony. Once I saw a production where the ballet was a bondage orgy, the dancers inhuman beasts. Horrifying yet hypnotic, which is why Tannhäuser was enslaved. If Venusberg was as safe and wholesome and dull as this ballet, he would have long since died of boredom.
Eva-Marie Westbroek as Elisabeth
Albery’s Wartburg is post apocalyptic greyness. The Royal Opera House arch lies broken, twisted like rubble in the background. Visually, though this adds a vertical element to the horizontal flatness. The barrenness is valid, since Wartburg’s in crisis situation. If Venusberg’s no fun, Wartburg should be even less so. Physical movement in the First Act is slow to the point of being comatose. At first I thought this was to allow for Johann Botha’s disability, which would be laudable, but then remembered that excessively slow movement is a Tim Albery trademark. In Albery’s Der fliegende Holländer , Bryn Terfel spent much of the time appearing to pull a long rope suspended diagonally across the stage. (An echo of that rope appears in this Tannhäuser too.) Grunge aesthetic is an Albery thing, whatever the opera or the singer, and sometimes it works. Obviously directors have an individual language, as all artists do, but grimness for its own sake can become tedious if it holds up dramatic flow.
Tannhäuser is not a romantic hero. He left Wartburg in a pique and gave in whole-heartedly to Venusberg’s excesses. Thus Johann Botha’s portrayal is psychologically accurate. Wagner’s whole point is that the character is sated, almost destroyed by what he’s experienced, yet still has a spark of goodness that makes him worth saving. That’s why Elisabeth cares about him. Why redeem someone who doesn’t need help? Botha’s characterization was much more subtle and true to the role and to the opera than might meet the eye. On the ear, too, he was very good, totally justifying the casting, even if his voice flagged in the final Act. Much better that Botha sings Tannhäuser with a sense of his inner complexes. Conflict is central to this opera, and Botha’s singing expresses depth and complexity. It’s a difficult role, and less gratifying because the big showpiece song isn’t his, but Botha shows that he’s a hero in his own way. Perhaps Wagner knew that the Meyerbeer crowd would never understand.
Michaela Schuster as Venus
Tannhäuser might see Elisabeth as the Virgin Mary, but Elisabeth is a real woman with intense passions. Eva-Maria Westbroek’s singing brings out the wildness, even the sexuality in the role. Westbroek’s forte is bringing personality to the parts she sings, and here she turns an almost stereotype into a fully-formed human being,. A lesser singer would be trapped by the restrictions created by this costume and direction. Westbroek overcomes these obstacles by her innate artistry.
Three different people in the audience mentioned that Christian Gerhaher sings like a Lieder singer. This has become such a cliché that maybe it’s time to think what that actually means. Gerhaher got mauled by Fischer-Dieskau fans many years ago, so conversely I’ve listened to him with much greater sympathy than otherwise. I’ve got most of his records and been to most of his UK concerts. He’s an excellent singer, but the smoothness of his line is best suited to roles which reach beyond the fundamental grittiness of Lieder. He’s a perfect Wolfram von Eschenbach. Here his clean timbre creates Wolfram as an idealized symbolic figurehead, not quite of this world even though he was a historic figure. That, for me, is why Gerhaher’s Wolfram was sublime. The character itself is less important than what it represents. Wolfram is the embodiment of “die heilige deutsche Kunst”, something greater than mere mortals.
Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram von Eschinbach
Semyon Bychkov conducted the Royal Opera House Orchestra. Very beautiful, emphasizing the lyricism in the score. The interludes uninterrupted by staging were excellent. Given Albery’s view that Tannhäuser operates at a critical post-trauma turning point, one might have hoped that Bychkov might have injected some crackling tension into the music. It’s not a comfortable opera. Wagner declares against Venus, after all.
At the end, another typical Albery touch. In his Der fliegende Holländer, the Dutchman’s haunting portrait was replaced by a toy boat. That’s acceptable, as an indication of Senta’s fantasist immaturity. In this Tannhäuser there’s no papal staff to burst into leaf. Instead a small boy, seated on the same chair Tannhäuser sat in, playing with what looks like a neon toy Xmas tree. Even if it’s supposed to be symbolic, it’s absurd. Reductionism can work extremely well in opera, but badly done, it turns to trivia.
Michaela Schuster, who sang the Princess in Adriana Lecouvreur , recently sang Venus. A sold cast all round: good support from Timothy Robinson, Steven Ebel, Clive Bayley and Jeremy White.
This production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser runs at the Royal Opera House, London until January 2nd 2011. For more information, please see the Royal Opera House site.
Anne Ozorio
|
Meistersinger
|
In the Bible, from what was 'Eve' created?
|
Great opera houses of the world: your guided tour
Great opera houses of the world: your guided tour
Features - Classical Music | Opera | Stage
Great opera houses of the world: your guided tour
by Melissa Lesnie on June 13, 2011 (June 13, 2011) filed under Classical Music | Opera | Stage | Comment Now
Limelight gives you a front-row seat inside the world's most illustrious opera theatres, old and new: their history, classic performances and the hottest tickets coming up.
Find more features and interviews on opera in Limelight's July Opera Issue, on sale now .
Italy
Teatro alla Scala, Milan
One of the world's oldest and grandest theatres, La Scala has become synonymous with opera in Italy, the birthplace of the artform. Designed by Giuseppe Piermarini in Neoclassical style, it first opened its doors in 1778 with Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta for its inaugural performance. Built at the behest of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria to replace Milan's Royal Ducal Theatre destroyed by fire two years prior, La Scala became the home of opera seria, especially the music of Rossini. It hosted the world premieres of Bellini's Norma (1831), Catalani's La Wally (1892) and Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904).
Legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini became artistic director in the early 20th century, cementing La Scala's reputation for Verdi performance as well as bringing a new focus to the works of Wagner. Toscanini left a lasting legacy, with the 135-strong Teatro alla Scala Orchestra now considered one of the world’s best for in the genre. Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti have also taken up the baton, the latter leaving in 2005 - citing "staff hostility" - after 19 years as music director.
The building sustained severe damage in WWII bombings, and a major restoration effort ensued. Extensive renovations again took place in 2002 - 2004 to expand the backstage area and modernise technical mechanisms. Today, the theatre seats 2,800 and boasts one of the largest stages in Italy (16.15m d x 20.4m w x 26m h).
Fun Fact: The loggione gallery above the boxes are famously peopled with the most critical and often merciless opera devotees, who have been the cause of many a fiasco and audience riot over the years. As recently as 2006, they booed Roberto Alagna off the stage during Verdi's Aida, his understudy replacing him mid-scene without time to don his costume.
In the 19th century, opera-goers were even rowdier thanks to a casino stationed in the foyer.
One to watch: Verdi's Rigoletto in a new Luc Bondy production, with Vittorio Grigolo as the Duke and Gustavo Dudamel conducting. November 6-17, 2012 .
Captured on film: This visually stunning 2009 production of the first opera, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, takes a Titian painting and the traditions of commedia dell'arte as its inspiration.
Teatro La Fenice, Venice
Inaugurated in 1792 with Paisiello's musical drama I Guochi d'Agrigento, La Fenice ("The Phoenix") has risen from the ashes more than once to loom large in the city of canals. It was the first theatre in Venice which sought to claim its status in the classical, elegant facade, designed by G A Selva. Even after it was burned down and rebuilt in 1837, it remained one of Italy's leading theatres.
Verdi composed five operas for La Fenice: Ernani (1844), Attila (1846), Rigoletto (1851), La traviata (1853) and Simon Boccanegra (1857), and the theatre helped Giacomo Meyerbeer rise to stardom with his Il crociato in Egitto (1824).
From 1949, the names of Maria Calls and Renata Tebaldi began to appear in the playbills when Callas took on the role of Elvira in I Puritani. In 1960, La Stupenda graced the Fenice stage in the eponymous role of Alcina in Handel's opera.
On January 1996 a devastating fire destroyed much of the theatre. Riccardo Muti heralded its triumphant reopening in 2003. To safeguard against more bad luck, the theatre's entire historical archive has been digitised and is available to browse online .
One to watch: La Fenice is staging a new production of Verdi's Il Trovatore in December 2011, following Rigoletto and La Traviata as a trilogy celebrating the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Directed by Lorenzo Mariani with set and costumes by William Orlandi.
Captured on film: The incredible male soprano Michael Maniaci's aria in Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto .
Teatro di San Carlo, Naples
Italy's oldest surviving opera house claims opera buffa as a particular specialty. After just eight months of construction, the Real Teatro di San Carlo opened in 1737 with Domenico Sarro's Achille in Scirro to a libretto by Metastasio. The ambition and speed at which the theatre was built earned the Sicilian architect Giovanni Antonio Medrano the nickname, "the Man of Miracles".
Alas, in 1816 the theatre was burned to the ground by a stage lantern. Rebuilt in just ten months on a design by Antonio Niccolin, the new theatre prompted Stendhal to remark on its splendour: "It dazzles the eyes, it enraptures the soul". It is this theatre we see today, and that attracted Malibran, Colbran and other illustrious singers of the day. Rossini was engaged as San Carlo's artistic director and composer-in-residence for seven seasons, composing ten operas during his tenure. Donizetti was next in line for the post, building on the San Carlo prestige over ten years and premiering Lucia di Lammermoor there in 1835.
A €67-million renovation was completed in 2009, restoring the theatre to its original glory (with San Carlo's famed acoustics remaining intact) while introducing more modern amenities and replacing outdated technical facilities.
Fun fact: There is an apocryphal story of how the San Carlo came into being. King Charles VII of Naples and his queen were on their way to attend an opera at the run-down Teatro San Bartolomeo. When their horses were tripped up and their carriage upset by loose paving stones, the queen, fuming, insisted her husband build her a new opera house.
One to watch: See Lucia di Lammermoor in the house for which it was written, February 10-18, 2012 .
Captured on film: Pergolesi's charming opera buffa, La Serva Padrona
Germany & Austria
Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Richard Wagner's own purpose-built theatre, bankrolled primarily by the loopy King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth is a monument to one man's vision that has revolutionised the way theatres are constructed today.
Unlike the traditional opera house design with several tiers arranged in a horse-shoe configuration, the Festspielhaus's 1,925 seats ascend in a single steeply-shaped wedge inspired by Greek ampitheatres, with no galleries or boxes. The pit was larger than any other in Europe at the time to cater for Wagner's expanded orchestral sound, and covered by a hood so that the musicians do not distract from the gripping action on stage.
The foundation stone was laid on May 22, 1872 (Wagner's birthday) with the building completed for the premiere of the complete Ring Cycle over four days in August 1876. Since then, journeying to the annual Bayreuth festival devoted to Wagner's operas has become a rite of passage for composers and music aficionados around the world. In the 1880s it was the French who fell most ardently under the spell of Wagnerisme; Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Chausson and d'Indy all made the pilgrimage.
The theatre is still very much a family business. Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina took over the theatre last year following the death of Wolfgang Wagner. Her 2007 directorial debut at the Bayreuth Festival, a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2007, was booed. In October 2010 she sought to end the postwar boycott of Wagner's music in Israel by inviting the Israel Chamber Orchestra to play in Bayreuth, but Ms Wagner's visit to Israel was canceled after expressions of outrage from Holocaust survivors.
Captured on film: Opus Arte DVD is releasing the acclaimed 2007 Bayreuth Ring Cycle conducted by Christian Thielemann.
Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg
Salzburg is to Mozart lovers what Bayreuth is to hardened Wagnerites. The festival in the Classical composer's birthplace has become synonymous with Mozart opera performance, especially during the years of Herbert von Karajan's music direction from 1956 until his death in 1989.
In 1960 the Great Festival Hall opened its doors with a performance of Der Rosenkavalier conducted by Karajan. Built to a design by Clemens Holzmeister (the architect of the Small Festival Hall during the 1920s), the building incorporates the original facade of the former royal stables, transformed into a break room. At 100 metres wide, it is one of the largest opera theatres in the world.
he 250th anniversary of Mozart's death in style by staging all 22 of his operatic works.
Captured on film: From the 2006 anniversary celebrations, La Finta Giardinera starring Véronique Gens, with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg conducted by Ivor Bolton.
Vienna State Opera
Gustav Mahler was one of its illustrious conductors, and members of the Vienna Philharmonic are recruited from its orchestra. In the waltz capital of the world, it has long been the venue of the city's glittering annual opera ball.The Wiener Staatsoper was the first major building on Ringstrasse, commissioned by the Viennese "city expansion fund". The Neo-Renaissance-style theatre of the Vienna Imperial Opera, as it then was, opened in 1869.
Mahler was required to convert from Judaism to Catholicism in order to be accepted as music director, a position he held from 1897 to 1907. Richard Strauss also occupied the post from 1919-1924.
Towards the end of World War II the opera was set alight by an American bombardment. The front section, which had been walled off as a precaution, remained intact, sparing the spectacular frescoes in the foyer. But the auditorium and stage were completely destroyed along with much of the original décor. The Staatsoper reopened in 1955 with Fidelio conducted by Karl Böhm, ushering in a golden era remarkable in particular for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's performances.
Fun fact: It was at the Vienna Imperial Opera that Mahler introduced the custom of dimming the lights of a theatre during performances; a practice that initially outraged patrons but has become a given in our concert-going lives.
One to watch: Simone Young conducts Strauss's Daphne in December 2011 .
Captured on film: Anna Netrekbo's Carmen.
France
Palais Garnier, Paris
Home to the Opéra national de Paris, this immense, gilded marble palace was built on the orders of Napoleon III as part of the Baron Haussmann's overhaul of the city. The ensuing architecture competition was won by the then little-known Charles Garnier. Building began in 1860 but was not completed until 1875 due to intervening circumstances including the Franco-Prussian war.
The sumptuous interior is famous for its grand symmetrical staircase and the rococo decadence of the Salon du Glacier, where bacchantes and fauns gambol in relief. The marble and bronze busts of countless composers and classical figures stare out at visitors from archways and corners. The theatre itself is decked out in red and gold - 1,900 red velvet seats - and lit by the 8-tonne chandelier hanging beneath Marc Chagall's cheerily anachronistic ceiling painting, added in 1964. Apollo and his gilded lyre preside over the Palais Garnier at the very peak of the building, 73.6m above ground.
Fun fact: In 1896, one of the counterweights of the grand chandelier fell, resulting in a death. This accident and the building itself were the inspiration for Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera.
One to watch: No-one does the infectious, elegant rhythms of the French-Baroque like, well, the French. Jean-Philippe Rameau's first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, will be presented by Emmanuelle Haïm's energetic period-instrument ensemble Concert d'Astrée with a cast including English mezzo Sarah Connolly and Brisbane-born tenor Topi Lehtipuu. June 2012.
Captured on film:
Natalie Dessay's brazen Cleopatra in this year's sensational Giulio Cesare.
Salle Favart: l'Opéra-Comique, Paris
The charming Opéra-Comique is located in Place Boïeldieu in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier. One of the oldest surviging musical establishments in France, the company was founded in 1714 towards the end of Louis XIV's reign. The genre opéra comique is the theatre's main repertory: not necessarily comic in style, sung lines are interspersed with spoken drama.
In 1783 the company moved into the first Salle Favart (architect Jean-François Heurtier) and opened with a performance of André Grétry in the presence of Queen Marie-Antoinette. The theatre was plagued by disaster, burning to the ground in 1838, with a fire during a performance claiming more than 80 victims in 1887. Facing bankruptcy in the 1930s, the company became part of the Paris Opéra.
In spite of its misfortunes, the Opéra-Comique theatre was host to several significant premieres, including Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (1846), Bizet's Carmen (1875), Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1947).
Fun fact: The Opéra-Comique company was originally formed from an amalgamation of fairground troupes.
One to watch: Purcell's only opera Dido and Aeneas was commissioned by the Francophile King Charles II. William Christie takes up the baton in with his Les Arts Florissants for a Baroque performance par excellence. March 2012
Captured on film: Anna Caterina Antonacci will fog up your opera binoculars with her sultry Carmen in this performance conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
L'Opéra Bastille
The second home of the Opéra national de Paris was the brainchild of the composer French composer/conductor Pierre Boulez, who in 1968 urged the then-President François Mitterrand to sponsor a competition to build a new theatre. The starkly modern structure on Rue Lyon in Paris was designed by Canadian-Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott and inaugurated in 1989, though it did not see its first complete opera performance until 1990 with Berlioz's Les Troyens. With transparent facades, huge expanses of blue granite and a glass ceiling, it could not be more different from the highly decorative Palais Garnier. The Bastille houses 2,700 seats, supposedly acoustically consistent throughout the auditorium, and at its largest the pit accommodates 130 musicians.
Fun fact: The building was inaugurated on July 13, 1989, on the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the medieval prison in the centre of Paris that came to represent royal authority. Its downfall came at the height of the French Revolution and is still commemorated with Bastille Day.
One to watch: The quintessentially French Romantic masterpiece, Gounod's Faust, starring Roberto Alagna and Inva Mula opens in a new production from September 22, 2011 .
Captured on film: Jonas Kaufmann portrays Massenet's tortured Werther.
UK
English National Opera (London Coliseum)
The ENO has been doing daring things in the opera world lately, with Monty Python genius Terry Gilliam staging a wicked Berlioz's Damnation of Faust this year. The London Coliseum was designed by Frank Matcham in 1904 with the stated ambition of being the largest, finest "people's palace of entertainment" of the age. And indeed it is: with 2,359 seats it is the largest theatre in London and also boasts the city's largest proscenium arch, measuring 55 feet wide and 34 feet high. The English National Opera, formerly Sadler's Wells, is quintessentially British: 85% of the 2010/11 season's singers and conductors are British born, trained or resident.
Fun fact: The theatre on St Martin's Lane served as a canteen for Air Raid Patrol workers during the Second World War, with Churchill giving a speech from the stage.
One to watch: Sir Charles Mackerras had a long and prolific association with the ENO, which is celebrated in a gala of his most beloved music: Handel, Mozart, Gilbert & Sullivan, Britten and Janácek. Lesley Garrett, Yvonne Kenny and other greats perform with the ENO's orchestra and chorus. June 2011 .
Captured on film: The late English tenor Philip Langridge in Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, 1994.
Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne is one of opera’s most unlikely, and most inspiring, success stories. Founded in 1934 by John Christie and his opera singer wife, Audrey Mildmay, the Sussex countryside estate emanates a curious mix of the quaint and the grand. Most remarkably, it has remained financially independent and family-owned since it was opened.
The Glyndebourne musical bug started as a drawing room with an organ and expanded to a small auditorium of 300 seats. Early years of the Glyndebourne Festival revolved almost entirely around Mozart before gradually expanding to include works by other composers such as Benjamin Britten, whose Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring were premiered there in 1946 and 1947 respectively.
The annual festival's reputation grew, and so did its facilities - the heart of Glyndebourne since 1994 has been its state-of-the-art, 1,200-seat opera house, with its interior of century-old pine that gives a warm acoustic. Yet it has lost none of the intimacy that has made it such a beloved English musical institution. Despite its cottage-industry feel, it has hosted some of the world's brightest opera stars over the years, including Dame Janet Baker, Pavarotti in his British debut, and Joan Sutherland as early as 1960.
The London Philharmonic is the Glyndebourne Festival's house orchestra, headed by Vladimir Jurowski.
One to watch: Britten's Turn of the Screw, starring Toby Spence and Swedish soprano Miah Persson, runs as part of the 2011 festival in August.
Captured on film: Janet Baker sings Dido's Lament.
Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London
Home of the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet, this is England's oldest and most famous opera house. Originally the Theatre Royal, built on the site of an ancient convent garden, it functioned mainly as a playhouse for decades until 1734, when its first ballet was staged. The following year, the first of George Frederic Handel's regular seasons at Covent Garden heralded a golden age of Baroque opera and English oratorio - several of his greatest stage works had their premieres here.
The current building is the third theatre on the site following devastating fires in 1808 and 1857. The facade, foyer and auditorium we see today dates from 1858 in Edward Middleton Barry's design, but most other elements date from modern-day reconstruction, including the Paul Hamlyn Hall's large iron and glass atrium, historically part of the old Covent Garden flower market and still widely referred to as the "floral hall".
On the magnificent Covent Garden stage, Joan Sutherland sang Violetta in Zeffirelli's 1960 revival of La Traviata; music director Georg Solti revolutionised modern opera performance from the pit upwards, and visionary stage directors like Luchino Visconti brought a gripping new sense of drama.
Fun fact: During the Second World War, the Royal Opera House became a dancehall, and very nearly remained one.
One to watch: David McVicar's production of Berlioz's epic Les Troyens, an opera not seen at ROH since 1972. Conducted by Antonio Pappano with Anna Caterina Antonacci, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann heading an international star cast. June - July 2012 .
Captured on film: It would be hard to miss Bryn Terfel's rotund, leering Falstaff!
Spain
Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia
Curvaceous white forms and a distinctive shell-like construction - no, not the Sydney Opera House but the shiny new Palace of Arts in Valencia, built in 2005 and inaugurated to the tune of Fidelio. Valencia's homegrown architect Santiago Calatrava designed the Olympic stadium in Athens before his €250m culture precinct became one of the biggest performing arts centres in Europe. Architecturally, the new space is replete with surprising details and views of the city and the centre's Mediterranean gardens. It seems to hover dreamily over its 11,000 square metres of surrounding water, an opera oasis.
The Sala Principal (main hall) seats 1,700 and is home to the resident orchestra, the Cumunitat Valenciana conducted by Zubin Mehta. Here, Mehta leads a new annual music and opera feast, the Festival fel Mediterraneo. The 2008-2009 festival included a high-tech Ring Cycle that matches the modern virtuosity of the building; who knows what Wagner would have made of the production's computer graphics and human pyramids (it was staged by acrobatic troupe La Fura dels Baus) but one can imagine it appealing to his sense of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Fun fact: The Palau is the tallest opera house in the world and boasts the third-largest orchestral pit accommodating 120 musicians.
One to watch: Placido Doming presents a series celebrating the centenary of Italian opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007). July 2011 .
Captured on film:
Teatro Real, Madrid
Madrid's Royal Theatre is a stone's throw from the Palacio Real, the residence of Queen Isabel II who ordered the construction of the opera house but wasn't able to enjoy the venue until 1850, thirty years after building began. El Real opened with Donizetti's La Favorite and in 1863 Verdi visited the theatre for the Spanish premiere of his La Forza del Destino - Italian bel canto repertoire was embraced alongside zarzuelas. The Ballets Russes made their way to the theatre in 1925 for a performance in the presence of Nijinsky and Stravinsky.
Madrid-born Placido Domingo has had a long history with El Real; this year, celebrating his 70th birthday, the great tenor stood at the theatre's balcony and cried "Viva Madrid!" to his adoring fans as they sang "Happy Birthday" in Spanish.
Fun fact: The Teatro Real hosted the 14th Eurovision Song Contest in 1969. Performers shared the stage with an immense metal sculpture by Spain's leading surrealist artist, Dalí.
One to watch: Messiaen's St François d'Assise with music direction from Messiaen specialist Sylvain Cambreling. July 2011.
Captured on Film: An enchanting La bohème with Laura Giordano as Musetta.
United States
Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Centre, New York
The Met is one of the most extravagant, prestigious and biggest-spending opera houses today, but make no mistake: it's a singer's House, first and foremost. A debut at the Met is considered a sign of having "arrived." Juan Diego Flórez, Anna Netrebko, American stars Joyce DiDonato Renée Fleming, Jessye Norman and Deborah Voigt: this was, and is, their home. James Levine, music director since 1976, breathes energy and fire into each and every performance.
The Met's current 3,800-seat home in the Lincoln Centre on Broadway opened in 1966 with the premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra starring Leontyne Price (libretto by Franco Zeffirelli).
Although the current general manager Peter Gelb has shifted focus to new productions in a bid to attract younger audiences, it is the lavish classics that have given the Met its reputation for greatness.
Limelight's opera blogger Sarah Noble has chronicled her recent Met experiences here .
One to watch: The Met's extravagant production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, with Richard Croft reprising his role as Gandhi and also starring Australia's Rachelle Durkin. November - December, 2011 .
Captured on film: Romanian superstar soprano Angela Gheorghiu in Zeffirelli's La Traviata.
Australia
Sydney Opera House
It may be newer and of more modest proportions than most of the historic buildings on the list, and the acoustics and size of its opera theatre are constantly under attack, but nonetheless the Sydney Opera House is the only theatre to stand as a national icon in any country, and remains one of the most breathtaking tourist destinations in the world.
It's distinctive silhouette is internationally recongisable, the naturalistic design and glass curtain walls overlook the picturesque Botanical Gardens. It may have been designed by a Danish architect, but it is a quintessentially Australian building.
In the 1940s conductor Eugene Goossens lobbied for a theatre to be built at Sydney's breezy Bennelong Point, arguing that the Sydney Town Hall was bursting at the seams, but teething problems and a break with architect Jørn Utzon caused construction delays and a cost blowout fourteen times the projected budget. When the Sydney Opera House was finally complete, in 1973, Queen Elizabeth the II attended the official opening.
Since then, we have seen Dame Joan Sutherland's farewell gala and memorable, innovative world premieres from Australian composers Richard Mills (Batavia) and Brett Dean (Bliss). Opera lovers in Australia and continue to follow news of the controversial $1b development plans to improve the much-maligned acousics.
One to watch: Filmmaker Bruce Beresford directs a new production of Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men, based on the classic John Steinbeck novel. July - August 2011 .
Captured on film: Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti share the stage in Sydney in 1983.
China
Guangzhou Opera House
South China's new opera house, inaugurated late 2010, has been hailed an architectural masterpiece . Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid's design for a multi-purpose performing arts centre along Pearl River represents China's shifting cultural landscape. Dramatic curves, innovative forms and foreboding granite structures mix naturalistic and industrial elements, just like the city for which the theatre was designed.
The 1,800-seat hall has been built in collaboration with Melbourne-based acousticians to ensure it caters for both traditional Chinese and European sounds - the promise of exciting arts events to come. Hadid describes the Opera House as her "monument to the new milennium", and so it is.
|
i don't know
|
What was the name of the character played by Anna Wing in 'Eastenders'?
|
Anna Wing obituary | Television & radio | The Guardian
Anna Wing obituary
Actor who became a household name in her 70s as Lou Beale in EastEnders
Anna Wing took along her birth certificate to the EastEnders audition to prove she was the daughter of a greengrocer. Photograph: Graham Turner
Thursday 11 July 2013 08.56 EDT
First published on Thursday 11 July 2013 08.56 EDT
Share on Messenger
Close
When Anna Wing took on her most famous role, in EastEnders in 1985, the Sun ran the headline: "Enter the dragon ... Lou Beale!" As hard as nails and as brittle as pressed flowers, Lou was one of a declining breed, an East End widow whose power indoors was absolute, but whose attitude towards the outside world was one of mounting fear and alienation. She played Albert Square's indomitable matriarch for only four years but Wing, who has died aged 98, became synonymous for many with her character.
The original character outline by Julia Smith and Tony Holland, creators of EastEnders, described Lou Beale thus: "The changing face of the area (especially the immigrants) is a constant source of fear to her, but then she doesn't go out much. She prefers to be at home, or on a trip down memory lane." Wing recognised this stereotypical character as she had grown up among such women. Born in Hackney, east London, she took her birth certificate to the audition to prove she was the daughter of a greengrocer – which was fitting since Lou and her late husband Albert had built up the Beales' business running a fruit and veg stall on Walford market.
At the time of her audition, Wing was 71 and the show's producers worried whether she was up to EastEnders' tough filming schedules. "All my life I've been an actress, now I want to be a household name," she told them.
She worked 70 hours a week for four years to achieve that aim, playing Lou largely from an armchair, dispensing reminiscences to the family faithful . "I can recall when there was 25 of us round this table for Sunday winkles, and separate tables out in the yard for the kiddies," she said once. She could even reflect on the menopause with her trademark combination of denial and sentiment: "I never had all that trouble. I just got on with it. In my day, we fetched ourselves by the bootstraps and carried on, no matter what."
By 1988, Wing had had enough. She asked to be written out. "We had 31 million viewers and it was shown all over the world, and I suddenly thought 'Should I be in this?'... I had a crisis of conscience." So the scriptwriters killed Lou off. She returned from an outing to Leigh-on-Sea feeling ill and retreated to bed. After giving putative wisdom to her descendants, her last words were: "That's you lot sorted. I can go now." After her funeral, her son, Pete, proposed a toast to that "bloody old bag".
Wing deserves disentangling from the legend of Lou Beale. She was several things unimaginable to her soap character, including a Quaker and a CND supporter. She decided, aged 11, that she wanted to be an actor after seeing John Gielgud on stage at the Old Vic (in 1977, she appeared with her idol in Alain Resnais' film Providence).
After attending the Croydon School of Acting in south London, Wing worked extensively in repertory theatre. She was also a teacher – and an artist's model, at tenpence an hour. "I had a very attractive body, a Renoir, and they were mad about it."
When war broke out in 1939, Wing, a lifelong pacifist, took a nursing course and volunteered with the Red Cross. After the war, she worked as both a nursery school teacher and a stalwart of rep, where she met her first husband, the merchant navy lieutenant and actor Peter Davey. The pair had a son, Mark, and were divorced in 1947.
In 2007, she reckoned to have appeared in at least 50 plays in 68 years, among them Early Morning in 1969 and A Man for All Seasons in 1971. During the 70s, she worked with Mark (the actor and director Mark Wing-Davey ) in Sheffield Crucible's production of Free for All. She also had small parts in films including Billy Liar (1963) and an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973).
Between 1953 and 1960, she was the partner of the surrealist poet Philip O'Connor , with whom she had a second son, John. She encouraged O'Connor to write his first book, the extraordinary Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958). She once lamented that she had nothing to remember him by but a scribbled farewell note reading: "I love you, the gist of it is, I've been unfaithful. Have packed and gone." She said: "I pined for him for 15 years."
Wing appeared in the ATV soap Market in Honey Lane between 1967 and 1969. The drama was set in a cockney market and made at Elstree studios where, 20 years later, she would film EastEnders. During this era, she also had roles in Dixon of Dock Green, Z Cars and Play for Today. But EastEnders was to be her big, if belated, break.
After EastEnders, she had parts in Casualty, Doctors, French and Saunders, The Bill and Silent Witness. In the cinema, in 2004, she appeared opposite Orlando Bloom in The Calcium Kid and as an ancient fairy in Tooth. In 2009, she was made an MBE for her services to drama and charity. Perhaps her strangest incarnation was in 2012 as a nonagenarian East End gangster in a music video for the band Quarrel . She played an indomitable woman bent on purging her manor of funk music.
Wing is survived by her two sons and five grandchildren.
• Anna Eva Lydia Catherine Wing, actor, born 30 October 1914; died 7 July 2013
|
Lou Beale
|
0191 is the telephone code for which British city?
|
EastEnders’ Lou Beale actress Anna Wing dies at 98 - The Courier
Home / News / UK & World / EastEnders’ Lou Beale actress Anna Wing dies at 98
EastEnders’ Lou Beale actress Anna Wing dies at 98
by The Courier Reporter
Anna Wing appeared in the very first episode of EastEnders.
Anna Wing, who played sharp-tongued EastEnders matriach Lou Beale, has died aged 98.
The star, who died on Sunday, appeared in the BBC1 soap for three years from its start in 1985.
She formed a formidable on-screen partnership with fellow actress Gretchen Franklin who played Ethel Skinner.
She received the MBE in 2009 in recognition of a career that spanned more than six decades of television, film, radio and theatre.
Speaking at the time, she said: “I wanted to be an actress when I was a little girl and everybody said no, but I did it. I stuck it out and I’ve done it for 70 years and I’m still working.”
She appeared in The Bill aged 92 playing a feisty pensioner caught up in a drug deal.
Adam Woodyatt, who plays her grandson, Ian Beale, described Wing as “a wonderful lady”.
He said: “I worked with Anna on Witches And The Grinnygog before she became my gran in EastEnders. I remember one episode in particular number 16 we had a seven-page scene for the cliff-hanger, Ian pouring his heart out to his gran. It was the first time I had to cry on screen and I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to do it. Anna was so helpful, happy to rehearse it over and over again and put me completely at ease. Sure enough the tears flowed from nowhere and it was the first time Julia’s Theme was used at the end of an episode. I have so many fond memories of her, my thoughts are with her family and friends.”
June Brown, who plays Dot Cotton, said it was a “pleasure” to work with Wing.
She said: “She was a very generous woman in many ways and an excellent actress who made a script her own, lifting the character off the page and made it quite different from what you’d have expected.
“Anna had a true old-fashioned cockney accent like my grandma. I always enjoyed her company and she often asked me to stay with her, saying that I could smoke on the landing! Anna always thought well of everyone and she loved and enjoyed her children and grandchildren. I was very fond of her indeed and will remember Anna with great affection always.”
Wing, who appeared in the first episode of the long-running soap, featured in 232 episodes before her character was written out.
A spokeswoman for the show said: “We are deeply saddened to hear that Anna Wing has passed away. From the very first episode of EastEnders, Anna created one of the most iconic matriarchs in television history.
“The character of Lou Beale is still so entrenched in EastEnders history and, without Anna, the Beale family would never have been the focal point that it is today.
“Anna will be remembered fondly by everyone at EastEnders and our deepest sympathies are extended to her family and friends.”
Related Content
|
i don't know
|
In which 1991 film were the whole 'Royal Family' wiped out, leaving a club pianist, played by John Goodman, as king?
|
King Ralph Reviews & Ratings - IMDb
IMDb
36 out of 47 people found the following review useful:
Regarding the film
from London, England
29 October 2004
I think that people are generally harsh towards the nature of this film. It is not meant to be entirely accurate and yes, perhaps I am slightly biased having starred in the film myself (Jason Richards (I) on IMDb). You will see that I played the role of Ralph II, the little guy who played that tiny piano/ keyboard at the end of the film! Having looked at the film again recently, I regard it as one of those classic comedies not to be mocked. I had great fun when acting in the film and I had just as much fun watching it! John Goodman really is the greatest of guys (although the size of him really scared me when I met him!) I suggest to everyone who mocks this film, that this is one of the reasons he became so great in the movie world. If it wasn't for King Ralph, he would have never got to the Flintstones or any of the other films which have come to make him so renowned.
Was the above review useful to you?
20 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Royally Amusing
from Buffalo, New York
18 February 2006
Though this film got trashed in a lot of circles, I rather like it if for no other reasons than it gives Americans some notion of the function of the monarchy in Great Britain.
Sometimes having the head of state and the head of government does have its bad points. Watergate for instance might have not been the gut wrenching experience if in America we were a parliamentary democracy with a royal head of state. Richard Nixon would have been put up for a "no confidence" vote and out he would have been without all the drama.
Drama on the other side of the Atlantic is saved for the Royals. This film might give an American some idea of what the abdication crisis was all about. John Goodman as the American born King has his own Mrs. Simpson.
In fact how he got to the throne is quite the tale. On some grand occasion the extended royal family got together for what looks like a team picture like they take in spring training of the various baseball rosters. Someone left a loose electrical cable dangling on the metal bleachers and the whole lot of them were electrocuted.
Genealogists poured through the Windham family tree and found some member had renounced it all and gone to America. The heir of that forgotten branch is John Goodman, Ralph Jones who does a lounge act in Las Vegas and not in classier joints in Las Vegas.
Of course the free and easy and thoroughly American Goodman doesn't take readily to his new found job. He can't quite comprehend that he has to serve as well as be served. And he has the same problem the Duke of Windsor had when he was briefly Edward VIII. With a lot more excuse since Windsor was brought up in the tradition.
Peter O'Toole as the lord who tries to give him some on the job training and John Hurt who has his own reasons for wanting Goodman to flop both give stand out performances. Best scene the palace ball for Goodman's prospective bride when Goodman does his lounge act.
It's a funny film and in its own way educational. The Duke of Windsor should have seen it. His duty would have been clear.
Was the above review useful to you?
22 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Predictable but Hilarious
from El Paso, TX, USA
13 June 2004
I confess that "King Ralph" is one of my favorite movies. Yes, the basic plot concept of the film has been done in MANY stories, both written and filmed, but the superb acting coupled with the not-so-subtle jabs at British Royalty push the plot right over the top. Never mind that John Goodman is brilliant (as usual), but the well-done and loosely-serious role of Peter O'Toole adds a much needed anchor to Mr. Goodman's highly-anticipated antics. The filming locations of the film as well provide a truly beautiful backdrop to the production, steeped strongly in tradition and British heritage. Two thumbs up for this light-hearted comedy that dares to poke at some of the more serious issues of royal responsibility and pressure.
Highly recommended for fun entertainment, I give "King Ralph" a 9 out of 10.
Was the above review useful to you?
15 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Good fun
from Australia
3 September 2006
This seems to get a panning from film reviewers here, but it actually is a good comedy. The story line is mildly stupid and a replay of the old fish-out-of-water formula, but the British were able to add a fantastic flavour to the film and the comedy is kept in check and doesn't become too outlandishly stupid.
Thumbs up in my view, but it's a little bit date these days. Superb supporting cast and a friendly film: nothing crude and from recollection, no bad language.
Goes to show that it can still be done if you really apply your mind to it!
Was the above review useful to you?
12 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Who the hell cares about critics? This is great fun!
Author: CinefanR
10 February 2012
"King Ralph" was surprisingly entertaining and very funny, actually. However outrageous, implausible, ridiculous the plot, that doesn't matter. It was deliciously over the top to see Peter O'Toole and John Goodman, the most unlikely team ever, provide the spectacle of a cultural clash, to say the least. The movie cheerfully mocks both American and British culture and stereotypes, but it does it rather playfully, without being offensive to anybody. The joke is either on the hamburger and baseball loving Americans, or the stiff conservatory high-class Brits. People who describe this movie as "low-brow" comedy obviously have no idea what that means. This is good quality humor, no crude and tasteless jokes here. The actors are all top-rate and the acting is first class.
Who could have played the majestic, royal British type better than Peter O'Toole? Nobody! He's perfect, graceful and dignified as the King's adviser. John Goodman, on the other hand, is perfect as the average joe who doesn't know or care much about protocol, good manners or politics. John Hurt is another excellent choice to play the part of an evil, unscrupulous aristocrat hung up on power. Hurt obviously enjoyed doing this part and he's very funny. The movie tends to drag when Goodman's girlfriend shows up, but Princess Anna enters the stage to compensate. There are also some unnecessary exaggerations, but I didn't mind. The script is good, the jokes are over the top and performances are great all around. Hilarious stuff!
Was the above review useful to you?
14 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Charming!
from California, USA
9 October 2003
It's not stupid, it's charming. A bit old-fashioned and corny, yes, but entertaining and amusing and well worth the time! I just saw this for the second time on cable TV and liked it just as much as the first time!
Goodman performs bravely and exquisitely as the good-hearted buffoon who overcomes the stuffiness and snobbishness of a group of bluebloods too good for their own bodily functions.
Was the above review useful to you?
10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
An Underrated Classic
from United States
6 August 2008
Although I own the DVD, whenever King Ralph show up on television I watch it all the way through. This is a clever satire sending up both the pretentiousness of the British monarchy and the crassness of American society. Peter O'Toole and John Goodman....both gifted actors give this film real depth in their nuanced performances. William Hurt's over the top performance as the villainous pretender to the throne is pitch perfect, and the supporting cast, including the aides to the King, the visiting Roals from Finland, the African King and Ralph's love interest are solid, leaving this movie without a weak performance. There is something in this for everyone; romance, betrayal, friendship, and a fast moving plot with just the right kinds of twists and turns that keep the pace of this relatively short movie moving right along.
Was the above review useful to you?
7 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Great cast in a decent movie
from United Kingdom
12 April 2010
I wasn't sure whether King Ralph would be my style, seeing how much the critics panned it. But when I watched it, I was surprised at how much I liked it. It is not perfect, but one of the worst films ever? No, far from it. It is enjoyable, despite the sometimes weak script, uneven direction and one or two parts that felt rather slow and contrived. What redeems it though is the cast. John Goodman amiably bumbles his way through his role and gives some charm into a character that could have been bland and uninteresting, and Peter O'Toole and John Hurt seem to be having a whale of a time as the adviser and scheming courtier. Also, the film does actually look nice, the cinematography is good and the scenery is lovely. The soundtrack and score were enjoyable as well. Overall, it has its problems, but it isn't a bad film by all means. 7/10 Bethany Cox
Was the above review useful to you?
14 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
A hilarious culture clash of a film
John Goodman stars as the title monarch in this royal comedy.
Ralph is a Las Vegas lounge singer badly in the need for some
moolah when a group of British councilmen approach him one night
and bear him the news that Ralph is the new king of England
after the whole royal family has been wiped out in a freak
accident! Reluctantly, Ralph takes the job. At first, he seems
like a fish out of water, the fact being that he is an American
first of all, and that he is also a total slob! Being king might
not be so good after all.
This movie is funny because Goodman does a nice job being a
lovable slob trying his best to be the royal figurehead of the
Britain. Peter O'Toole is also good as Willingham, the
aristocrat whose job is to look after the newly appoi
Was the above review useful to you?
7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A good idea turned into a slightly-above-average movie.
from Paderborn, Germany
3 May 2001
When the entire British royal family is wiped out in an "awful" accident, the American bar entertainer Ralph Jones (excellent: John Goodman, he makes up for most of the boring parts of the plot) becomes the new King of England. After a few adjustment problems with his new job (clothing, manners etc.) he falls in love with a young woman he meets at a local strip club. Problems emerge when his secretary tries to marry him to the Finnish princess to seal a business deal for a few English companies. All in all, a good movie with some great lines but also some boring parts.
Was the above review useful to you?
Page 1 of 5:
|
King Ralph
|
In which opera by Offenbach does a poet relate three stories about the loves of his life?
|
King Ralph Reviews & Ratings - IMDb
IMDb
36 out of 47 people found the following review useful:
Regarding the film
from London, England
29 October 2004
I think that people are generally harsh towards the nature of this film. It is not meant to be entirely accurate and yes, perhaps I am slightly biased having starred in the film myself (Jason Richards (I) on IMDb). You will see that I played the role of Ralph II, the little guy who played that tiny piano/ keyboard at the end of the film! Having looked at the film again recently, I regard it as one of those classic comedies not to be mocked. I had great fun when acting in the film and I had just as much fun watching it! John Goodman really is the greatest of guys (although the size of him really scared me when I met him!) I suggest to everyone who mocks this film, that this is one of the reasons he became so great in the movie world. If it wasn't for King Ralph, he would have never got to the Flintstones or any of the other films which have come to make him so renowned.
Was the above review useful to you?
20 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Royally Amusing
from Buffalo, New York
18 February 2006
Though this film got trashed in a lot of circles, I rather like it if for no other reasons than it gives Americans some notion of the function of the monarchy in Great Britain.
Sometimes having the head of state and the head of government does have its bad points. Watergate for instance might have not been the gut wrenching experience if in America we were a parliamentary democracy with a royal head of state. Richard Nixon would have been put up for a "no confidence" vote and out he would have been without all the drama.
Drama on the other side of the Atlantic is saved for the Royals. This film might give an American some idea of what the abdication crisis was all about. John Goodman as the American born King has his own Mrs. Simpson.
In fact how he got to the throne is quite the tale. On some grand occasion the extended royal family got together for what looks like a team picture like they take in spring training of the various baseball rosters. Someone left a loose electrical cable dangling on the metal bleachers and the whole lot of them were electrocuted.
Genealogists poured through the Windham family tree and found some member had renounced it all and gone to America. The heir of that forgotten branch is John Goodman, Ralph Jones who does a lounge act in Las Vegas and not in classier joints in Las Vegas.
Of course the free and easy and thoroughly American Goodman doesn't take readily to his new found job. He can't quite comprehend that he has to serve as well as be served. And he has the same problem the Duke of Windsor had when he was briefly Edward VIII. With a lot more excuse since Windsor was brought up in the tradition.
Peter O'Toole as the lord who tries to give him some on the job training and John Hurt who has his own reasons for wanting Goodman to flop both give stand out performances. Best scene the palace ball for Goodman's prospective bride when Goodman does his lounge act.
It's a funny film and in its own way educational. The Duke of Windsor should have seen it. His duty would have been clear.
Was the above review useful to you?
22 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Predictable but Hilarious
from El Paso, TX, USA
13 June 2004
I confess that "King Ralph" is one of my favorite movies. Yes, the basic plot concept of the film has been done in MANY stories, both written and filmed, but the superb acting coupled with the not-so-subtle jabs at British Royalty push the plot right over the top. Never mind that John Goodman is brilliant (as usual), but the well-done and loosely-serious role of Peter O'Toole adds a much needed anchor to Mr. Goodman's highly-anticipated antics. The filming locations of the film as well provide a truly beautiful backdrop to the production, steeped strongly in tradition and British heritage. Two thumbs up for this light-hearted comedy that dares to poke at some of the more serious issues of royal responsibility and pressure.
Highly recommended for fun entertainment, I give "King Ralph" a 9 out of 10.
Was the above review useful to you?
15 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Good fun
from Australia
3 September 2006
This seems to get a panning from film reviewers here, but it actually is a good comedy. The story line is mildly stupid and a replay of the old fish-out-of-water formula, but the British were able to add a fantastic flavour to the film and the comedy is kept in check and doesn't become too outlandishly stupid.
Thumbs up in my view, but it's a little bit date these days. Superb supporting cast and a friendly film: nothing crude and from recollection, no bad language.
Goes to show that it can still be done if you really apply your mind to it!
Was the above review useful to you?
12 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Who the hell cares about critics? This is great fun!
Author: CinefanR
10 February 2012
"King Ralph" was surprisingly entertaining and very funny, actually. However outrageous, implausible, ridiculous the plot, that doesn't matter. It was deliciously over the top to see Peter O'Toole and John Goodman, the most unlikely team ever, provide the spectacle of a cultural clash, to say the least. The movie cheerfully mocks both American and British culture and stereotypes, but it does it rather playfully, without being offensive to anybody. The joke is either on the hamburger and baseball loving Americans, or the stiff conservatory high-class Brits. People who describe this movie as "low-brow" comedy obviously have no idea what that means. This is good quality humor, no crude and tasteless jokes here. The actors are all top-rate and the acting is first class.
Who could have played the majestic, royal British type better than Peter O'Toole? Nobody! He's perfect, graceful and dignified as the King's adviser. John Goodman, on the other hand, is perfect as the average joe who doesn't know or care much about protocol, good manners or politics. John Hurt is another excellent choice to play the part of an evil, unscrupulous aristocrat hung up on power. Hurt obviously enjoyed doing this part and he's very funny. The movie tends to drag when Goodman's girlfriend shows up, but Princess Anna enters the stage to compensate. There are also some unnecessary exaggerations, but I didn't mind. The script is good, the jokes are over the top and performances are great all around. Hilarious stuff!
Was the above review useful to you?
14 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Charming!
from California, USA
9 October 2003
It's not stupid, it's charming. A bit old-fashioned and corny, yes, but entertaining and amusing and well worth the time! I just saw this for the second time on cable TV and liked it just as much as the first time!
Goodman performs bravely and exquisitely as the good-hearted buffoon who overcomes the stuffiness and snobbishness of a group of bluebloods too good for their own bodily functions.
Was the above review useful to you?
10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
An Underrated Classic
from United States
6 August 2008
Although I own the DVD, whenever King Ralph show up on television I watch it all the way through. This is a clever satire sending up both the pretentiousness of the British monarchy and the crassness of American society. Peter O'Toole and John Goodman....both gifted actors give this film real depth in their nuanced performances. William Hurt's over the top performance as the villainous pretender to the throne is pitch perfect, and the supporting cast, including the aides to the King, the visiting Roals from Finland, the African King and Ralph's love interest are solid, leaving this movie without a weak performance. There is something in this for everyone; romance, betrayal, friendship, and a fast moving plot with just the right kinds of twists and turns that keep the pace of this relatively short movie moving right along.
Was the above review useful to you?
7 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Great cast in a decent movie
from United Kingdom
12 April 2010
I wasn't sure whether King Ralph would be my style, seeing how much the critics panned it. But when I watched it, I was surprised at how much I liked it. It is not perfect, but one of the worst films ever? No, far from it. It is enjoyable, despite the sometimes weak script, uneven direction and one or two parts that felt rather slow and contrived. What redeems it though is the cast. John Goodman amiably bumbles his way through his role and gives some charm into a character that could have been bland and uninteresting, and Peter O'Toole and John Hurt seem to be having a whale of a time as the adviser and scheming courtier. Also, the film does actually look nice, the cinematography is good and the scenery is lovely. The soundtrack and score were enjoyable as well. Overall, it has its problems, but it isn't a bad film by all means. 7/10 Bethany Cox
Was the above review useful to you?
14 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
A hilarious culture clash of a film
John Goodman stars as the title monarch in this royal comedy.
Ralph is a Las Vegas lounge singer badly in the need for some
moolah when a group of British councilmen approach him one night
and bear him the news that Ralph is the new king of England
after the whole royal family has been wiped out in a freak
accident! Reluctantly, Ralph takes the job. At first, he seems
like a fish out of water, the fact being that he is an American
first of all, and that he is also a total slob! Being king might
not be so good after all.
This movie is funny because Goodman does a nice job being a
lovable slob trying his best to be the royal figurehead of the
Britain. Peter O'Toole is also good as Willingham, the
aristocrat whose job is to look after the newly appoi
Was the above review useful to you?
7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A good idea turned into a slightly-above-average movie.
from Paderborn, Germany
3 May 2001
When the entire British royal family is wiped out in an "awful" accident, the American bar entertainer Ralph Jones (excellent: John Goodman, he makes up for most of the boring parts of the plot) becomes the new King of England. After a few adjustment problems with his new job (clothing, manners etc.) he falls in love with a young woman he meets at a local strip club. Problems emerge when his secretary tries to marry him to the Finnish princess to seal a business deal for a few English companies. All in all, a good movie with some great lines but also some boring parts.
Was the above review useful to you?
Page 1 of 5:
|
i don't know
|
In which country was Mohammad al Fayed born?
|
Mohamed Al-Fayed - Bio, Facts, Family | Famous Birthdays
Mohamed Al-Fayed
Egyptian businessman whose interests ranged from sports franchises to hotels and department stores.
Before Fame
He was always a go-getter. His first business was a lemonade stand in his front yard.
Trivia
He was once the 993rd richest person in the world.
Family Life
He was married to Samira Kashoggi for two years. He has three sons named Dodi, Karim and Omar and two daughters named Camila and Jasmine.
|
Egypt
|
Who is fifth in line to the throne?
|
Mohamed al-Fayed | Egyptian businessman | Britannica.com
Egyptian businessman
Roland Walter Rowland
Mohamed al-Fayed, original name Mohamed Fayed (born Jan. 27, 1933, Alexandria , Egypt ), Egyptian businessman.
Fayed was raised in Alexandria, Egypt. In 1954 he wed Samira Khashoggi, the sister of Saudi Arabian businessman and international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who subsequently employed him at his import-export business. Fayed moved to Genoa, Italy, in 1958 and then to London in 1964. Two years later, he became an adviser to the sultan of Brunei and founded his own shipping company, Genevaco. In 1972 he launched the marine repair yard International Marine Services in Dubayy .
In 1974 Fayed moved to Britain , where he added the “al” to his name and acquired vast holdings, including the Ritz Hotel in Paris (1979). Fayed’s contentious relationship with the British establishment was well documented. In a rancorous takeover in 1985, he beat out mining giant Lonrho to purchase the House of Fraser, the holding company that controlled Harrods department store. Spurred on by Lonrho owner Roland (“Tiny”) Rowland, the government accused Fayed of having misrepresented his ability to finance the takeover. Though Fayed proved his solvency, his wealth continued to be suspect in some quarters. In 1986 he signed a 50-year lease on the Parisian villa of the duke and duchess of Windsor, which he promptly restored. Following the formal reopening of the villa in 1989, he received the Plaque de Paris, the city’s highest honour.
However, Fayed’s relationship with the establishment was further strained by his involvement in the “cash-for-questions” scandal that arose in 1994 after Fayed named ministers who had accepted money from him in return for tabling parliamentary questions on his behalf. After the disclosures were made, two junior ministers resigned and a new committee was established to monitor standards at Westminster. Fayed’s 1995 attempt to buy London News Radio and his 1996 bid to buy The Observer also attracted considerable publicity, as did his relaunch of the venerable humour magazine Punch (1996–2002).
Although frustrated in his efforts to be accepted as a British citizen—his application was first denied in 1995, and subsequent attempts were also unsuccessful—Fayed continued to play an influential and highly controversial role in Great Britain. Fayed had numerous feuds with the British establishment and helped wreck the careers of several Conservative politicians. The British royalty also became entangled with Fayed when, on Aug. 31, 1997, Diana, princess of Wales , died in a car crash alongside Fayed’s son Emad (“Dodi”), with whom she had been romantically linked; that evening the couple had dined at the Fayed-owned Ritz Hotel in Paris. Two months later, Fayed launched a private investigation into the crash and hired a former French police chief to head it. Although a French court later faulted the driver of Diana’s car, Fayed continued to assert that the British royal family had ordered her execution. A 2008 British inquest later cleared the royals and the secret service of any wrongdoing.
Britannica Stories
|
i don't know
|
In astrology, name the only star sign not represented by aliving creature?
|
Libra The Scales – Star Sign Style
SHOP
Libra The Scales Of Justice…
They say that the balance seeking tendencies of Libra can be likened to the Scales of justice, as this zodiac sign strives towards equality and temperance. Libra is Latin for weighing scales and the Libran nature of weighing and swaying is demonstrated in the glyph of the zodiac sign. So, what’s the legend of Libra?
The Mythology Of Libra The Scales…
As far back as Babylonian astronomy, Libra was known as Mul Zibanu, ‘the Scales’, and were held as sacred to the Sun god Shamash, patron of truth and justice. During the Sun’s transit of the Libra constellation the days and nights are equal and fair, which is where ancient Babylon perhaps originated this thought and association.
Since then, Libra has been associated with themes of fairness, as it balances night and day.
Greek astronomer Geminus of Rhodes wrote about Libra in the first century B.C. and the Egyptian priest Manetho also wrote of Libra in the third century B.C, however Libra only became a constellation later, in ancient Rome.
Manetho introduced the idea that Libra represented legal dealings, linking the constellation with the ‘tables of law’, what is permissible and forbidden, the “people’s magistrate holding lifelong office… Indeed, whatever stands in dispute and needs a ruling the pointer of the balance will determine.”
In Roman mythology, Libra is considered to depict scales held by Astraea, a.k.a Virgo, goddess of justice. Libra follows Virgo in the order of the zodiac too.
In ancient Egypt, the Scales were used to weigh the souls of the dead against the Feather of Truth, a ritual for the afterlife. Again this symbolism is linked to justice, and the symbol for Libra,
, might well come from the hieroglyphic ‘Akhet’, the place of sunrise.
So Civilised!
Libra is the only constellation of the zodiac signs that is not represented by a living creature, although in Arabic culture and in ancient Greece Libra was seen as the Scorpius the Scorpion’s claws (or Scorpio), hung upside down.
Art For Libra The Scales
|
Party of Liberal Democrats
|
What is the name of the 'pre-Roman Road' that runs from Norfolk to Wiltshire?
|
The Thirteenth Astrological Star Sign - David Icke's Official Forums
The Thirteenth Astrological Star Sign
User Name
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
The Thirteenth Astrological Star Sign
The Thirteenth Astrological Star Sign
Ophiuchus (pronounced off-ee-YOO-cuss) represents a man with a snake coiled around his waist. He holds the head of the snake in his left hand and its tail in his right hand. The snake is represented by the constellation Serpens.
http://www.ianridpath.com/startales/ophiuchus.htm
The Zodiac
The 12 “star signs” the astrologers use are the constellations that fall on the ecliptic, otherwise referred to as the zodiac. The ecliptic is merely the path the sun seems to follow as the earth revolves around it. So, if on a certain date you looked at the sun, the current “star sign” would be the constellation directly behind the Sun.
Star Sign (Constellation).............Date
Libra................................Sep 23 Oct 22
Scorpius...........................Oct 23 Nov 21
The zodiac is “A belt on the celestial sphere, about 8° either side of the ecliptic, which forms the background for the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets.” The ecliptic passes through more than 12 constellations, it passes through 13, the thirteenth being Ophiuchus. Why do the astrologers ignore poor old Ophiuchus? Probably because it is not a particularly bright constellation. But that does not change the fact that the ecliptic passes through 13 constellations, not 12.
Star Sign (Constellation)..............Date
http://www.aqua.co.za/assa_jhb/Canopus/c979zodi.htm
The solar year has a little more than 364 days. The lunar month has just over 29 days. To reconcile these awkward figures the ancient astronomers devised a calendar of thirteen equal months, each of 28 days or four equal weeks. This calendar is all but regular, with the full moon falling one day and one hour later each month, and with only a small correction to be made at the end of the year.
The lunar months (or 'moon ths'), were represented in the skies by the constellations of the zodiac; and on the ground by a circle of trees in the sacred grove. Twelve of the signs of the zodiac are familiar to us from the astrology columns in the daily newspapers, but what happened to the thirteenth, and what was its symbol? This question can be answered by consulting the works of the ancient astronomers. Ptolemy of Alexandria gives the name of the constellation, and also the bearing and magnitude of the stars which form it. The constellation was called Ophicius (in Greek) and Serpentarius (in Latin). Both names mean 'snake-holder', and refer to the pythoness, the high priestess of the goddess temples. The symbol of this sign, a bare-breasted woman holding snakes, occurred in the Sumerian; Minoan, and other cultures of the Archaic period. Thus the missing month, the month that we disrupted an orderly calendar to avoid, was the month of the Goddess
Less familiar is the forgotten thirteenth sign, which lies "betwixt" them, Ophicius, the Snake-Holder, the symbol of which was a goddess or priestess brandishing two snakes, and which connoted the most important new moon in the goddess' lunar calendar. Milton, who also wrote the Book of Common Prayer used by Protestant congregations, has told us here in cryptic form that he was mindful that the Christian Satan (aka the Devil), was a new name given to an older but unmentionable deity, the goddess.
More here... http://www.crystalinks.com/ophiuchus.html
THE WORD OBEAH
Now, while it is true that the ORIGIN of the word is indeed obscured and clouded in secrecy, it is primarily because Obeah, as implied above, is in itself clouded in secrecy --- being the remnant of a once very powerful and celebrated SECRET religious Order lost in the mist of time. Even so, slowly over the years clues have surfaced that indicate THAT particular secret religious Order emanated from a certain general geographical area. Those clues, few in number that they may be, strongly point to the fact that the Order originated in or around an area where the Egyptian language was either born, dominant, or used by the priests or religious class --- much as Latin is used by certain religious orders today --- with the power and knowledge of Obeah maintained and rising from the underground ashes of that dispersed Order over the centuries. Considering such a background, it is very probable the etymology of the word sprang from the Egyptian word Ob or Aub, meaning "serpent." Oph is a winged serpent or dragon; and Ab means wisdom/understanding, and together means "Serpent of Wisdom" or "Serpent of Knowledge." To this day Obion is still the Egyptian name for a serpent.....
Moses, who escaped with his people out of Egypt with the full might of the Pharaoh's army hot on their heels all the way to the Red Sea --- where the army reportedly then drowned --- forbade in the name of God, the Israelites even to enquire about the demon Ob, which is translated in the first testament as a necromancer, wizard, or Diviner. In today's world the various translations are wide enough to encompass the type shaman-sorcerer that the infamous Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus apprenticed under, a Diablero, a new-world tribal spiritual elder known to embody a sense of evilness and the ability to shapeshift. Moses himself carries a great deal of importance in all those translations, including right up to this day with Obeah. Even though Moses forbade enquiry into Ob amongst his people, he is seen as the ultimate snake-charmer and among the greatest of magicians. When Moses doubted he was really hearing the voice of God, he was asked what he was holding in his hand. When he replied that he was holding a rod, he is commanded to throw it to the ground. When he does, the rod becomes a serpent. When he picks it up it becomes a rod again. Later, under the direction of Moses, when Aaron throws his rod down before Pharaoh, it becomes a snake as well.(Exodus 7:1-16).....
Throughout the ancient world, the Middle East and Egypt, because of the brilliantly clear desert night skys, the stars and the constellations carried deep significance, both for the wandering tribes such as those following Moses and the great civilizations and city-states such as Babylonia, Sumeria, and Egypt. Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer is one of those desert-sky constellations. Most people pretty much know what the Zodiac is --- the constellations on the plane of the ecliptic through which the sun passes in the course of a year --- and what their "Sun Sign" is in relation to the Zodiac (i.e., Sagittarius, Taurus, etc.). What most people don't know is that there are actually thirteen Sun Signs, NOT twelve. According to the official modern constellation boundaries that astronomers use today, the sun passes through thirteen constellations, not twelve. The Greeks chose to remove one of the original thirteen constellations from the Zodiac in order to accomplish their desire to have each sign rule for an even 30º of sky, so they selected Ophiuchus to be eliminated. It can only be because of his origins in Egypt as one of their most powerful dieties, on par with Osiris and Thoth, all of whom answered only to Ra. Mysteriously enough, just like Obeah is secret, hidden, and unknown, the "thirteenth constellation" of the Zodiac, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer is secret, hidden, and unknown. About one person in twenty is an "Ophiuchus," and they don't even know it.....
The peoples of ancient times (most typically the Pythagoreans, but others as well) had a legend that a kind of Light, described as a "living fire," flowed through all living things. Guarding this Flame was the serpent Ophioneus, very similar in respects to his nearly same namesake Ophiuchus. He was said to lay coiled in the Waters of Life. If anyone obstructed or hindered the Light of the Flame, Ophioneus would rise out of the water like a monster and consume them. The Greek philosopher Pherecydes (circa 600-550 BC) wrote a great deal about Ophioneus, having obtained the doctrines from the Phoenicians, also known as Ophites (Greece was first colonized by Ophites, serpent worshippers from both Egypt and Phoenicia). The Ophites venerated a serpent by the deity-title Ab, sometimes rendered Ob and Ob Aur, meaning Father --- as in the procreator of All. They also had the watery serpent Leviathan or Thiavat, which is same as Ophioneus. All of this ties into Abaddon that appears in Revelations as the Angel of the Abyss. It is unclear if the forces of the Abyss are fully good or evil in any way. The Obic forces that guard the Light and keep it flowing apparently take it by whatever means necessary and return it back to where it belongs when a person fails to let it flow or obstructs it.....
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/...01/obeah2.html
Ophiuchus in the Arts
Today a cult of followers of all ages have kept him immortal so that we could look back on him today and see an image of Ophiuchus the Serpent Holder as he might have appeared during the ...
http://www.startistics.com/astronomo...h/ophinart.htm
ASCLEPIUS : Greek god of medicine & doctors ; mythology ; pictures ...
Asklepios was afterwards placed amongst the stars as the Constellation Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer ... CULT OF ASKLEPIOS. See the Cult of Asklepios page ...
http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Asklepios.html
Ophiuchus or Serpentarius
Myth and history: Ophiuchus Serpentarius , is Ofiuco with the Italians, Schlangentrager (Snake Bearer ... Mar 26th 1997 The bodies of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate techno-religious cult who'd ...
http://users.winshop.com.au/annew/Ophiuchus.html
Ophiuchus Constellation
... that the constellation represents Asclepius or Aesculapius, the healer of Greek myth whose cult was closely associated with serpents. This identification is by no means certain. Stars: Ophiuchus is a ...
http://home.xtra.co.nz/hosts/Wingmakers/Ophiuchus.html
eSky: Ophiuchus
The group of stars has been known by the name Ophiuchus for two thousand years or more. ... that the constellation represents Asclepius or Aesculapius, the healer of Greek myth whose cult ...
This is a work in progress. Please feel free to add your own research to this thread.
With LOVE.
Last edited by limelady; 31-05-2007 at 11:43 AM.
Likes: 63 (47 Posts)
Well I'd add the obvious that the above misses out:
Ophiuchus had to go becuase it was a product of a Lunar calander (hence association with goddess) when all the sun worshiping blokes in skirts took charge of Pagan europe....
The Islamic world is still on a Lunar calander
__________________
Free your Self and Free the World
6 YEARS of solid Vote Leave/expose NWO on my Facebook Timeline, every one an infoweapon to be aimed at the right target: arm up and use them!
Location: Alkashic Cocktail Lounge & Piano Bar
Posts: 4,446
Likes: 0 (0 Posts)
The Book of Yahweh is also Lunarcentric; the New Moon, as a Sign for setting of Yahwehs' Sacred Days.
Is not the Mayan calander also Lunar?
And is the serpent holder not also deliberately hidden by the alleged reptilians?
__________________
Nothing is concealed that will not be disclosed.
Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists but empty space and we are but a thought.
Posts: 8,369
Likes: 2 (2 Posts)
asian countries although following solar/georgian calendar for everyday life, business. use the lunar calendar for religous ceremonies.
this is a cool thread. i never realised the 13th sign existed etc. will have to read this in depth, great find.also goddess worhip, more based on the feminine qulaity of creation/birth than actual gender of enitities. also perfect pr, a vengeful god with a nice womanly facade.
__________________
Fearlessness means faith in God: faith in His protection, His justice, His wisdom, His mercy, His Love, and His omnipresence… To be fit for Self-realization, man must be fearless.— Paramahansa Yogananda
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
Likes: 3 (3 Posts)
Serpents in Mytholgy/Religion
The image of the serpent was tremendously significant in the ancient world. Societies and scriptures of the Near East simultaneously attributed two highly symbolic roles to serpents. One role connected serpents to the heavens by having them represent deity, creative powers, and healing. The other linked them with the underworld and associated them with evil, harm, and destructive influences. We who live in modern times have no difficulty appreciating this double symbol because, in fact, this duality persists in our own day. The symbol of the healing serpent appears on the physician's caduceus, while a person of disreputable actions—especially treachery—is sometimes referred to as "a snake."
Egyptian Evidence
one of the forms of the god Atum, believed to be a primeval creator deity, was the snake or serpent that continued to live season after season. In a fascinating dialogue with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the netherworld and of final judgment,[2] Atum predicts the destruction of the world he created and his own reversion back to the form of a serpent or snake.
Another primeval deity mentioned in the Pyramid Texts is Amun, one of whose two primary representations was that of the snake named Kematef (meaning "he who has completed his time").[5] After the Eleventh Dynasty (the Egyptian Middle Kingdom), Amun appeared as the god of the capital of Thebes and eventually merged with the sun god to be become known as Amun-Re, the supreme state god in the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1090 B.C.). At Karnak it was believed that Amun-Re and his divine consort, the goddess Mut, gave birth to a son named Khonsu. Mut is also symbolized as a snake and is called "Mut the resplendent serpent."[6] Thus the divine triad or family, the preeminent unit of social organization among the gods and humans according to the Egyptian worldview, was linked to the image of the serpent.
When corn was harvested and grapes pressed into wine, an offering was made to the harvest goddess, Thermuthis, who was depicted as either a snake or a woman with a serpent's head.[7] Geb, the god of the earth and "the father of the gods," is referred to as "the father of snakes" that emerge from the earth
Veneration of serpents or snakes in predynastic Egypt and during the Old Kingdom coalesced around the most important serpent-goddess of Lower Egypt: Wadjet. Wadjet (meaning "green one") was the general Egyptian term for cobra, and in that form she became the symbol of royalty and unification.
In opposition to all that was good in ancient Egypt, the most preeminent of all the demons, evil gods, or evil powers was Apophis, who was represented by a snake.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead fairly crawls with other serpent demons as well, sometimes winged or rearing up, occasionally even standing on legs and spitting fire.
Mesopotamian Evidence
The Sumerian god of spring vegetation, Tammuz, was linked to the image of the snake. Both he and his mother bore the title "mother-great-serpent of Heaven," that is, the serpent deity who emanated from the heaven god Anu.[16] The snake was also the sacred symbol of the god Ningizzida, who was called in Sumerian mythology "the companion of Tammuz.
Nidaba, was shown in representations with serpents (springing from her shoulders).
The greatest sovereign the Sumerians ever produced, King Gudea of the city-state Lagash, placed a representation of a serpent deity at the entrance of one of his temples around 2050 B.C., presumably to act as a guardian of the sacred edifice where life is renewed. Fourteen hundred years later, King Nebuchadnezzar II, ruler of the Neo-Babylonian empire (605–562 B.C.), dedicated the monumental Ishtar Gate of Babylon to the god Marduk with the following inscription:
(Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, son of) Nabopolassar (King of Babylon am I). The gate of Nana (Ishtar . . . I built) with (blue) enamelled bricks . . . for Marduk my lord. Lusty bulls of bronze and mighty figures of serpents I placed at their thresholds . . . Marduk, exalted lord . . . eternal life . . . give as a gift.
The forces of chaos are headed by none other than Tiamat, who is herself a female serpent (frequently referred to as a dragon).
Phoenician and Greek Evidence
Like the Greek deity Asclepius, Eshmun was the god of medicine whose symbol was a serpent.
Though Asclepius is also represented as a serpent in Greek portrayals, an actual Sidonian coin shows Eshmun leaning on a staff with a serpent entwined about it.
Sidonian depictions of Eshmun also parallel ancient Syrian representations of their god of healing, Shadrapa, whose image is that of the serpent.
The most important Minoan deity was the mother earth goddess of the city-state Knossos, or Cnossus, the capital of Cretan civilization. She is similar to fertility goddesses worshiped elsewhere in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. On Crete she was usually depicted in small statue form as a woman holding a snake in each hand, with a bird perched on top of her head.
The Agathos Daimon was often depicted as a winged serpent and regarded as a good spirit.
Even the most famous example of the winged serpent motif outside of (but related to) the Near East, namely, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ("feathered serpent"), is impressive because that god was revered as the founder of priestly wisdom (almost as if the Aztecs were somehow familiar with Jesus' statement to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves" [Matthew 10:16]). Quetzalcoatl's high priests even bore the title "Prince of Serpents."
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/disp...le=jbms&id=254
NINGIZZIDA: A Goddess who can appear in serpent form and does magic and healing.
Ningizzida was a fertility god. Originally depicted as a serpent with a human head, Ningizzida became known as a magical god of healing.
Ningishzida is the earliest known symbol of snakes twining (some say in copulation) around an axial rod. It predates the Caduceus of Hermes, the Rod of Asclepius and the staff of Moses by more than a thousand years.
Serpent worship in early Christian art.
A Serpent god
(An old Chinese print)
E.A., the standing serpent wave, offers the secret of the stars to a priest.
Yahweh is the serpent that curls around the prophets. His head is at the lower right at the bottom of his column or pillar.
Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan "lord of life"and King of Tula being `consumed' by a `serpent' (left). Beside him is a statue of the Great Sun Buddha, dating from the 12th century in Cambodia. He is seated in the coils of a snake. The parallel between the two `saviors' is remarkable. Both statues suggest a wormhole connection.
Jesus as a serpent-god from bas-relief in Egypt. This drawing was made by a member of Napoleon's army in 1798, one hundred years before the same face appeared to the world `for the first time ever' on the photograph of the Shroud of Turin.
With LOVE.
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
Serpents in Myhtology/Religion
The Scandinavian Tree of Life.
The Gnostics called this serpent CHNOUBIS or KANOBIS and said he was the guardian of a 12-angled pyramid with holes that surrounds the Earth.
Quetzalcoatl / Viracocha
The Hindu god Shiva.
Enki, as the serpent god.
Pictured above left: Greek and Roman artists depicted the god Ammon with a pillar-like trunk in the form of a serpent.
Right: Serpent columns of the Toltec Temple of the Warriors, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, accord with the world tradition:
the male dragon manifest as the pillar of heaven
Mercury/Hermes.
Caracalla adoring the God-Serpent of Pergamum.
Maya vision serpent.
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
Likes: 3 (3 Posts)
Vishnu resting on Ananta-Shesha between the cycles of creation.
The name ouroboros (or, in Latinized form, uroborus) is Greek οὐροβóρος, "tail-devourer". The depiction of the serpent is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way, as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens.
Snake Goddess describes a number of figurines of a woman holding a serpent in each hand found during excavation of Minoan archaeological sites in Crete dating from approximately 1600 BCE.
Adam, Eve, and the (female) Serpent at the entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Medieval Christian art often depicted the Edenic Serpent as a woman, thus both emphasizing the Serpent's seductiveness as well as its relationship to Eve. (This connection might be due do the influence of Lilith, as well.) Several early Church Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, interpreted the Hebrew "Heva" as not only the name of Eve, but in its aspirated form as "female serpent."
Garuda and Naga are represented together on the city wall at Preah Khan. Garuda as usual is the victor in the encounter; thrusting out his chest, he treads one vanquished Naga underfoot and holds another aloft as a trophy.
A modern imitation of an Angkorian Garuda and Naga sculpture stands at the entrance to a bridge in downtown Siem Reap. Garuda is mounted just above Naga's central head. Again, the impression is of a raptor with a serpent in its claws.
This thread is incredible! Lots of hard work! You rock, IAAIA!
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
This thread is incredible! Lots of hard work! You rock, IAAIA!
Thank you Tinmenace.
Here's some more.....
Jesus as the crucified serpent. By current report it's a copy from the ancient "The Book of Abraham the Jew", found during the 14th century.
The Celtic god Cernunnos.
The Churning of the Sea of Milk covers another of the walls of Angkor Wat. The asuras (giants) and the gods team up to pull on the body of the giant naga (serpent) Vasuki, which is coiled around Mount Mandara.
Brahma, the planet Saturn, encircled ring-like by serpents.
Uxmal, the West Building of the Nunnery Quadrangle. The reliefs show the God Chac and various serpents.
After his death, Aesculapius became a god and he was also placed among the constellations, where he is pictured as a man holding a serpent in his hands.
The Vatican's Crest: the 'snake-/dragon' as displayed in the Vatican Museum...
Quote:
The word 'vatican' comes from Latin and is a contraction of two words in the following way:
'Vatis' = 'prophetic' or 'diviner'
These two words combined make:
'the prophetic- or made divine serpent'
The Vaticaan is a place, so you may say, that 'Vatican' means 'the place of the prophetic- and worshipped serpent'.
http://www.sign2god.com/folders/vati...ticaan-en.html
The Phoenician serpent god, alias Basilisk. The serpent, as well as the image of the sun, is always a phallic symbol in ancient religion. Basilisk is where the Roman Catholic Church got the name-- St. Peter's Basilica. Basilica is the old Greek name for the temple of the phallic god. How appropriate this is in view of the perpetual obsessions of the priests of "Mother Church." It also is well complimented by the obelisk in St. Peter's square which is a world wide phallic symbol complete with the phallic ball on top.
Moses interceded with God and was instructed: "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live" (Numbers 21:8).
Location: WITHIN ALL THAT IS
Posts: 2,787
Likes: 3 (3 Posts)
Serpent (symbolism)
Serpent is a word of Latin origin (serpens, serpentis) that is commonly used in a specifically mythic or religious context, signifying a snake that is to be regarded not as a mundane natural phenomenon nor as an object of scientific zoology, but as the bearer of some symbolic value.....
Particular Types of Serpents in Mythology
Dragons
Sometimes serpents and dragons are used interchangeably, having similar symbolic functions. The venom of the serpent is thought to have a fiery quality similar to a fire spitting dragon. The Greek Ladon and the Norse Níðhöggr are sometimes described as serpents and sometimes as dragons. In Germanic mythology, serpent (Old English: wyrm, Old High German: wurm, Old Norse: ormr) is used interchangeable with the Greek borrowing dragon (OE: draca, OHG: trahho, ON: dreki). In China, the Indian serpent nāga was equated with the lóng or Chinese dragon. The Aztec and Toltec serpent god Quetzalcoatl also has dragon like wings, like its equivalent in Mayan mythology Gukumatz ("feathered serpent").
Sea Serpents
Sea serpents were giant cryptozoological creatures once believed to live in water, whether sea monsters such as the Leviathan or lake monsters such as the Loch Ness Monster. If they were referred to as "sea snakes", they were understood to be the actual snakes that live in Indo-Pacific waters (Family Hydrophiidae).
Cosmic Serpents
The serpent, when forming a ring with its tail in its mouth, is a clear and widespread symbol of the "All-in-All", the totality of existence, infinity and the cyclic nature of the cosmos. The most well known version of this is the Aegypto-Greek Ourobouros. It is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens.
In Hindu mythology Vishnu is said to sleep while floating on the cosmic waters on the serpent Shesha. In the Puranas Shesha holds all the planets of the universe on his hoods and to constantly sing the glories of Vishnu from all his mouths. He is sometimes referred to as "Ananta-Shesha" which means "Endless Shesha." In the Samudra manthan chapter of the Puranas Shesha loosens Mount Mandara for it to be used as a churning rod by the Asuras and Devas to churn the ocean of milk in the heavens in order to make Soma (or Amrita), the divine elixir of immortality. As a churning rope another giant serpent called Vasuki is used.
In pre-Columbian Central America Quetzalcoatl was sometimes depicted as biting its own tail. The mother of Quetzalcoatl was the Aztec goddess Coatlicue ("the one with the skirt of serpents"), also known as Cihuacoatl ("The Lady of the serpent"). Quetzalcoatl's father was Mixcoatl ("Cloud Serpent"). He was identified with the Milky Way, the stars and the heavens in several Mesoamerican cultures.
The demi-god Aidophedo of the West African Ashanti is also a serpent biting its own tail. In Dahomey mythology of Benin in West Africa, the serpent that supports everything on its many coils was named Dan. In the Vodun of Benin and Haiti Ayida-Weddo (a.k.a. Aida-Wedo, Aido Quedo, "Rainbow-Serpent") is a spirit of fertility, rainbows and snakes, and a companion or wife to Dan, the father of all spirits. As Vodun was exported to Haiti through the slave trade Dan became Danballah, Damballah or Damballah-Wedo. Because of his association with snakes, he is sometimes disguised as Moses, who carried a snake on his staff. He is also thought by many to be the same entity of Saint Patrick, known as a snake banisher.
The serpent Hydra is a star constellation representing either the serpent thrown angrily into the sky by Apollo or the Lernaean Hydra as defeated by Heracles for one of his Twelve Labours. The constellation Serpens represents a snake being tamed by Ophiuchus the snake-handler, another constellation. The most probable interpretation is that Ophiuchus represents the healer Asclepius.
Chthonic serpents and sacred trees
In many myths the chthonic serpent (sometimes a pair) lives in or is coiled around a Tree of Life situated in a divine garden. In the Genesis story of the Torah and Biblical Old Testament the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is situated in the Garden of Eden together with the tree of immortality. In Greek mythology Ladon coiled around the tree in the garden of the Hesperides protecting the entheogenic golden apples.
Níðhöggr gnaws the roots of Yggdrasill in this illustration from a 17th century Icelandic manuscript.Similarly Níðhöggr the dragon of Norse mythology eats from the roots of the Yggdrasil the World Tree.
Under yet another Tree (the Bodhi tree of Enlightenment), the Buddha sat in ecstatic meditation. When a storm arose, the mighty serpent king Mucalinda rose up from his place beneath the earth and enveloped the Buddha in seven coils for seven days, not to break his ecstatic state.
The Vision Serpent was also a symbol of rebirth in Mayan mythology, fuelling some cross-Atlantic cultural contexts favored in pseudoarchaeology. The Vision Serpent goes back to earlier Maya conceptions, and lies at the center of the world as the Mayans conceived it. "It is in the center axis atop the World Tree. Essentially the World Tree and the Vision Serpent, representing the king, created the center axis which communicates between the spiritual and the earthly worlds or planes. It is through ritual that the king could bring the center axis into existence in the temples and create a doorway to the spiritual world, and with it power". (Schele and Friedel, 1990: 68)
Sometimes the Tree of Life is represented (in a combination with similar concepts such as the World Tree and Axis mundi or "World Axis") by a staff such as those used by shamans. Examples of such staffs featuring coiled snakes in mythology are the caduceus of Hermes, the Rod of Asclepius and the staff of Moses. The oldest known representation is that of the Sumerian fertility god Ningizzida. Ningizzida was sometimes depicted as a serpent with a human head, eventually becoming a god of healing and magic. It is the companion of Dumuzi (Tammuz) with whom it stood at the gate of heaven. In the Louvre, there is a famous green steatite vase carved for king Gudea of Lagash (dated variously 2200–2025 BCE) with an inscription dedicated to Ningizzida. Ningizzida was the ancestor of Gilgamesh, who according to the epic dived to the bottom of the waters to retrieve the plant of life. But while he rested from his labor, a serpent came and ate the plant. The snake became immortal, and Gilgamesh was destined to die.
Ningizzida has been popularised in the 20th C. by Raku Kei Reiki (a.k.a. "The Way of the Fire Dragon") where "Nin Giz Zida" is believed to be a fire serpent of Tibetan rather than Sumerian origin. Nin Giz Zida is another name for the ancient Hindu concept of Kundalini, a Sanskrit word meaning either "coiled up" or "coiling like a snake". Kundalini refers to the mothering intelligence behind yogic awakening and spiritual maturation leading to altered states of consciousness. There are a number of other translations of the term usually emphasizing a more serpentine nature to the word— e.g. 'serpent power'. It has been suggested by Joseph Campbell that the symbol of snakes coiled around a staff is an ancient representation of Kundalini physiology. The staff represents the spinal column with the snake(s) being energy channels. In the case of two coiled snakes they usually cross each other seven times, a possible reference to the seven energy centers called chakras.
In Egypt, Ra and Atum ("he who completes or perfects") were the same god, Atum, the "counter-Ra," was associated with earth animals, including the serpent: Nehebkau ("he who harnesses the souls") was the two headed serpent god who guarded the entrance to the underworld. He is often seen as the son of the snake goddess Renenutet, often confused with the snake goddess Wadjet.
The image of the serpent as the embodiment of the wisdom transmitted by Sophia was an emblem used by gnosticism, especially those sects that the more orthodox characterized as "Ophites" ("Serpent People"). The chthonic serpent was one of the earth-animals associated with the cult of Mithras. The Basilisk, the venomous "king of serpents" with the glance that kills, was hatched by a serpent, Pliny the Elder and others thought, from the egg of a cock.
Outside Eurasia, in Yoruba mythology, Oshunmare was another mythic regenerating serpent.
The Rainbow Serpent (also known as the Rainbow Snake) is a major mythological being for Aboriginal people across Australia, although the creation stories associated with it are best known from northern Australia. In Fiji Ratumaibulu was a serpent god who ruled the underworld and made fruit trees bloom.
Serpents in Particular Religious and Cultural Traditions
Cambodian Mythology
See also: Naga (mythology)
Serpents, or nagas, play a particularly important role in Cambodian mythology. A well-known story explains the emergence of the Khmer people from the union of Indian and indigenous elements, the latter being represented as nagas. According to the story, an Indian brahmana named Kaundinya came to Cambodia, which at the time was under the dominion of the naga king. The naga princess Soma sallied forth to fight against the invader but was defeated. Presented with the option of marrying the victorious Kaundinya, Soma readily agreed to do so, and together they ruled the land. The Khmer people are their descendants.[4]
Greek Mythology
See also: Dragons in Greek mythology
Serpents figured prominently in archaic Greek myths. According to some sources, Ophion ("serpent", a.k.a. Ophioneus), ruled the world with Eurynome before the two of them were cast down by Cronus and Rhea.
The Minoan Snake Goddess brandished a serpent in either hand, perhaps evoking her role as source of wisdom, rather than her role as Mistress of the Animals (Potnia theron), with a leopard under each arm. She is a Minoan version of the Canaanite fertility goddess Asherah. It is not by accident that later the infant Heracles, a liminal hero on the threshold between the old ways and the new Olympian world, also brandished the two serpents that "threatened" him in his cradle. Classical Greeks did not perceive that the threat was merely the threat of wisdom. But the gesture is the same as that of the Cretan goddess.
Typhon the enemy of the Olympian gods is described as a vast grisly monster with a hundred heads and a hundred serpents issuing from his thighs, who was conquered and cast into Tartarus by Zeus, or confined beneath volcanic regions, where he is the cause of eruptions. Typhon is thus the chthonic figuration of volcanic forces. Amongst his children by Echidna are Cerberus (a monstrous three-headed dog with a snake for a tail and a serpentine mane), the serpent tailed Chimaera, the serpent-like chthonic water beast Lernaean Hydra and the hundred-headed serpentine dragon Ladon. Both the Lernaean Hydra and Ladon were slain by Heracles.
Python was the earth-dragon of Delphi, always represented in the vase-paintings and by sculptors as a serpent. Pytho was the chthonic enemy of Apollo, who slew her and remade her former home his own oracle, the most famous in Classical Greece.
Statue of Asclepius in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Amphisbaena a Greek word, from amphis, meaning "both ways", and bainein, meaning "to go", also called the "Mother of Ants", is a mythological, ant-eating serpent with a head at each end. According to Greek mythology, the mythological amphisbaena was spawned from the blood that dripped from Medusa the Gorgon's head as Perseus flew over the Libyan Desert with it in his hand. Medusa and the other Gorgons were vicious female monsters with sharp fangs and hair of living, venomous snakes. The Gorgons wore a belt of two intertwined serpents in the same configuration of the caduceus.
Asclepius, the son of Apollo and Koronis, learned the secrets of keeping death at bay after observing one serpent bringing another (which Asclepius himself had fatally wounded) healing herbs. To prevent the entire human race from becoming immortal under Asclepius's care, Zeus killed him with a bolt of lightning. Asclepius' death at the hands of Zeus illustrates man's inability to challenge the natural order that separates mortal men from the gods. In honor of Asclepius, snakes were often used in healing rituals. Non-poisonous snakes were left to crawl on the floor in dormitories where the sick and injured slept. In The Library, Apollodorus claimed that Athena gave Asclepius a vial of blood from the Gorgons. Gorgon blood had magical properties: if taken from the left side of the Gorgon, it was a fatal poison; from the right side, the blood was capable of bringing the dead back to life. However Euripides wrote in his tragedy Ion that the Athenian queen Creusa had inherited this vial from her ancestor Erichthonios, who was a snake himself and receiving the vial from Athena. In this version the blood of Medusa had the healing power while the lethal poison originated from Medusa's serpents.
Laocoön was allegedly a priest of Poseidon (or of Apollo, by some accounts) at Troy; he was famous for warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks, and for his subsequent divine execution. Poseidon (some say Athena), who was supporting the Greeks, subsequently sent sea-serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus. Another tradition states that Apollo sent the serpents for an unrelated offense, and only unlucky timing caused the Trojans to misinterpret them as punishment for striking the Horse.
Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great and a princess of the primitive land of Epirus, had the reputation of a snake-handler, and it was in serpent form that Zeus was said to have fathered Alexander upon her; tame snakes were still to be found at Macedonian Pella in the 2nd century AD (Lucian, Alexander the false prophet) and at Ostia a bas-relief shows paired coiled serpents flanking a dressed altar, symbols or embodiments of the Lares of the household, worthy of veneration (Veyne 1987 illus p 211).
Norse Mythology
See also: Jörmungandr
Jörmungandr, alternately referred to as the Midgard Serpent or World Serpent, is a sea serpent of the Norse mythology, the middle child of Loki and the giantess Angrboða.
According to the Prose Edda, Odin took Loki's three children, Fenrisúlfr, Hel and Jörmungandr. He tossed Jörmungandr into the great ocean that encircles Midgard. The serpent grew so big that he was able to surround the Earth and grasp his own tail, and as a result he earned the alternate name of the Midgard Serpent or World Serpent. Jörmungandr's arch enemy is the god Thor.
Judaism and Christianity
In the Hebrew Bible (the Tanach) of Judaism, the speaking serpent (nachash) in the Garden of Eden brought forbidden knowledge, but was not identified with Satan in the Book of Genesis. "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made," Genesis 3:1 reminded its readers. Nor is there any indication in Genesis that the Serpent was a deity in its own right, aside from the fact that the Pentateuch is not otherwise rife with talking animals. Although the identity of the Serpent as Satan is made explicit in the later writings of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament of the Bible, in Genesis the Serpent is merely portrayed as a deceptive creature promoting as good what God had directly forbidden, and particularly cunning in manipulating truth toward its deceptive ends. (cf. Gen. 3:4-5 and 3:22)
Though it was cursed for its role in the Garden, this was not the end of the serpent, who continued to be venerated in the folk religion of Judah and was tolerated by official religion until the in time of king Hezekiah.
A conversion of a rod to a snake and back was believed to have been experienced by Moses and later by his brother Aaron according to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish hagiography:
And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand and caught it and it became a rod in his hand. (Exodus 4:2-4)
The Book of Numbers provides an origin for an archaic bronze serpent associated with Moses, with the following narratives:
"21.6. And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. 7. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. 8. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. 9. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived." (Book of Numbers 21:6-9)
When the young reforming king Hezekiah came to the throne of Judah in the late 8th century:
"He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan." 2 Kings 18:4.
In Christianity, a connection between the Serpent and Satan is strongly made, and Genesis 3:14 where God curses the serpent, is seen in that light: "And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life". Some feel that this seems to indicate that the serpent had legs prior to this punishment. But if the lying serpent was in fact Satan himself (as he is called THE serpent or dragon), rather than an ordinary snake simply possessed by Satan, then the reference to crawling and dust is purely symbolic reference to his ultimate humiliation and defeat.
In the Gospel of Matthew 3:7, John the Baptist calls the Pharisees and Saducees visiting him a `brood of vipers`. Later in Matthew 23:33, Jesus himself uses this imagery, observing: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Gehenna?" ("Hell" is the usual translation of Jesus' word Gehenna.)
Although in the minority, there are at least a couple of passages in the New Testament that do not present the snake with negative connotation. When sending out the twelve apostles, Jesus exhorted them "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16).
Jesus made a comparison between himself and the setting up of the snake on the hill in the desert by Moses:
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:14-15).
In this comparison Jesus was not so much connecting himself to the serpent[citation needed], but showing the analogy of his being a divinely provided object of faith, through which God would provide salvation, just as God provided healing to those who looked in faith to the brass serpent. The other most significant reference to the serpent in the New Testament occurs in Revelation 12:9, where the identity of the serpent in Genesis is made explicit:
"The great dragon was hurled down--that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray..."
This verse lends support to the view that of the serpent being Satan himself, which helps to explain, as well, why Eve was not surprised to be spoken to by the serpent--it was not a talking snake, but a beautiful and intelligent (yet evil) angelic being.
Veyne, Paul, 1987. A History of Private Life : 1. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
Snake handling is a religious ritual in a small number of Christian churches in the U.S., usually characterized as rural and Pentecostal. Practitioners believe it dates to antiquity and quote the Bible to support the practice, especially:
"And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." (Mark 16:17-18)
"Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." (Luke 10:19)
Modern Medicine
........................Caduceus.................. ..The Star of Life features a Rod of Asclepius
Snakes entwined the staffs both of Hermes (the caduceus) and of Asclepius, where a single snake entwined the rough staff. On Hermes' caduceus, the snakes were not merely duplicated for symmetry, they were paired opposites. (This motif is congruent with the phurba.) The wings at the head of the staff identified it as belonging to the winged messenger, Hermes, the Roman Mercury, who was the god of magic, diplomacy and rhetoric, of inventions and discoveries, the protector both of merchants and that allied occupation, to the mythographers' view, of thieves. It is however Hermes' role as psychopomp, the escort of newly-deceased souls to the afterlife, that explains the origin of the snakes in the caduceus since this was also the role of the Sumerian entwined serpent god Ningizzida, with whom Hermes has sometimes been equated with.
In Late Antiquity, as the arcane study of alchemy developed, Mercury was understood to be the protector of those arts too and of arcane or occult "Hermetic' information in general. Chemistry and medicines linked the rod of Hermes with the staff of the healer Asclepius, which was wound with a serpent; it was conflated with Mercury's rod, and the modern medical symbol— which should simply be the rod of Asclepius— often became Mercury's wand of commerce. Another version is used in alchemy whereas the snake is crucufied, known as Nicolas Flamel's caduceus. Art historian Walter J. Friedlander, in The Golden Wand of Medicine: A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine (1992) collected hundreds of examples of the caduceus and the rod of Asclepius and found that professional associations were just somewhat more likely to use the staff of Asclepius, while commercial organizations in the medical field were more likely to use the caduceus.
Last edited by i am all i am; 26-05-2007 at 11:17 PM.
http://astrology.aryabhatt.com/astrology_glossary.asp
So why is this seal here ???
Well, shown above is the reference to the Eagle Nebula, hence the eagle on the seal. There are 13 stars (13th star sign) above the head of the eagle (Eagle Nebula) holding 13 arrows in the left claw (Caput Draconis - the serpents head) and a branch with 13 leaves on a branch in the right claw (Cauda Draconis - the serpents tail).
Snake Goddess describes a number of figurines of a woman holding a serpent in each hand found during excavation of Minoan archaeological sites in Crete dating from approximately 1600 BCE.
The Greek word drakõn [1], 'serpent', is related to the word drakos, meaning 'eye'.
Through the Druidic calendar the Elder tree is the 13th tree, with the December correlation the same as Ophiuchus, that is represented by the planetary ruler Saturn, and Saturn is linked through the occult with the Star of David formed by the 13 stars above the eagle. The eagle is representative of the Birch tree in the Druidic calendar and the planetary ruler is the Sun, hence the sun symbolism around the eye on the pyramid.
Scottish Rite Eagle
There are 18 objects surrounding the 13 stars. 1+ 8 = 9. There are nine muses of the Goddess...
Quote:
The nine named Muses each inspired a different musical or poetic field, with Urania as the inspirer of astronomy and the mysteries of the stars.
Posts: 217
Likes: 0 (0 Posts)
Stunning information, really - I'd like to come back on IAAIA as soon as I have finished Philip gardiner's books about the Serpent Grail, which contain much useful information too, about the origins of the serpent myth and its relationship to the Alchemical tradition amongst other things.
Thank you very much for posting such extensive and valuable info.
__________________
"Let it be known once and for all that when real spiritual forces are operating in the
human domain, there is never any question of mystery or befuddlement. There is only
direct, austere confrontation, administered understanding and truth." Michael Tsarion
"Only the Good discerns the good" Elisabeth Barrett Browning
Likes: 0 (0 Posts)
Thanks for putting this out there also.
Since Ptolemy based his astronomy on other older civilization, I forgot about this constellation all together. The constellation also doesn't have a regular zodiac host so I completely forgot about the significance when they dropped the zodiac constellation. The four houses of constellations of three are equal as the twelve of the zodiac we know. I wonder who's been pondering on the ramifications of 13 months of the zodiac, i am all i am?
__________________
I can no longer have fair and intelligent conversation with people here, without them resorting to the use of personal attacks. I have been targeted as a scapegoat for my defensive actions. I cannot discuss new topics and stop the rampant amounts of misinformation when it happens, where it applies. If it can happen to me it can happen to you.
|
i don't know
|
In which Dickens novel do 'Bitzer', 'Sleary', and 'James Harthouse' appear?
|
SparkNotes: Hard Times: Character List
Character List
Plot Overview
Analysis of Major Characters
Thomas Gradgrind - A wealthy, retired merchant in Coketown, England; he later becomes a Member of Parliament. Mr. Gradgrind espouses a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and cold, hard fact. He describes himself as an “eminently practical” man, and he tries to raise his children—Louisa, Tom, Jane, Adam Smith, and Malthus—to be equally practical by forbidding the development of their imaginations and emotions.
Read an in-depth analysis of Thomas Gradgrind.
Louisa - Gradgrind’s daughter, later Bounderby’s wife. Confused by her coldhearted upbringing, Louisa feels disconnected from her emotions and alienated from other people. While she vaguely recognizes that her father’s system of education has deprived her childhood of all joy, Louisa cannot actively invoke her emotions or connect with others. Thus she marries Bounderby to please her father, even though she does not love her husband. Indeed, the only person she loves completely is her brother Tom.
Read an in-depth analysis of Louisa.
Thomas Gradgrind, Jr - . Gradgrind’s eldest son and an apprentice at Bounderby’s bank, who is generally called Tom. Tom reacts to his strict upbringing by becoming a dissipated, hedonistic, hypocritical young man. Although he appreciates his sister’s affection, Tom cannot return it entirely—he loves money and gambling even more than he loves Louisa. These vices lead him to rob Bounderby’s bank and implicate Stephen as the robbery’s prime suspect.
Josiah Bounderby - Gradgrind’s friend and later Louisa’s husband. Bounderby claims to be a self-made man and boastfully describes being abandoned by his mother as a young boy. From his childhood poverty he has risen to become a banker and factory owner in Coketown, known by everyone for his wealth and power. His true upbringing, by caring and devoted parents, indicates that his social mobility is a hoax and calls into question the whole notion of social mobility in nineteenth-century England.
Read an in-depth analysis of Josiah Bounderby.
Cecelia Jupe - The daughter of a clown in Sleary’s circus. Sissy is taken in by Gradgrind when her father disappears. Sissy serves as a foil, or contrast, to Louisa: while Sissy is imaginative and compassionate, Louisa is rational and, for the most part, unfeeling. Sissy embodies the Victorian femininity that counterbalances mechanization and industry. Through Sissy’s interaction with her, Louisa is able to explore her more sensitive, feminine sides.
Mrs. Sparsit - Bounderby’s housekeeper, who goes to live at the bank apartments when Bounderby marries Louisa. Once a member of the aristocratic elite, Mrs. Sparsit fell on hard times after the collapse of her marriage. A selfish, manipulative, dishonest woman, Mrs. Sparsit cherishes secret hopes of ruining Bounderby’s marriage so that she can marry him herself. Mrs. Sparsit’s aristocratic background is emphasized by the narrator’s frequent allusions to her “Roman” and “Coriolanian” appearance.
Stephen Blackpool - A Hand in Bounderby’s factory. Stephen loves Rachael but is unable to marry her because he is already married, albeit to a horrible, drunken woman. A man of great honesty, compassion, and integrity, Stephen maintains his moral ideals even when he is shunned by his fellow workers and fired by Bounderby. Stephen’s values are similar to those endorsed by the narrator.
|
Hard Times
|
Which pop group was named for the schoolboy hero of the film 'Back To The Future'?
|
HARD TIMES Summary Spark Notes | Hard Times | Charles Dickens
HARD TIMES Summary Spark Notes
You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 3 to 27 are not shown in this preview.
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
CANCEL
We've moved you to where you read on your other device.
Get the full title to continue
Get the full title to continue reading from where you left off, or restart the preview.
Restart preview
|
i don't know
|
From which ship did Grace Darling and her father rescue seven survivors in 1838?
|
Wreck and Rescue: Grace Darling, A Victorian Heroine | Historic England
Wreck and Rescue: Grace Darling, A Victorian Heroine
Glossary
Wreck and Rescue: Grace Darling, A Victorian Heroine
When Grace Darling was born on November 24th, 1815, in the Northumbrian town of Bamburgh, to the lighthouse keeper William Darling and his wife Thomasina, there was little indication that she would become one of the most fêted heroines of the Victorian era and a celebrated media figure.
William was the keeper at Brownstone lighthouse among the Farne Islands, but in 1826 transferred to the new Longstone light, which was better positioned to warn shipping away from the Farne Islands: for ever after the name Darling would be associated with the Longstone lighthouse and with one of the most notorious wrecks lost among the Farne Islands.
The late 18th to early 19th century cottage in which Grace Darling was born, of random rubble stones with a slate roof. © Mr Steve Miller. Source Historic England Archive
Disaster!
The Farne Islands are a notorious ships' graveyard: a collection of rocks and small islands lying off the forbidding cliff of Bamburgh. Caught in a storm with the wind blowing from the south-east, countless vessels coming from the south overshot their intended destination of Tynemouth to come to grief among the Farnes further to the north. Many of the Farne rocks have names hinting at their capacity to tear ships apart, among them the Fang and the Knivestone. During a storm on the night of 7th September, 1838, like many other vessels before and since, the paddle steamer Forfarshire , bound from Hull for Dundee with a general cargo and passengers, was driven onto the rocks and 'went to pieces': few people today now realise the maritime origin of this phrase.
The night of the wreck
On that fateful night, Grace, now 22, was at home at the lighthouse with her parents. The lighthouse would have borne the brunt of the storm, battered by the huge waves crashing against its walls, so its effects on the disintegrating wreck can easily be imagined.
In the early morning the family could just make out the wreck, but only when it was fully light could they see the survivors on Big Harcar Rock, clinging to the fore part of the wreck which was all that remained. The weather conditions were too atrocious to permit any hope of rescue from the mainland, and local fishermen considered the attempt far too perilous. Even William himself had his doubts, but there was no other possible help for the few survivors still clinging to what remained of their ship, so he and his daughter prepared to set out in their coble to do what they could to rescue survivors.
Rescue at last
The north-east coble at its smallest was a sturdy little rowing boat, used for fishing and piloting other ships, and was the inspiration for the earliest lifeboats, being easy to right in difficult conditions. After a short but dangerous passage among the rocks in extreme conditions, the Darlings were only able to take five people off the rock on their first attempt, including a lady still clinging to the bodies of her two dead children in grief. Passengers, especially women and children, frequently came off worst in such shipwrecks, sometimes because they had been abandoned by the crew, but more often because they were much more vulnerable and less aware of what to do to help themselves in danger, and "exposure", or hypothermia, could strike indiscriminately. On the second attempt William Darling returned to Big Harcar with some of the crew he had rescued the first time round, to pick up the other four survivors, leaving Grace behind with her mother to care for the remainder of the first group in the lighthouse. The storm raged for two days before the survivors could be taken to the mainland.
The lifeboat 'Tyne', displayed under its elegant commemorative canopy, erected in 1894, shows something of how the versatile coble developed into a dedicated lifeboat as designed by William Greathead and William Wouldhave, both claimed as the inventor of the self-righting lifeboat. The actual coble used by Grace and her father was smaller and is still on display in the Grace Darling Museum in Bamburgh. © Mr A Hubbard. Source Historic England Archive
A media celebrity
The rescue became a media sensation at a time when most newspapers published shipping news, vital in Victorian Britain which relied on her mercantile trade overseas and her navy. Wrecks were commonplace and the loss of life correspondingly high: shipping losses were newsworthy for commercial, insurance and humanitarian reasons. Slowly but surely, as the appetite for news in general increased, so did the column inches devoted to the "human interest" aspect of shipwreck incidents, becoming increasingly melodramatic in tone. Such a rescue against all the odds caught the imagination of the public, particularly because Grace had single-handedly kept the coble in position as her father assisted the survivors into the little vessel, and because, at any moment, the little coble could have suffered the same fate of the much larger ship.
Grace and her father were given medals and financial rewards, and were inundated with visitors, letters, and requests for souvenirs. Grace's fame eclipsed that of her father, who was referred to as "Grace Darling's father" when he was involved in further rescues, notably the Success in 1853, and the Trio in 1860. Her early death from tuberculosis in 1842 increased national fervour and provided an occasion for the new Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, to write an appropriate tribute.
The grandeur of Grace Darling's monument reflects the esteem in which she was held at the time of her death and for many decades afterwards, as the epitome of a Victorian heroine. The original monument was designed by the eminent architect Anthony Salvin, who had connections with the north-east. The canopy was rebuilt 1894 in an elaborate Gothic style after being damaged in a gale in November 1893, which also sank 48 vessels on the east coast of England. © Mr Kenneth Robinson. Source Historic England Archive
Was this page helpful?
|
Angus
|
In which year did Sir Anthony Eden resign as Prime Minister?
|
The Collective Biographies of Women: Biographies
Biography of Grace Darling Read more...
Katie Barber and Liz Rose
At the dawn of the Victorian Era, one diminutive but brave young woman captivated the national consciousness as a result of her role in a dangerous rescue mission off the coast of Northumberland. Her name was Grace Darling, and through her efforts in the rescue of nine shipwrecked passengers early on the morning of September 7, 1838, she was transformed into an exalted national hero. She was both lauded and hounded by the public up until her early death, after which she, and her story, continued to entrance the public imagination in Britain and abroad.
At the dawn of the Victorian Era, one diminutive but brave young woman captivated the national consciousness as a result of her role in a dangerous rescue mission off the coast of Northumberland. Her name was Grace Darling, and through her efforts in the rescue of nine shipwrecked passengers early on the morning of September 7, 1838, she was transformed into an exalted national hero. She was both lauded and hounded by the public up until her early death, after which she, and her story, continued to entrance the public imagination in Britain and abroad.
Grace Horsley Darling was born in Bamburgh, Northumberland on November 14, 1815, and was the seventh of William and Thomasin Darling’s nine children. William Darling was a lighthouse keeper, as his father had been before him, and Grace and her siblings grew up on the “Longstone Light on one of the wild and savage Farne islands” (Sitwell 59). Relatively little is known regarding Grace’s early years, though she seems to have received a solid education evident in her handwriting, which was “equal to that of most ladies” (Bruce 376). Furthermore, she was surrounded by books, albeit those “principally [of] Divinity” and “Geography, History, Voyages and Travels, with Maps” (Mitford 89). Her father regarded novels and other forms of literature, as well as pursuits such as card-playing, to be the works of the Devil, and raised his family within the confines of strict Puritanism (Mitford 89; ODNB ).
In their remote location, Grace and her family were isolated from society at large, making only occasional excursions to the mainland, and otherwise occupying themselves with the daily domestic duties of the lighthouse (Bruce). Perhaps as a result of this confined but (for Grace, apparently) enjoyable upbringing, Grace was “remarkable for a retiring and somewhat reserved disposition” (Bruce 376). She assisted her father in his work on the lighthouse and kept watch at times (ODNB), bearing witness to several wrecks and rescues over the course of her lifetime but never participating in them, as her older brothers were always present to help their father (Bruce).
In this manner, for the first twenty-two years of her life, the mild-tempered “young girl of five feet two, with small wrists” (Sitwell 61) lived quietly in a household of sober industry and religious commitment. The events of the early hours of September 7, 1838, however, drastically expanded the confined world in which Grace lived, though they never seemed to change her fundamental personality and temperament.
The Forfarshire, one of the largest steamships of its day, set off from port on September 6, 1838, carrying around sixty people, crew and passengers. Upon encountering a brutal storm near the Farne Islands, the ship was wrecked on Big Harcar Rock (Mitford 29). Grace, keeping watch from the lighthouse, glimpsed the nine survivors at around five o’clock on the morning of September 7 and informed her father (Thomasin Darling). Her older brothers had all left their parents by then to live on the mainland, while her younger brother, who was usually present at the lighthouse, was away on a fishing excursion (Mitford 29). As a result, Grace was put in the unusual position of being the only able-bodied assistant for her father. Most initial accounts of the story of this day portray William Darling as reluctant and unwilling to brave the stormy waters, while Grace forced him into action by declaring her intention to go regardless of his participation (Sitwell). Later accounts, however, have questioned this depiction of the story, and the only firsthand written account of the rescue is that of William Darling himself, in the official letter he wrote to the Secretary of Trinity House.
His depiction of the rescue is a straightforward factual representation in which he credits his “Daughter” with having “observed a vessel on Harker’s Rock” and “incessantly [applying] the glass until near 7 o’clock when, the tide being fallen [they] observed three or four men upon the rock.” He then states that they “agreed that if [they] could get to them some of them would be able to assist [them] back,” after which they “immediately launched [their] boat, and [were] enabled to gain the rock.” Grace and William then returned to the Lighthouse with the sole woman and four of the men, two of whom then returned with William to retrieve the remaining four men (William Darling). The matter-of-fact attitude with which these events were treated by the Darling family is evident in William Darling’s account of the rescue. To a family of lighthouse-keepers, dangerous rescues were fairly frequent occurrences, and the efforts that Grace and her father put forth were expected and unremarkable. Indeed, William Darling is likely to have thought of the prospect of "sole salvage rights" to the goods in the wreck if he could reach the ship (ODNB). The rest of the nation, however, did not perceive the event in such a pragmatic manner. Instead, the public exalted the romantic and heroic nature of the event in a manner directly opposed to the down-to-earth humility of the Darlings’ reaction.
The year 1838, one year following the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign and its corresponding era, was a “moment [that] was opportune for acclaiming female virtue” (Correspondent). Although Grace and her father played equally significant roles in the rescue of the survivors, it was Grace and the combination of her unconventional physical feat and virtuous humility, emblematic of ideal Victorian womanhood, that attracted the media and publicity. The number of visitors at the Longstone Lighthouse increased exponentially as people from all over the country flocked to meet the great heroine and see the location of her selfless deed.
In addition to the masses that besieged the once reclusive world of Longstone Lighthouse, numerous institutions celebrated the Darling family. The Royal Humane Society acknowledged Grace and William Darling in a special general court held on October 31, 1838 that highlighted the “intrepidity, presence of mind, and humanity that nobly urged [Grace]” to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck (Thomasin Darling 26). In addition to this acknowledgment, Grace and William each received the society’s Golden Medallion, one of the highest honors of that time. The Duke of Northumberland was chosen to deliver the honorific medallions, and he added to the delivery his own gifts for the family: waterproof clothing, a silver teapot, a gold seal engraved with Grace’s initials, and four pounds of tea. It was through this act of largesse that the lifelong friendship between the Duke and Grace began (Thomasin Darling).
Following the Royal Humane Society’s lead, many other national and local institutions recognized Grace’s actions. She received medals from The Royal Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, The Edinburgh and Leith Humane Society, The Glasgow Humane Society, and The Shipwreck Society of Newcastle. Some organizations, such as Lloyds, the insurance company, and The Ladies of Edinburgh, chose to send money and stocks to Grace and her father. Just a year after the shipwreck, Grace had received about seven hundred and fifty pounds' worth of stock (Thomasin Darling).
Medals, stocks, and money were not the only gifts that Grace and her family received. Admirers sent a plethora of treasures that included silver tea sets, jewelry, and even a beaver bonnet. The number of presents received by the family, despite its immensity, was insignificant in comparison to the number of letters sent to the lighthouse. Many people wrote simply to praise Grace, demonstrating the public fascination surrounding her. Others wrote to describe how they had lost loved ones in shipwrecks and to thank Grace for preventing others from suffering the same loss. Queen Victoria herself recognized and contributed to Grace’s national prominence when the Darlings received a letter from the United Kingdom’s Treasury stating that “Her Majesty [had] been called to the circumstances attending the Wreck of the Forfarshire Steamer” and wished to acknowledge Grace Darling for her actions in saving the survivors (Thomasin Darling 30). Amongst all of these letters, however, there is no evidence that Grace ever received acknowledgement from the survivors of the Forfarshire’s wreck (Thomasin Darling).
Grace attempted to reply to every letter and gift she received. She usually declined any admiration or gratitude, insisting that she was simply God’s instrument, and that therefore it was God who deserved the thanks. Many people wrote to Grace asking for a signature or lock of her hair, leading her to begin enclosing locks of hair in her responses as a means of repayment for the recognition she received (Thomasin Darling). This custom soon ended, however, as Grace “would soon have been left with a closely cropped head” had her attempts to satisfy the demanding public continued in this manner (Thomasin Darling 47).
Despite this sudden burst of popularity and fame, Grace “shrank from, not courted, the public” (Thomasin Darling 38), behavior that simultaneously reinforced the Victorian conception of her virtuous nature and characterized her as a shy and wild creature threatened by the hungry public (Sitwell). Grace received many offers to be properly introduced to London’s society, some including paid appearances, but she refused all of them. The Duke of Northumberland, now a family friend and patron, understood Grace’s reluctance to embrace her fame and worked to spare her from undesired exhibition. When Grace received letters requesting her appearance at various ceremonies and functions, she informed the Duke and he wrote politely worded refusals on her behalf. Eventually, people began to write to the Duke in order to pass messages on to Grace. Grateful for this understanding and help, Grace called the Duke her Guardian and herself his servant (Thomasin Darling).
The Duke was not able to shield Grace from the artistic community, however. The events of that September morning seized the artistic imagination of the era, and painters such as J.W. Carmichael and Thomas Musgrave Joy requested that Grace and her father sit for portraits. Many times, Grace would be forced to reenact awkward positions in order for the painters to properly portray the scene of the Forfarshire’s shipwreck. There were also many books dedicated to Grace’s story. Many of them were written as romances, with loose treatment of the facts of the event. William Wordsworth commemorated Grace and her actions in verse considered to be beautifully and poetically written, but also greatly romanticized and “embarrassing” (ODNB). Grace did not read or pay attention to any of the novels, in keeping with her strict upbringing (Thomasin Darling).
She continued to “politely refuse” all offers of paid appearances (Correspondent) and to decline invitations to enter into London society, as Grace was content to focus on her chores and duties at Longstone and to remain a companion and helper to her parents. She refused numerous offers of marriage following her rise in fame (Bruce), and “clung to her father and to her name, [explaining] that any husband of hers should take it” (Thomasin Darling 11). She showed no indications of yearning for something more than what she had, and refuted the assumption that her quiet life on the island was unfulfilling, stating that she “[had] no time to spare” as she had “seven apartments in the house to keep in a state fit to be inspected every day by Gentlemen, so that [her] hands [were] kept very busy” (Mitford, 89 and 90). Despite the external clamor and demands of the public, Grace was satisfied with the quiet confinement, humble industry, and familial duty of the lighthouse.
In this way, Grace lived contentedly at the Longstone Lighthouse until a sudden decline in her health occurred after a visit to her oldest brother on Coquet Island in 1842. In the hope of improving her condition, Grace’s parents sent her and her sister, Thomasin, to visit a family friend, George Shield, in Wooler (Thomasin Darling, Britain Unlimited). While there, Grace wrote to her parents that she greatly enjoyed spending time with her sister and was beginning to feel better. Thomasin’s letters contradicted Grace’s claim, however, as she wrote that her sister’s coughs remained about the same (Thomasin Darling).
The two sisters then went to Alnwick, the residence of the Duke of Northumberland, as the Duke had requested that Grace be treated by his personal doctor. Grace’s health never improved, however, and the doctor said that her disease was one which “no skill, nor care, nor kindness could arrest” (Thomasin Darling 56). In one last attempt to save their daughter, the Darlings sent Grace to Thomasin’s home in Bamborough. Much to everyone’s surprise, Grace began to show signs of increasing health within the first few days in Bamborough. Despite this short-lived hope, Grace died several days later on October 20th, 1842 at the age of twenty-seven, a victim of what is believed to have been tuberculosis (Thomasin Darling, Britain Unlimited). She was buried in St. Aidan’s Churchyard, less than one hundred yards from where she had been born (Britain Unlimited).
Though Grace was dead, her fame lived on in literature, art, popular culture, and, most significantly, the national consciousness. As Edith Sitwell put it, “to the last day of her life Grace Darling could not see that she had done anything extraordinary…but she became the pride of the nation” (Sitwell 62). Certain types of heroic legend coincided in her, as in the physical courage and prowess of Joan of Arc , the wild, indigenous innocence and rescue of Pocahontas or Walter Scott's heroines, and other romantic themes apart from love and marriage. In turn, she became a type recognized in other women's deeds around the world, even for predecessors such as the "Grace Darling of Newfoundland," Ann Harvey, who helped to rescue 180 survivors of a shipwreck in 1828 (Ann Harvey). To the Victorian Era, Grace stood as an emblem of both British courage and female virtue that resonated deeply with that era's imperialism and idealism. She was a woman with a truly “English heart” (Mitford) who represented the absolute best of her society, and gave its members hope and faith in a time of transition.
Works Cited
Ann Harvey's Weblog , http://thedespatch.wordpress.com, 8 August 2009.
Bruce, Charles. The Book of English Noblewomen: Lives Made Illustrious by Heroism, Goodness, and Great Attainments. W.P. Nimmo, 1875, pp. 375-385. Google Books. 10 Nov 2008. http://books.google.com/books?id=HR8XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA375&dq=Grace+ Darling+date:1815-1899& lr=&as_brr=0#PPA378,M1
Correspondent. “The Centenary of Grace Darling: A Nation’s Acclamation,” The Times 07 Sept 1938. The Times Digital Archive, Infotrac, Gale Group. 3 Nov 2008. http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/64/55/46060710w16/purl=rc1_TTDA_0_CS 253309735&dyn=13!xrn_24_0_CS253309735&hst_1?sw_aep=viva_uva
Darling, Grace. “The Wreck of the Forfarshire: A letter from Grace Darling,” The Times 20 Oct 1838.The Times Digital Archive, Infotrac, Gale Group. 3 Nov 2008. http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/64/55/46060710w16/purl=rc1_TTDA_0_CS 51014484&dyn=3!xrn_1_0_CS51014484&hst_1?sw_aep=viva_uva
Darling, Thomasin. Grace Darling, Her True Story. Paternoster Row, London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1880. Google Books. 1 Nov 2008. http://books.google.com/bookshl=en&id=bAUoQC0ryeoC&dq=grace+darling+her+true +story&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3rcg0yXrpt&sig=6FCSfboxaRzIQV273 B1WfXu4M8c&sa=X&oi=book_result&-Secretary-of-Trinity-House.html
“Grace Darling.” 2002-08. Britain Unlimited. 1 Nov. 2008. http://www.britainunlimited.com/Biogs/Darling.htm
H. C. G. Matthew. “Darling, Grace Horsley (1815–1842).” 2004. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. 1 Nov. 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7155
Mitford, Jessica. Grace Had an English Heart. London: Penguin Books Ltd., Butler and Tannner Ltd., 1988.
Sitwell, Edith, Dame. English Women. London: Prion, 1942. pp.59-63.
From 'Lives of the Victorians' blog at Wordpress.com
Links
|
i don't know
|
Cliff Richard's 'Living Doll' featured in which 1959 film?
|
Cliff Richard - Living Doll (1959) - YouTube
Cliff Richard - Living Doll (1959)
Want to watch this again later?
Sign in to add this video to a playlist.
Need to report the video?
Sign in to report inappropriate content.
Rating is available when the video has been rented.
This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.
Published on Mar 18, 2013
"Living Doll" is a song written by Lionel Bart made popular by Cliff Richard and the Shadows (then still The Drifters) in 1959. Worldwide Sales were 2,000,000. Living Doll was originally written for the film Serious Charge which featured Cliff Richard. The idea came from a newspaper advert for a child's doll. The original version of Living Doll was a rock 'n' roll song (rather than a ballad) and can be heard on the soundtrack to Cliff Richard's first film, Serious Charge. It was originally meant for the singer Duffy Power.
Category
|
Serious Charge
|
On March 22nd 2007, naval personnel from which British warship were arrested and imprisoned by the Iranian navy?
|
BIOGRAPHY: Cliff Richard Lifetime
twitter
BIOGRAPHY
He started life as Harry Webb and spent some of his childhood years in India. Cliff Richard was inspired by the music of Elvis Presley and at age 16, formed a band, 'The Quintones', with school friends and performed at their local Youth Club. From there, Cliff Richard went from strength to strength and became a global star.
Having moved to India to help build a system of railways, Rodger Webb married Dorothy Dazely in 1939 and the following year the couple had a baby boy - Harry Rodger Webb.
Born in The King's English Hospital in Lucknow, Harry was educated in Howrah, until his family moved to England in 1948, following Home Rule in India.
After a privileged life in India, the Webbs faced poverty, and were forced to sleep on mattresses at the houses of various relatives. In 1951, they were given a council house in Chesthunt, and after just failing the eleven-plus exam, Harry was enrolled in the newly built Cheshunt County Secondary School.
After being inspired by the music of Elvis, Harry and a group of school friends formed a group, 'The Quintones', and performed at their local Youth Club.
For his 16th birthday, Harry got his first guitar, going on to form ‘The Drifters’ in 1958, with Terry Smart and Norman Mitham. After a number of low-key London gigs, Ian Samwell joined the band and they recorded their first demo, covers of Elvis' ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ and Jerry Lee Lewis' ‘Breathless’.
After recording their first hit single, ‘Schoolboy Crush/Move It’, they were quickly signed by Columbia. The song hit No.2 in the British charts, and went on to sell over a million copies.
Now going under the name Cliff Richard, an appearance on the TV show ‘Oh Boy!’ catapulted Cliff to sex symbol status.
In 1958, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch joined 'The Drifters', and by 1959 the band changed their name to ‘The Shadows’. It was also around this time that Cliff made his film debut in ‘Serious Charge’. The film produced the hit ‘Living Doll’, Cliff’s first number one hit.
Cliff's second movie, ‘Expresso Bongo’, was more successful and critically acclaimed. As the albums and hit singles rolled out, Cliff Richard was building a devoted fan base that would secure his chart success some 40 years later.
In 1961, Cliff starred in ‘The Young Ones’, and the accompanying single shot straight into number one in the charts. The second film with Cliff in the leading role was another musical, ‘Summer Holiday’, which saw him star alongside Una Stubbs.
1968 saw the last album recorded by Cliff with 'The Shadows', and Cliff went on to tour with his own gospel album. In 1970, Cliff launched his first television show, featuring a mix of music and comedy. In the same year, he made his stage debut in Peter Shaffer's ‘Five Finger Exercise’, a play focusing on a 'deep friendship' between a student and his tutor. The play was originally considered controversial for its veiled homosexual themes but despite this, reviews were favourable.
One of the most talked about aspects of Cliff's life is his relationships. A much publicised relationship with tennis star Sue Barker in 1981 ended within a year. Cliff has also been linked with actress Una Stubbs.
In 1986, Cliff and The Young Ones re-recorded ‘Living Doll’ and made it to the top of the charts. In the same year he appeared in the West End musical ‘Time’, and by the end of the decade he had released his highest selling album of all time, 'Private Collection', which went on to be certified four-times platinum in the UK alone!
‘Mistletoe & Wine’ become Cliff's first Christmas-themed No.1 in 1988 and by 1989, Cliff became the first British artist to release 100 singles. Cliff continued to tour and break records throughout the 1990s, and in 1995 he became Sir Cliff Richard - the first pop star to be honoured with a full Knighthood.
Despite selling records by the lorry load, Cliff ran into trouble getting airplay from various radio stations, including a ban by the BBC for his track ‘Misunderstood Man’, which was deemed “too raucous” for listeners.
Perhaps the most significant project for Cliff in the nineties was the fulfilment of his lifelong dream to play the character of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's masterpiece, 'Wuthering Heights'. The show was a runaway success, and gave Cliff his highest selling video ever, topping the UK video charts for two months upon its 1998 release.
In 1999, ‘The Millennium Prayer’ reached number one, regardless of no airplay and scathing reviews. Despite a lack of support in the press, Cliff continues to make music and his recent album and DVD release cracked the top twenty. From 2001 to 2013 Cliff has released a total of nine studio albums (as well as live albums and compilations), with the last being the certified-gold 'The Fabulous Rock 'n' Roll Songbook.
Cliff now divides his time between his homes in the UK, Barbados and Portugal, where he has taken to making his own wine.
|
i don't know
|
What do Americans call a Hare?
|
What's the Difference Between Rabbits and Hares?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141219-rabbits-hares-animals-science-mating-courtship.html
What's the Difference Between Rabbits and Hares?
For one, they're separate species—and hares are bigger, have longer ears, and are less social than bunnies.
View Images
A newborn Nuttall's cottontail (Sylvilagus nuttallii) rests in Alberta, Canada.
Photograph by All Canada Photos, Alamy
Hares and rabbits look similar, and some may hop to the conclusion that they're the same animal.
Related Content
Not so fast. Our Weird Animal Question of the Week comes from Tristan Ishtar , who asked: "What's the difference between a rabbit and a hare? And is that where 'hare brained' came from?"
The short answer: A lot, and yes—the adjective "harebrained" likely refers to hares' skittish tendencies, especially in captivity.
Hares and rabbits are in the same family, Leporidae , but they're "different species, like sheep and goats are different species," Steven Lukefahr , a geneticist at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, said via email.
View Images
Young eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) snuggle in their nest.
Photograph by Scott Camazine, Alamy
Opposites From Birth
Hares are also larger, have longer ears, and are less social than rabbits. The "most profound difference" is seen in baby hares versus baby bunnies, said Philip Stott , a wildlife ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. (See National Geographic's pictures of baby animals .)
First off, a hare's pregnancy lasts 42 days, compared with rabbits' 30-31 days with a bun(ny) in the oven.
Newborn hares, called leverets, are fully developed at birth—furred with open eyes—while newborn rabbits, called kittens or kits, are born undeveloped, with closed eyes, no fur, and an inability to regulate their own temperature, Stott said.
Their nests are also worlds apart—"hares live completely aboveground, lacking the normal burrow or warren system of rabbits," said Michael Sheriff , an ecologist at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. (Related: " Ask Your Weird Animal Questions: Animal Nests Explained.")
That's why, as a hare that burrows, "Bugs Bunny is a fraud," Stott joked.
There is an exception to the burrowing-bunny rule—the cottontail , a type of American rabbit that does not burrow.
View Images
A female European hare (right) boxes with a male in Wales.
Photograph by Andy Rouse, 2020VISION/Nature Picture Library/Corbis
Are We Fair to the Hare?
As for "harebrained," which means flighty or foolish, Stott suspects it stems from the animals' unease in captivity, where they're prone to spooking at the slightest stimulus (sometimes accidentally causing their own deaths).
Stott, who has tried hand-raising hares, said even those that are bottle-fed from day one never really relax in his company.
The expression "mad as a March hare" is no doubt a reflection on hares' behavior during mating season, which involves leaping into the air, among other antics, Texas A&M's Lukefahr said.
The female hare, called a jill, tests the male, called a jack, by making him give chase over several miles, Stott says. If he catches her, she'll mate with him; if not, "he was poor paternal material anyway," Stott says. (Also see " Wild Romance: Weird Animal Courtship and Mating Rituals.")
But if a female isn't ready to mate with a male who is chasing her, she might stand up and throw a punch right at him—or several.
Life in the Fast Lane
Such a zany courtship is not just about fun—it's also about staying fit, Stott said.
Speed is crucial to hares' survival, especially for species that live on open plains, such as the European hare, which can run at 37 body lengths a second, he said. Cheetahs , he noted, "can only manage 23 body lengths per second."
Those speedy reflexes may be great for avoiding predators, but it makes hares a "poor pet," he said. That's another way they differ from rabbits, which the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals describes as " delightful companion animals ."
Despite its name, a jackrabbit wouldn't make a good pet, either. It's called that because of its fabulous ears, which reminded its namers of a jackass, but it's not even a rabbit. It's a hare.
Your mind has to be as quick as a bunny to keep these animals straight.
Got a question about the weird and wild animal world? Tweet me or leave me a note or photo in the comments below. You can also follow me on Facebook .
Comment on This Story
|
Hare
|
Which is the most northerly lake in the Cumbrian 'Lake District'?
|
What’s the Difference Between a Bunny, a Rabbit and a Hare? | Dictionary.com Blog
Home » Nature » What’s the Difference Between a Bunny, a Rabbit and a Hare?
What’s the Difference Between a Bunny, a Rabbit and a Hare?
March 21, 2016 by: Dictionary.com 210 Comments
The religious content of Easter is relatively easy to explain and understand. The holiday’s substance starts to blur, however, when it comes to a certain anthropomorphized bunny, baskets, pastel colors and eggs. There’s far too much in this semantic basket to tackle; let’s start with the crucial question: what’s the difference between a rabbit, a hare and a bunny?
Hares and rabbits are both in the family Leporidae, but they are separate species. Both animals have long ears, powerful back legs and a divided upper lip. Hares are larger than rabbits. They also do not burrow, but make nests in the grass. Hares have exposed nesting sites and are precocial when born, requiring little parental care. They have fur and their eyes open. Rabbits, on the other hand, are born naked, blind and helpless, and live in more secure dens underground. The word hare comes not from hair, but possibly from the West Germanic word khasan or Dutch hase, meaning “gray.” Hares are usually shy and isolated creatures, but their spring mating ritual makes them most conspicuous to humans during March and April. The turn of phrase “mad as a March hare ” hints at mating season, when hares can be seen boxing each other as part of their raucous courtship ritual.
Until the 18th century rabbits were called coneys, based on the French cunil, shortened from the Latin cuniculus. Rabbit first referred to the young of coneys until eventually the word took over in popularity. Incidentally, this is also the origin of the name Coney Island or Rabbit Island, the beachside amusement park in New York. It is one of the only references to coney that is still used in North America.
So, how did it become the Easter bunny? German immigrants brought with them the traditions of Kriss Kringle and the Easter hare. The night before Easter children would find a quiet corner in their house and make a nest out of clothing for the Easter hare to come lay eggs. This is the origin of the Easter basket. The word hare was dropped on its way across the Atlantic and the fuzzier, cuddlier word bunny, a diminutive form for young and small animals, was applied in its place.
Why a hare, and not, say, a chicken to lay those Easter eggs? The intensely short gestation period and well-known reproductive speed of hares and rabbits have a long cultural association with spring and fertility. Eggs are also a fertility symbol. During the Lent fast, Catholics traditionally were not allowed to eat eggs, so they became part of the Easter feast.
A note: Welsh rabbit is an English tavern dish of cheese toast that does not contain rabbit meat. The origin of the name isn’t clear, but the dish originated at a time when rabbit meat was the meat of the poor, and the Welsh were among the poorest in England. Thus, their meat wasn’t meat at all but cheese.
See Also:
|
i don't know
|
Which Biblical king was the son of David and Bathsheba?
|
Bathsheba - Wife of King David and Mother of Solomon
By Jack Zavada
Updated December 21, 2015.
The relationship between Bathsheba and King David did not begin well, but she later became his loyal wife and mother of King Solomon , the wisest ruler of Israel.
David forced Bathsheba to commit adultery with him while her husband, Uriah the Hittite, was away at war. When she became pregnant, David tried to trick Uriah into sleeping with her so it would look like the child was Uriah's. Uriah refused. David then plotted to have Uriah sent to the front lines of battle and abandoned by his fellow soldiers; Uriah was killed by the enemy. After Bathsheba finished mourning Uriah, David took her for his wife. But David's actions displeased God, and the baby born to Bathsheba died.
Bathsheba bore David other sons, most notably Solomon . God so loved Solomon that Nathan the prophet called him Jedidiah, which means "beloved of Jehovah."
Bathsheba's Accomplishments:
Bathsheba was a faithful wife to David.
She was especially loyal to her son Solomon, making sure he followed David as king, even though Solomon was not David's firstborn son.
Bathsheba is one of only five women listed in the ancestry of Jesus Christ ( Matthew 1:6 ).
Bathsheba's Strengths:
Bathsheba was wise and protective.
She used her position to ensure both her and Solomon's safety when Adonijah tried to steal the throne.
Life Lessons:
Women had few rights in ancient times. When King David summoned Bathsheba, she had no choice but to sleep with him. After David had her husband murdered, she had no choice when David took her for his wife. Despite being mistreated, she learned to love David and saw a promising future for Solomon. Often circumstances seem stacked against us , but if we keep our faith in God, we can find meaning in life . God makes sense when nothing else does.
Hometown:
2 Samuel 11:1-3, 12:24; 1 Kings 1:11-31, 2:13-19; 1 Chronicles 3:5; Psalm 51:1.
Occupation:
Queen, wife, mother, counselor of her son Solomon.
Family Tree:
Husbands - Uriah the Hittite, and King David.
Sons - An unnamed son, Solomon, Shammua, Shobab, and Nathan.
Key Verses:
2 Samuel 11:2-4
One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite." Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. ( NIV )
2 Samuel 11:26-27
When Uriah's wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the LORD. ( NIV )
2 Samuel 12:24
Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and he went to her and made love to her. She gave birth to a son, and they named him Solomon. The LORD loved him; ( NIV )
|
Solomon
|
How many Umpires are there in a game of Baseball?
|
Bathsheba, King David's Most Famous Wife
< Continued from page 1
David Connives Uriah's Death
Not long after Bathsheba and David committed adultery, Bathsheba sent a message to David telling him she was pregnant. Now the pressure was really on the king, who might have concealed his affair with Bathsheba, but couldn't hide her pregnancy for long. Instead of owning up to the liaison and making restitution, David took an even more sinful approach to the crisis.
First, 2 Samuel 11:7-11 says that David tried to attribute Bathsheba's pregnancy to Uriah.
He recalled Uriah from the front, supposedly to give him a report on the battle, and then told him to take some leave and visit his wife. But Uriah didn't go home; he stayed within the palace barracks. David asked Uriah why he didn't go home, and loyal Uriah replied that he wouldn't dream of having a conjugal visit when David's army at the front has no such opportunity.
continue reading below our video
4 Tips for Improving Test Performance
Next, in 2 Samuel 12 and 13, David invited Uriah for dinner and got him drunk, figuring that intoxication will arouse Uriah's desire for Bathsheba. But David was foiled again; drunk though he was, honorable Uriah returned to the barracks and not to his wife.
At this point David was desperate. In verse 15, he wrote a letter to his general, Joab, telling him to put Uriah in the front lines where the fighting is fiercest, and then to withdraw, leaving Uriah undefended. David sent this letter to Joab by Uriah, who had no idea that he was carrying his own death sentence!
David and Bathsheba's Sin Results in Death
Sure enough, Joab put Uriah in the front lines when David's army attacks Rabbath after a long siege, although Joab didn't withdraw the army as David instructed.
Despite Joab's action, Uriah and other officers were killed. After a mourning period, Bathsheba was brought to the palace to become the latest of King David's wives, thus assuring the legitimacy of their child.
David thought he pulled off this caper until the prophet Nathan came to visit in 2 Samuel 12.
Nathan told the powerful king a tale of a poor shepherd whose lamb was stolen by a rich man. David flew into a rage, demanding to know who the man was so that he could exact judgment on him. Nathan calmly told the king: "You are the man," meaning that God had revealed to the prophet the truth of David's adultery, deceit and murder of Uriah.
Even though David had committed sins worthy of execution, said Nathan, God instead exacted judgment upon David and Bathsheba's newborn son, who subsequently died. David consoled Bathsheba by getting her pregnant again, this time with a son they name Solomon.
Bathsheba Became Solomon's Closest Adviser
Although she seems passive at the beginning of her relationship with David, Bathsheba became King David 's most famous wife because of the way she secured David's throne for their son, Solomon.
By now David was old and feeble, and his oldest surviving son, Adonijah, attempted to usurp the throne before his father died. According to 1 Kings 1:11, the prophet Nathan urged Bathsheba to tell David that Adonijah was preparing to take the throne by force. Bathsheba told her aged husband that only their son Solomon remained loyal, so the king named Solomon his co-regent. When David died, Solomon became king after executing his rival Adonijah. The new King Solomon valued his mother's help so much that he had a second throne installed for her so that she became his closest adviser until her death.
Bathsheba and David References:
The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004).
"Bathsheba," Women in the Bible, URL = www.womeninthebible.net/1.11.Bathsheba.htm
"Bathsheba," Women in Scripture, Carol Meyers, General Editor (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).
|
i don't know
|
What is Gordon Brown's first name?
|
Home - The Office of Gordon & Sarah Brown
The Office of Gordon & Sarah Brown
Welcome to the Office of Gordon & Sarah Brown Visit our news page to find out the latest from the Office. Read More
Global Education We believe education is the birthright of every child, the key to expanded opportunity, and a source of prosperity, employment and social cohesion. Read More
2025 In 2025: SHAPING A NEW FUTURE Gordon Brown charts the massive technological, demographic social and political forces - including the explosive growth of a global middle class, reinventing our world. Read More
Latest News
2017: A Year To Restore Hope For Children
We would be entitled to approach 2017 with trepidation – so many people still battered and bruised, grieving and confused by the events of a momentous 12 months. Now a new year has begun and with it new commitments to … Continue reading »
At the UN Brown Calls For 2017 Children’s New Deal
Speaking at the United Nations today, UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown said: “2017 must see an end to the war on children. “Never since 1945 have so many children been subjected to such widespread violations of their … Continue reading »
Brown Calls For International Criminal Court Prosecutions Following Year Of War Crimes Against Children
Speaking at the Education in Emergencies Forum in Brussels today, UN Education Envoy Mr Brown said: “With 500,000 children under siege in Syria and Iraq, an International Criminal Court investigation into the abuse of children in Libya, evidence mounting of … Continue reading »
Celebrities share toddler photos to support Theirworld’s #5for5 campaign
A host of famous faces have shared cute pre-school photos of themselves to show support for a new campaign by children’s charity Theirworld. #5for5 highlights the need for all children to get the best start in life. Stars taking part … Continue reading »
Sarah talks about the power of laughter with top comedians
Sarah Brown speaks to comedians James Corden, Sarah Millican and Stuart Goldsmith in the latest episode of her podcast series titled ‘The Power of Laughter’. The fourth instalment of ‘Better Angels’ focuses on the power of comedy and looks at … Continue reading »
Gordon Brown Proposes UK People’s Constitutional Convention
Extracts from Gordon Brown’s speech to the Fabian Society, delivered today 3 November 2016: I want to suggest today that there is now an overwhelming case for a UK-wide people’s constitutional convention, mandated with setting a roadmap towards a more … Continue reading »
|
James Cancer Hospital
|
Which cartoon featured 'Benny the Ball', 'Spook' and 'Officer Dibble'?
|
BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | The Gordon Brown story
The Gordon Brown story
Has there even been a more enigmatic politician than Gordon Brown?
No-one has ever doubted the formidable intellect and iron determination of Britain's new prime minister.
BROWN'S CV
Educated: Kirkcaldy High School, Edinburgh University
Family: Married, two sons (daughter died shortly after birth)
1972: Rector, Edinburgh University
1976: Politics lecturer, Glasgow College of Technology
1980: Television journalist, STV current affairs
1983: Labour MP, Dunfermline East
1985: Opposition front bench trade and industry spokesman
1987: Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury
1989: Shadow trade and industry spokesman
1992: Shadow chancellor
1997: Chancellor
He was marked out as gifted from an early age, although he resented it at the time, and seemed to excel at everything he tried, rising rapidly through the ranks of the Labour Party and inspiring fierce loyalty in those close to him.
Yet the abiding public image of Gordon Brown is of a dour, self-absorbed figure, a "control freak", who has spent more than a decade coveting the job of his more charismatic Downing Street neighbour.
This is entirely at odds with the warm generous and engaging character described by Mr Brown's family and friends.
So who is the real Gordon Brown? And what is there in his background to explain the extraordinary drive and determination that has been the hallmark of his near 40 year career in politics?
James Gordon Brown was born in February 1951, the second son of Rev Dr John Ebenezer Brown, a Church of Scotland minister.
The family lived in Glasgow until Gordon was three, when they moved to Kirkcaldy, a small industrial town on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth and the area he represents in Parliament today.
Gordon was the shyest of the Brown boys, his mother said
Mr Brown has often said his parents were the "inspiration" for his career in politics and the source of his "moral compass".
Kirkcaldy was going through tough times in the 1950s and the Brown brothers, Andrew, Gordon and John, were encouraged to help local families made unemployed by factory closures.
Africa was also an early concern. Inspired by one of their father's sermons, Gordon and his older brother John set up a tuck shop in the family's garage and started a newspaper, The Gazette, to raise money for refugees.
Gordon - who was mad about football and sold programmes at Raith Rovers on Saturdays in exchange for free entry to games - was The Gazette's sports editor.
Fast-tracking
But the paper also provided an early platform for his views on politics and society. In one article, he backed a church campaign against the evils of alcohol and tobacco.
He feared he might lose his sight altogether. It was a bleak time
John Brown, Gordon's older brother
Gordon Brown profile
His mother Elizabeth described him as "the shyest member of the family" but he excelled at sport and school friends remember him always being at the centre of things.
His political affiliations were never in doubt. By the age of 12 he was pushing Labour Party leaflets through letterboxes in Kirkcaldy.
He was also academically gifted. After sitting an IQ test, he was sent to Kirkcaldy High School at the age of 10, where he and fellow members of the "e-stream" were taught in separate classes as part of an experiment in academic fast-tracking.
Brown sat his Highers, the Scottish equivalent of A-levels, two years early and was named the "Dux", or leading scholar of his year.
But he appears to have resented being separated from his age group and angry that some of his e-stream friends had been pushed to breaking point in pursuit of academic success.
In confidence I have warned the BBC News Editor in Edinburgh about the Rector's attitude
Edinburgh University memo
In an unpublished 1967 essay, he describes himself the "victim of a totally unsighted and ludicrous experiment in education, the result of which was to harm materially and mentally the guinea-pigs".
Detached retina
At the age of 16, he had joined his older brother John at Edinburgh University, the youngest fresher there since 1945.
But disaster struck in his first week of term when he was diagnosed with a detached retina - thought to be the result of being kicked in the head during an end of term rugby match at Kirkcaldy High.
He missed the entire first term while doctors battled to save his sight. He would be in and out of hospital for the next five years, often spending weeks lying on his back in a darkened room. He eventually lost the sight in one eye and retained just 30% of his vision in the other.
Edinburgh university was the launchpad for Brown's political career (PIC: STV)
The experience appears to have had a profound effect on Brown.
"It made him more determined,'' his older brother John recently told The Daily Telegraph.
"He was in more of a hurry; he feared he might lose his sight altogether. It was a bleak time.''
University battles
Edinburgh University in the late 1960s was a hotbed of student radicalism and Brown made sure he was in the thick of it.
Brown became an MP at a torrid time for Labour
In his second year he followed in the footsteps of his older brother by becoming the editor of The Student magazine, grabbing national headlines by exposing the university's investments in pro-apartheid South Africa. Then, after graduating, with a first, he launched a campaign to be the university's Rector.
This was traditionally an honorific post, normally going to a showbusiness personality.
But it came with a rarely exercised legal right to chair the university's governing body - something that proved irresistible to 20-year-old Brown's anti-establishment instincts.
Unlikely romance
He swept to power with a campaign boosted by three mini-skirted fans, The Brown Sugars, who accompanied him to photo opportunities in "Gordon for me" T-shirts.
And he wasted no time in becoming a thorn in the side of the university authorities, successfully fighting a court battle with them when they tried to overturn his election.
BROWN'S HEROES
Edith Cavell, nursed World War One wounded in Belgium
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Protestant pastor who led German opposition against the Nazis
Raoul Wallenberg, businessman who tried to save Hungarian Jews in 1944
Martin Luther King, US civil rights leader
Robert Kennedy, John F Kennedy's brother
Nelson Mandela, South African civil rights leader
Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of hospice movement
Aung San Suu Kyi, led opposition to dictatorship under house arrest in Rangoon
Source: Courage: Eight Portraits, by Gordon Brown, Bloomsbury publishing
Officials' irritation at his publicity-seeking antics is evident from one internal memo written by the university's information officer.
"The Rector appears to be sensitive to the fact that the BBC did not contact him yesterday to appear on television," the officer writes.
"I told him this was a matter for the BBC to decide whether or not they should follow up any story. In confidence I have warned the BBC News Editor in Edinburgh about the Rector's attitude."
When his three-year term ended, Brown even tried to get the authorities to declare the day a special academic holiday, with no lectures or classes.
"He was a big star and had a natural way with people," radio presenter Simon Pia, who was taught by Brown during this period, would later recall.
"He would hold his tutorials in his flat over a couple of cans of beer. He held all sorts of parties. He had loads of friends from all different backgrounds.
"People were diving into bedrooms and smoking joints. He never indulged, but there was nothing disapproving about him either.''
'Madly in love'
Brown cut an untidy figure about campus, with his notes invariably stuffed into Marks and Spencer carrier bags, but he had no shortage of female admirers.
He even enjoyed an unlikely romance with an exiled Romanian Princess, who was studying at the university.
Brown was a rising star in the Scottish Labour party
Margarita du Romaine was a god-daughter of the University's Chancellor, Prince Philip and 81st in line to the British throne.
She fell "madly in love" with Brown, she would later recall, and moved into his digs in Marchmont Street.
But Brown's growing obsession with politics appears to have killed off their relationship, with Princess Margarita reportedly complaining after they had split up that it was "politics, politics, politics" with Brown - he had no time left for her.
By now, he was lecturing in politics at Glasgow College of Technology and well on his way to becoming a major figure in the Scottish Labour Party.
At the age of 23, he nearly became a candidate in the second general election of 1974.
He was also working on a thesis on maverick 1930s MP James Maxton, the "Red Clydesider", which he would later turn into a book.
The 1997 Budget set the tone for Brown's decade at the Treasury
In 1975, he made a big splash with The Red Paper for Scotland, a collection of essays on the country's political future, in which he called for "a positive commitment to creating a socialist society".
He fought Edinburgh South for Labour at the 1979 general election, narrowly losing out to future Conservative minister Michael Ancram.
Then, after a spell as a television journalist and producer for STV in Glasgow, he won the safe Labour seat of Dunfermline East, at the 1983 general election, at the age of 32.
Frustration
A few weeks after entering the Commons, Brown began sharing an office with another new boy, Tony Blair, a 30-year-old Islington barrister.
It was a grim time for Labour, which had just slumped to its lowest share of the vote in 60 years and was haemorrhaging support to the newly-formed Social Democratic Party.
The new chancellor had little time for the traditions of the City
Brown and Blair shared a sense of frustration at Labour's direction and the left-wing faction fighting that was tearing the party apart.
They were both convinced Labour had to change if it was ever going to win power again and they quickly became inseparable - bouncing ideas off each other, going on foreign trips together, even writing each other's speeches.
Brown was very much the senior partner. He was two years older than Blair, seen as more of an intellectual heavyweight, with deeper roots in the Labour movement.
He tutored Blair in how to handle the media, using his television experience to craft snappy soundbites and eye-catching press releases.
The pair's potential was spotted by Labour leader Neil Kinnock who promoted them into his shadow cabinet.
They were soon joined in their mission to modernise the party - and shake-up its communications strategy - by Peter Mandelson, a former TV producer hired by Kinnock to be his media chief.
The relationship that came to dominate British politics
By the early 1990s, Brown was riding high. When Kinnock allowed him to stand in for shadow chancellor John Smith after his first heart attack, he dazzled Labour MPs with his demolition of the Tories at the despatch box.
His popularity with Labour members was at its height and he regularly topped shadow cabinet elections.
But when Smith died of a second heart attack in 1994, Blair and Brown found themselves pitted against each other as rivals for the party leadership.
'Leadership deal'
Mandelson had become convinced it was Blair, the smiling family man with the middle-class background, who would most appeal to swing voters.
A much commented on, but never explicitly confirmed, deal was eventually struck between Blair and Brown over dinner at Islington's Granita restaurant.
In exchange for giving him a clear run at the leadership, Mr Blair promised he would make Brown the most powerful chancellor in history, with unprecedented control over domestic policy.
The terms of the deal remain hotly contested, creating a tension at the heart of New Labour that would dominate politics for more than a decade.
BROWN ON FOOTBALL
If I had money I would put it into Raith Rovers
1999, Four Four Two magazine
I like being in the ground. The atmosphere is tremendous, a great feeling. But unfortunately Scotland have a habit of losing
1999, on watching Scotland in the World Cup
My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it
June 2006, watching England play Trinidad and Tobago
My ideal scenario is that Scotland play England in the final and Scotland win...but if we don't qualify, or we go out in an earlier round, then I would transfer my allegiance to the other home nation, England
January 2007, on idea of England hosting the World Cup
Brown believed he had been manoeuvred out of the leadership and has never appeared to have forgiven his former ally Peter Mandelson for what he regarded as betrayal.
But the goal that united them all in the 1990s was to get Labour into power after 18 years in opposition.
Together they formed a hugely effective campaigning machine, and no one worked harder than Gordon Brown to secure the 1997 election victory that saw Tony Blair swept to power with a landslide.
He would put in 18 hour days, often ending up at the Park Lane apartment of millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, who would become his first pay-master general, talking tactics and swapping political gossip with his closest advisers, economist Ed Balls and spin doctor Charlie Whelan.
Whelan even tried to transform Brown's dour image, encouraging him to smile more on television.
But personality politics was not something that came easily to Brown.
His reluctance to talk about his private life even sparked rumours he was gay.
In fact, he had enjoyed on-off relationships with TV journalist Sheena Macdonald and Edinburgh lawyer Marion Caldwell since splitting up with Princess Margarita and, by 1995, was dating PR executive Sarah Macauley.
As Blair entered Downing Street on a wave of public optimism, Brown swung into action at The Treasury, granting control of interest rates to the Bank of England and freezing public spending for two years.
The Browns' wedding was a characteristically modest affair
Brown set about annexing powers from other departments, as he extended the reach of The Treasury into nearly every area of domestic policy.
Requests for more cash from ministerial colleagues were met with stern refusals, with little room for debate or discussion.
Decisions that might ordinarily have been expected to be made by a prime minister were being made at the Treasury.
Lord Turnbull, Brown's former permanent secretary, has since marvelled at the "Stalinist ruthlessness" of his negotiating style: "His view is that it is just not worth it and 'they will get what I decide'."
The power Brown held over vast areas of domestic policy led to fractious relations between No 10 and the Treasury.
As early as January 1998, unnamed Blair allies had briefed a newspaper about Mr Brown's alleged "psychological flaws," after he sanctioned the publication of a biography suggesting Mr Blair had cheated him out of the Labour leadership.
Euro flashpoint
Blair allies would complain that the chancellor would keep the details of his Budgets from Mr Blair until the last possible moment and "go missing" when the prime minister needed his public support.
But the biggest flashpoint in Labour's first term was over the euro.
Blair saw it as his destiny to take Britain into the single European currency but Brown, who was less enthusiastic, managed to seize control of the policy.
He turned it into an economic - rather than a political - decision by announcing five economic tests which had to be passed before he would recommend that the issue should be put to a public referendum. He would later hail it as one of his best decisions.
Family life transformed Brown's image
After the 2001 general election, relations between the Treasury and Number 10 reportedly deteriorated further.
Mr Blair's former EU adviser Stephen Wall recently told a Channel 4 documentary there was a "constant battle" between the two rival power bases, with Treasury staff regarding contact with Downing Street as "a kiss of death for their careers".
Matthew Taylor, Mr Blair's former policy chief, said staff felt like "children in a dysfunctional relationship where mum and dad are too busy arguing to ever talk to the kids".
Whenever things got out of hand, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott would host a reconciliation dinner with Blair and Brown at his grace and favour apartment at Admiralty Arch.
Modest wedding
Brown was, by now, a married man with a young family of his own.
His relationship with Sarah Macauley had been reluctantly dragged into the light, at Charlie Whelan's prompting, on the eve of his first Budget in 1997, when the couple agreed to be photographed dining together by The News of the World.
But it was another three years before they finally tied the knot, in a modest ceremony in the living room of Mr Brown's North Queensferry home, witnessed by their families and a few close friends.
A more relaxed Brown promises to 'listen and learn'
They honeymooned in Cape Cod, Mr Brown's favourite summer holiday destination, their typically frugal economy class seat being upgraded courtesy of Virgin Atlantic.
The following year, 2001, the Browns became parents, with the premature birth by Caesarean section of Jennifer Jane, weighing 2lb 4oz.
But tragedy struck just 10 days later when the little girl suffered a brain haemorrhage and lost her fight for life in her parents' arms at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
When, two years later, the couple had a son, John, the normally reserved Brown could barely contain his joy as he presented the little boy to waiting photographers at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary.
Family man
For once, he did not have to be reminded to smile for the cameras.
In July 2006, the Browns had a second son, James Fraser, diagnosed four months later with cystic fibrosis.
Brown's image as an workaholic bachelor, with no time for anything but politics, has been transformed by becoming a family man.
Brown launched his leadership bid with a pledge to be 'humble'
Friends say the couple are well-suited and Brown has become more relaxed and outgoing - more likely to talk about what John or Fraser have been up to than the details of the latest government spending review.
Politically, Brown achieved what many had thought impossible and gave Labour a reputation for sound economic management.
It allowed him to unveil large increases in public spending paid for, in part, by tax increases, prompting accusations from the opposition that he was increasing tax by "stealth".
But by 2003, he was coming under increasing pressure from his own allies, frustrated at his apparent reluctance to move in for the kill over the leadership.
At that year's Labour conference, he made what was widely interpreted as the opening salvo of a leadership campaign - with a speech appealing to the party's "soul" telling activists "we are best when we are Labour".
Party man
His moment seemed to have arrived the following January when Mr Blair - weakened by a public backlash against the Iraq war - faced a crunch Commons vote on university top-up fees.
The prime minister would almost certainly have had to resign if he had lost.
But although he reportedly kept Blair guessing until hours before the vote, Brown eventually instructed his supporters, through loyal lieutenant Nick Brown, to swing behind the government, helping Blair win by a margin of just five votes.
Brown secures an exit date - and prompts criticism from Blairites
According to some accounts, Nick Brown had tears in his eyes as the chancellor told him to back top-up fees - a policy he had argued passionately against just a year earlier.
For the chancellor's critics, it was a sign he lacked the courage to be a true leader - that he was better off as a backroom operator, emerging into the spotlight once a year to deliver a densely-worded Budget speech.
But Brown, it was said, was conscious of not becoming Labour's Michael Heseltine - the assassin cast out by his own party after toppling a successful leader. (In Heseltine's case Margaret Thatcher)
He was also a party man to his fingertips. He did not want to provoke a potentially lethal war over the succession.
Election campaign
He had already become the longest serving chancellor in modern times. He could afford to wait a little bit longer.
THE ARCTIC MONKEYS
The Arctic Monkeys really wake you up in the morning
New Woman, May 2006
You've got to laugh, because actually I was asked did I prefer Arctic Monkeys to James Blunt and I think I said I'd prefer Coldplay. But I made a joke that Arctic Monkeys would certainly wake you up in the morning. So, I mean, I've heard Arctic Monkeys and they're very loud
The Observer, September 2006
I'm more interested in the future of the Arctic circle than the future of the Arctic Monkeys
Labour conference speech, September 2006
Blair had, according to documents recently leaked to the Independent on Sunday, drawn up a secret plan to sack Brown after the 2005 general election and curb The Treasury's power.
He had already blocked Brown's membership of Labour's ruling National Executive and brought in his own man, former health secretary, Alan Milburn, to run the 2005 election campaign, in place of Brown.
But with Labour slipping in the polls, Blair was forced to bring Brown back to centre stage, making his record of low inflation and high employment, the centrepiece of the campaign.
Voters were treated to the familiar sight of Blair and Brown posing for pictures like old friends.
But although the old team had succeeded in winning an historic third term, the truce did not last long.
It culminated in September 2006 with Brown once again at the centre of an alleged plot to topple his old friend, as a string of junior ministers resigned over the prime minister's refusal to name a departure date.
Mr Brown denied any involvement but senior Blairites began openly questioning his suitability for the top job.
But a scramble to find a Blairite challenger to take on Brown - after Blair announced he was standing down - came to nothing as one-by-one they realised that being hammered in a leadership contest might not be a canny career move.
And by the time leadership nominations closed, Brown's total dominance of the Labour landscape was clear for all to see.
His task - as he launched his leadership "campaign" in central London - was not to prove he had the courage or determination to lead the party but the "humility".
Apparently stung by criticism of his "Stalinist" management style he pledged to "listen and learn" and to lead a government of "all the talents".
There will be more than a few Blairites - as well as Conservatives and Liberal Democrats - watching to see whether he lives up to those goals in Number 10.
|
i don't know
|
If Pluto is no longer recognised as a planet, which is the smallest planet in the solar system?
|
Pluto and the Solar System | IAU
Pluto and the Solar System
Pluto and the Developing Landscape of Our Solar System
The discovery of Pluto
Nearly eighty years ago an astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory in the United States made a discovery that would ultimately initiate a dramatic change in the way we look at our Solar System. The young astronomer was Clyde Tombaugh, an observing assistant working at the observatory made famous by the great astronomer Percival Lowell. Tombaugh was continuing the search for an elusive planet – planet X – that Lowell had believed (incorrectly) to be responsible for perturbing the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
Within a year, after spending numerous nights at the telescope exposing photographic plates and months tediously scanning them for signs of a planet, Tombaugh saw what he was looking for. At around 4pm on the afternoon of 18 February 1930 Tombaugh began comparing two plates taken in January that year showing a region in the constellation of Gemini. As he flicked from one plate to the other, trying to see if something moved slightly between the two (the tell-tale sign of the planet he was hunting), he spotted something. In one part of the frame a small object flitted a few millimetres as he switched between the two plates. Tombaugh had found his new planet! (Stern & Mitton, 2005)
The changing landscape of the Solar System
The object Tombaugh had discovered was named Pluto, a name officially adopted by the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK and the IAU. It is a frigid world, billions of kilometres from Earth, and 30 times less massive than the then-smallest known planet, Mercury. But Pluto was not alone. It was found to have five satellites. The largest, Charon, was discovered in 1978. The smaller four were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, 2011 and 2012 and officially named Nix, Hydra, in early 2006 ( read more ) , Kerberos and Styx in 2013 ( read more ) by the IAU.
The view of our Solar System's landscape began to change on August 30, 1992 with the discovery by David Jewitt and Jane Luu from the University of Hawaii of the first of more than 1000 now known objects orbiting beyond Neptune in what is often referred to as the transneptunian region. More generally these bodies are often simply labelled as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).
With so many Trans-Neptunian Objects being found, it seemed inevitable that one or more might be found to rival Pluto in size. On the night of the 21 October 2003, Mike Brown from Caltech, Chad Trujillo from the Gemini Observatory and David Rabinowitz from Yale University were using a telescope and camera at the Palomar Observatory in the US to search the edge of the Solar System. That night they imaged a region of sky showing an object moving relative to the background stars. Later analysis showed that they had discovered another cold world, around 2500 km across, orbiting the Sun. Subsequent observations showed that the new object, initially named 2003 UB313 according to the International Astronomical Union's protocol on the initial designation of such objects, was more massive than Pluto and that it too had a satellite ( read more ). With an object larger and more massive than Pluto now beyond Neptune and ever more of these Trans-Neptunian Objects being discovered, astronomers were beginning to ask: "Just what constitutes a planet?"
A new class of objects and how to define a planet
The IAU has been responsible for the naming and nomenclature of planetary bodies and their satellites since the early 1900s. As Professor Ron Ekers, past president of the IAU, explains:
Such decisions and recommendations are not enforceable by any national or international law; rather they establish conventions that are meant to help our understanding of astronomical objects and processes. Hence, IAU recommendations should rest on well-established scientific facts and have a broad consensus in the community concerned .( read the full article on page 4 of the IAU GA Newspaper )
The IAU decided to create a committee to gather opinions from a broad range of scientific interests, with input from professional astronomers, planetary scientists, historians, science publishers, writers and educators. Thus the Planet Definition Committee of the IAU Executive Committee was formed and quickly went about preparing a draft resolution to put to the members of the IAU. After the final meeting in Paris the draft resolution was completed. One crucial aspect of the resolution is described by Professor Owen Gingerich, Chair of the IAU Planet Definition Committee: "On the scientific side, we wanted to avoid arbitrary cut-offs simply based on distances, periods, magnitudes, or neighbouring objects". ( read more in the IAU GA Newspaper , starting on page 4)
The final resolution
The first draft proposal for the definition of a planet was debated vigorously by astronomers at the 2006 IAU General Assembly in Prague and a new version slowly took shape. This new version was more acceptable to the majority and was put to the members of the IAU for a vote at the Closing Ceremony on the 24 August 2006. By the end of the Prague General Assembly, its members voted that the resolution B5 on the definition of a planet in the Solar System would be as follows:
A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
( read more )
Dwarf Planets, plutoids and the Solar System today
The IAU Resolution means that the Solar System officially consists of eight planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A new distinct class of objects called dwarf planets was also decided on. It was agreed that planets and dwarf planets are two distinct classes of objects. The first members of the dwarf planet category are Ceres, Pluto and Eris, formerly known as 2003 UB313. Eris was named after the IAU General Assembly in 2006 ( read more ) Eris is the Greek god of discord and strife, a name which the discoverer Mike Brown found fitting in the light of the academic commotion that followed its discovery.
The dwarf planet Pluto is recognised as an important prototype of a new class of Trans-Neptunian Objects. The IAU has put given a new denomination for these objects: plutoids.
Today the resolution remains in place and is a testament to the fluid nature of science and how our view of the Universe continues to evolve with changes made by observations, measurements and theory.
The latest observations
On 14 July 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, providing numerous imaging, spectroscopy, and in situ datasets that have dramatically altered our knowledge about Pluto and its system of five moons. The images established that Pluto is larger than Eris and is the largest body in the Kuiper Belt. The images also revealed a remarkable landscape containing a variety of landforms, including broad plains, mountain ranges several kilometres high, and evidence for volcanoes.
Pluto's surface is unusual for its diversity of surface compositions and colours. Some regions are as bright as snow and others are as dark as charcoal. Colour imaging and composition spectroscopy revealed a highly complex distribution of surface ices, including nitrogen, carbon monoxide, water, and methane, as well as their chemical byproducts produced by radiolysis. It has also been determined that some surfaces on Pluto are completely free of visible craters, indicating that they have been modified or created in the recent past. Other surfaces are heavily cratered and appear to be extremely old. Pluto is shrouded by a cold, nitrogen‐dominated atmosphere that contains a thin, highly extended haze layer about 150 km thick.
Pluto’s large moon Charon displays impressive tectonics and evidence for a heterogeneous crustal composition, but no evidence for an atmosphere; its pole displays puzzling dark terrain. No new satellites were detected, nor were rings. Small satellites Hydra and Nix have brighter surfaces than expected.
These results raise fundamental questions about how a small, cold planet can remain active over the age of the Solar System. They demonstrate that dwarf planets can be every bit as scientifically interesting as planets. Equally important is that all three major Kuiper belt bodies visited by spacecraft so far — Pluto, Charon, and Triton — are more different than similar, bearing witness to the potential diversity awaiting the exploration of their realm.
References:
Stern, A., & Mitton, J., 2005, Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System, Wiley-VCH 1997
Planets, Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies
Questions and Answers
Q: What is the origin of the word planet?
A: The word planet comes from the Greek word for "wanderer", meaning that planets were originally defined as objects that moved in the night sky with respect to the background of fixed stars.
Q: Why is there a need for a new definition for the word planet?
A: Modern science provides much more information than the simple fact that objects orbiting the Sun appear to move with respect to the background of fixed stars. For example, recent new discoveries have been made of objects in the outer regions of our Solar System that have sizes comparable with and larger than Pluto. Historically Pluto has been recognised as the ninth planet. Thus these discoveries have rightfully called into question whether or not the newly found Trans-Neptunian Objects should also be considered as new planets.
Q: How did astronomers reach a consensus for a new definition of planet?
A: The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union, deliberated on a new definition for the word planet for nearly two years. The results of these deliberations were channelled to a Planet Definition Committee and ultimately proposed to the IAU General Assembly. Continued evolution of the definition through debate and further discussion allowed a final consensus and vote.
Q: What new terms are used in the official IAU definition?
A: There are three new terms adopted as official definitions by the IAU. The terms are: planet, dwarf planet and small Solar System body.
Q: In plain language, what is the new definition of planet?
A: A planet is an object in orbit around the Sun that is large enough (massive enough) to have its self-gravity pull itself into a round (or near-spherical) shape. In addition a planet orbits in a clear path around the Sun. If any object ventures near the orbit of a planet, it will either collide with the planet, and thereby be accreted, or be ejected into another orbit.
Q: What is the exact wording of the official IAU proposed definition of planet?
A: A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
Q: Does a body have to be perfectly spherical to be called a planet?
A: No. For example, the rotation of a body can slightly distort the shape so that it is not perfectly spherical. Earth, for example, has a slightly greater diameter measured at the equator than measured at the poles.
Q: Based on this new definition, how many planets are there in our Solar System?
A: There are eight planets in our Solar System; Mercury, Venus, Earth,Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Mnemonic: *My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos (Phyllis Lugger, * http://www.aas.org/cswa/bulletin.board/2006/08.25.06.html ).
Q: Is that all, only eight planets?
A: No. In addition to the eight planets, there are also five known dwarf planets. Many more dwarf planets are likely to be discovered soon.
Q: What is a dwarf planet?
A: A dwarf planet is an object in orbit around the Sun that is large enough (massive enough) to have its own gravity pull itself into a round (or nearly round) shape. Generally, a dwarf planet is smaller than Mercury. A dwarf planet may also orbit in a zone that has many other objects in it. For example, an orbit within the asteroid belt is in a zone with lots of other objects.
Q: How many dwarf planets are there?
A: Currently there are five objects accepted as dwarf planets. Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Makemake and Haumea.
Q: What is Ceres?
A: Ceres is (or now we can say it was) the largest asteroid, about 1000 km across, orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres now qualifies as a dwarf planet because it is now known to be large enough (massive enough) to have self-gravity pulling itself into a nearly round shape. (Thomas, 2005) Ceres orbits within the asteroid belt and is an example of the case of an object that does not orbit in a clear path. There are many other asteroids that can come close to the orbital path of Ceres.
Q: Didn't Ceres used to be called an asteroid or minor planet?
A: Historically, Ceres was called a planet when it was first discovered in 1801, orbiting in what is known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In the 19th century astronomers could not resolve the size and shape of Ceres, and because numerous other bodies were discovered in the same region, Ceres lost its planetary status. For more than a century, Ceres has been referred to as an asteroid or minor planet.
Q: Why is Pluto now called a dwarf planet?
A: Pluto now falls into the dwarf planet category on account of its size and the fact that it resides within a zone of other similarly-sized objects known as the transneptunian region.
Q: Is Pluto's satellite Charon a dwarf planet?
A: For now, Charon is considered just to be Pluto's satellite. The idea that Charon might qualify to be called a dwarf planet in its own right may be considered later. Charon may receive consideration because Pluto and Charon are comparable in size and orbit each other, rather than just being a satellite orbiting a planet. Most important for Charon's case as a dwarf planet is that the centre of gravity about which Charon orbits is not inside of the system primary, Pluto. Instead this centre of gravity, called the barycentre, resides in free space between Pluto and Charon.
Q: Jupiter and Saturn, for example, have large spherical satellites in orbit around them. Are these large spherical satellites now to be called dwarf planets?
A: No. All of the large satellites of Jupiter (for example, Europa) and Saturn (for example, Titan) orbit around a common centre of gravity (called the "barycentre") that is deep inside of their massive planet. Regardless of the large size and shapes of these orbiting bodies, the location of the barycentre inside the massive planet is what defines large orbiting bodies such as Europa, Titan, etc. to be satellites rather than planets. [Actually, there has been no official recognition that the location of the barycenter is involved with the definition of a satellite.]
Q: What was 2003 UB313?
A: 2003 UB313 was a provisional name given to a large object discovered in 2003 that resides in an orbit around the Sun beyond Neptune. It is now called Eris and is recognised as a dwarf planet.
Q: Why is Eris a dwarf planet?
A: Hubble Space Telescope images have resolved the size of Eris showing it to be as large as, or larger than Pluto, Brown (2006).More important, Eris was found to have a satellite, which was later named Dysnomia, after the Greek demon of lawlessness who was Eris' daughter. In 2007, the mass of Eris was determined to be (1.66 ± 0.02)×1022 kg, 27% greater than Pluto, based on observations of the orbit of Dysnomia. Eris also orbits within the transneptunian region - a region that has not been cleared out. Therefore Eris is a dwarf planet.
Q: What is an object called that is too small to be either a planet or dwarf planet?
A: All objects that orbit the Sun that are too small (not massive enough) for their own gravity to pull them into a nearly spherical shape are now defined as being small Solar System bodies. This class currently includes most of the Solar System asteroids, near-Earth objects (NEOs), Mars and Jupiter Trojan asteroids, most Centaurs, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and comets.
Q: What is a small Solar System body?
A: The term "small Solar System body" is a new IAU definition to encompass all objects orbiting the Sun that are too small (not sufficiently massive) to satisfy the definition of planet or dwarf planet.
Q: Is the term minor planet still to be used?
A: The term "minor planet" may still be used. But generally the term small Solar System body will be preferred.
Q: How will an official decision be reached on whether or not to call a newly discovered object a planet, dwarf planet, or a Solar System body?
A: The decision on how to classify newly discovered objects will be made by a review committee within the IAU. The review process will be an evaluation, based on the best available data, of whether or not the physical properties of the object satisfy the definitions. It is likely that for many objects, several years may be required to gather sufficient data.
Q: Are there additional planet candidates currently being considered?
A: No. None appear likely in our Solar System. But there are planet discoveries galore around other stars.
Q: Are there additional dwarf planet candidates currently being considered?
A: Yes. Some of the largest asteroids may be candidates for dwarf planet status and some additional dwarf planet candidates beyond Neptune will soon be considered.
Q: When will additional new dwarf planets likely be announced?
A: Probably within the next few years.
Q: How many more new dwarf planets are there likely to be?
A: There may be dozens or perhaps even more than a hundred waiting to be discovered.
Q: What are plutoids?
A: Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a semimajor axis greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit. Satellites of plutoids are not plutoids themselves, even if they are massive enough that their shape is dictated by self-gravity. The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris. It is expected that more plutoids will be named as science progresses and new discoveries are made. ( Read more )
Q: Can a satellite orbiting a plutoid be a plutoid too?
A: No, according to the IAU Resolution B5 a dwarf planet can not be a satellite, even if they are massive enough that their shape is dictated by self-gravity.
|
Mercury (newspaper)
|
What was the 'Boston Strangler's' real name?
|
Why is Pluto no longer a planet? (Everyday Mysteries: Fun Science Facts from the Library of Congress)
Why is Pluto no longer a planet?
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of a dwarf planet because it did not meet the three criteria the IAU uses to define a full-sized planet. Essentially Pluto meets all the criteria except one- it “has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.”
In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of "dwarf planet." This means that from now on only the rocky worlds of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer system will be designated as planets. The “inner Solar System” is the region of space that is smaller than the radius of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. It contains the asteroid belt as well as the terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The “gas giants” of course are Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. So now we have eight planets instead of the nine we used to have.
What is a Dwarf Planet?
A “dwarf planet,” as defined by the IAU, is a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough that its shape is controlled by gravitational forces rather than mechanical forces (and is thus ellipsoid in shape), but has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.
So, the three criteria of the IAU for a full-sized planet are:
It is in orbit around the Sun.
It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
It has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.
Pluto meets only two of these criteria, losing out on the third. In all the billions of years it has lived there, it has not managed to clear its neighborhood. You may wonder what that means, “not clearing its neighboring region of other objects?” Sounds like a minesweeper in space! This means that the planet has become gravitationally dominant -- there are no other bodies of comparable size other than its own satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence, in its vicinity in space.
So any large body that does not meet these criteria is now classed as a “dwarf planet,” and that includes Pluto, which shares its orbital neighborhood with Kuiper belt objects such as the plutinos.
History of Pluto
The object formerly known as the planet Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, with contributions from William H. Pickering. This period in astronomy was one of intense planet hunting, and Pickering was a prolific planet predictor.
In 1906, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian who had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894, started an extensive project in search of a possible ninth planet, which he termed "Planet X." By 1909, Lowell and Pickering had suggested several possible celestial coordinates for such a planet. Lowell and his observatory conducted the search until his death in 1916, to no avail. Unknown to Lowell, on March 19, 1915, his observatory had captured two faint images of Pluto, but they were not recognized for what they were. Lowell was not the first to unknowingly photograph Pluto. There are sixteen known pre-discoveries, with the oldest being made by the Yerkes Observatory on August 20, 1909.
The search for Planet X did not resume until 1929, when the job was handed to Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old Kansan who had just arrived at the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh's task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs taken two weeks apart, then examine each pair and determine whether any objects had shifted position. Using a machine called a blink comparator, he rapidly shifted back and forth between views of each of the plates to create the illusion of movement of any objects that had changed position or appearance between photographs. On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and January 29 of that year. After the observatory obtained further confirmatory photographs, news of the discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory on March 13, 1930.
The discovery made headlines across the globe. The Lowell Observatory, which had the right to name the new object, received over 1,000 suggestions from all over the world; the name Pluto was proposed by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name for the god of the underworld appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, a former librarian at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in the United States. Pluto officially became Pluto on March 24, 1930. The name was announced on May 1, 1930, and Venetia received five pounds (£5) as a reward.
Related Web Sites
International Astronomical Union (IAU): Pluto and the Developing Landscape of our Solar System - A discussion about Pluto from IAU that includes a history, references to how a planet is defined and a link to the report on the final resolution. Also included are questions and answers about Planets, Dwarf Planets, and Small Solar System Bodies.
The Girl Who Named a Planet - This is an article about Venetia (Burney) Phair, the girl who named the planet Pluto.
NOVA: The Pluto Files - Watch the PBS program which features Neil deGrasse Tyson exploring the rise and fall of America’s favorite planet.
Solar System Exploration: Pluto - NASA provides an abundance of information about Pluto such as facts, images, headline news, and a video.
Further Reading
Boyle, Alan. The case for Pluto: how a little planet made a big difference. Hoboken, N.J, John Wiley & Sons, c2010. 258 p.
Doressoundiram, Alain, and Emmanuel Lellouch. At the edge of the solar system: icy new worlds unveiled. [Translator, Bob Mizon]. Berlin, New York, Springer Verlag; Chichester, U.K,: Published in association with Praxis, c2010. 205 p. Original French edition: Aux confin de système solaire
Hoyt, William Graves. W. H. Pickering's planetary predictions and the discovery of Pluto. Isis, v. 67, Dec.1976: 551-564.
Pickering, W.H. Trans-Neptunian Planet. Popular astronomy, v. 38, June-July1930: 341-344.
Putnam, Roger Lowell, and V.M. Slipher. Searching out Pluto, Lowell’s trans-Neptunian planet X. Scientific monthly, v. 34, Jan. 1932: 5-21.
Tyson, Neil deGrasse. The Pluto files: the rise and fall of America’s favorite planet. New York, W.W. Norton, c2009. 194 p.
For more print resources...
Search on "Kuiper Belt" "Pluto (dwarf planet)," "Planets," or "Solar System" in the Library of Congress Online Catalog .
|
i don't know
|
Name the dragonthat guarded the treasure in 'The Hobbit'?
|
SparkNotes: The Hobbit: Character List
Character List
Analysis of Major Characters
Individual Characters
Bilbo Baggins - The hero of the story. Bilbo is a hobbit, “a short, human-like person.” Commonsensical and fastidious, Bilbo leads a quiet life in his comfortable hole at Bag End and, like most hobbits, is content to stay at home. But Bilbo possesses a great deal of untapped inner strength, and when the wizard Gandalf persuades Bilbo to join a group of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their gold from a marauding dragon, Bilbo ends up playing a crucial role as the company’s burglar. Bilbo’s adventures awaken his courage and initiative and prove his relentless ability to do what needs to be done.
Gandalf - A wise old wizard who always seems to know more than he reveals. Gandalf has a vast command of magic and tends to show up at just the moment he is needed most. Though he helps the dwarves in their quest (not least by making Bilbo go along with them), he does not seem to have any interest in their gold. He always has another purpose or plan in mind, but he rarely reveals his private thoughts.
Read an in-depth analysis of Gandalf.
Thorin Oakenshield - A dwarf who leads his fellow dwarves on a trip to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim their treasure from Smaug. Smaug’s bounty is Thorin’s inheritance, as it belonged to Thror, Thorin’s grandfather, the great King under the Mountain. Thorin is a proud, purposeful, and sturdy warrior, if a bit stubborn at times. As the novel progresses, his inability to formulate successful plans, his greed, and his reliance on Bilbo to save him at every turn make Thorin a somewhat unappealing figure, but he is partly redeemed by the remorse he shows before he dies.
Gollum - A strange, small, slimy creature who lives deep in the caves of Moria beneath the Misty Mountains. There, Gollum broods over his “precious,” a magic ring, until he accidentally loses it and Bilbo finds it. We never learn exactly what kind of creature he is. Apparently, his true shape has been too deformed by years of living in darkness to be recognizable.
Smaug - The great dragon who lives in the Lonely Mountain. Years ago, Smaug heard of the treasure that the dwarves had amassed in the mountain under Thror’s reign, and he drove them away to claim the gold for himself. His flaming breath can scorch a city, his huge wings can carry him great distances, and his armorlike hide is almost impenetrable. Smaug can speak and possesses a dark, sardonic sense of humor.
Bard - The grim human who is the honorable captain of the guard in Lake Town, a human city built on Long Lake just south of the Lonely Mountain. With the help of information discovered by Bilbo and related by a thrush, Bard finds Smaug’s weak spot and kills him.
Beorn - A man who can turn into a bear, Beorn helps Bilbo and the dwarves after their escape from the goblins.
Elrond - The great leader of the elves at Rivendell. Elrond gives Bilbo’s group aid and helpful advice when they pass through Rivendell early in the novel. He is described in Chapter 3 as being “as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.”
Dark Lord Sauron - An evil sorcerer and creator of the magic ring. Also called the Necromancer, Sauron is only mentioned in The Hobbit; he never actually appears.
Thror - Thorin’s grandfather. Thror mined Moria, a series of caves under the Mountain, and discovered a wealth of gold and jewels. He became King under the Mountain, but before long, the dragon Smaug came and killed or scattered all of Thror’s people. The dragon has been guarding the treasure ever since, and Thorin wants to get back what is rightfully his.
Races
Dwarves - Thorin’s group, composed of Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Balin, Oin, Gloin, Ori, Dori, Nori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur, none of whom is really developed as an individual character in the novel. The narrator describes dwarves unfavorably in Chapter 12, noting their greed and trickery. Some, however, are “decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.”
Elves - The first creatures in Middle-Earth. Immortal unless killed in battle, they are fair-faced, with beautiful voices, and have a close communion with nature, which makes them wonderful craftsmen. There are actually two different varieties of elves: the wood elves and the high elves. The wood elves reside in Mirkwood and, as a result, have more suspicious and less wise tendencies than their high relatives.
Humans - Humans appear in the settlement of Lake Town near the Lonely Mountain. Tolkien emphasizes their mortality, their lack of wisdom, their discordance with nature, and their rampant feuding, but he does not describe humans as inherently evil in the same way that he characterizes goblins and Wargs.
Trolls - Short-tempered and dull-witted creatures who will eat just about anything, the trolls are based on mythological creatures taken from Old English and Anglo-Saxon poems and on figures from popular fairy tales and folklore. Tolkien has them speak with a cockney accent, the dialect of lower-class Londoners, which injects a modern joke into the fantasy epic.
Goblins - Evil creatures encountered by Bilbo and company in Chapter 4. Goblins are infamous for their ability to make cruel weapons and torture devices.
Wargs - Evil wolves that join forces with the Goblins at the Battle of the Five Armies in Chapters 17 and 18. The Wargs haunt and pursue Bilbo and the dwarves soon after Bilbo acquires the ring.
|
SMAUG
|
"Which Italian spaghetti literally means ""little worms""?"
|
lord of the rings - Why did Smaug gather a treasure of gold and other precious objects? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
Why did Smaug gather a treasure of gold and other precious objects?
up vote 36 down vote favorite
2
In The Hobbit, the Dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf are on a mission to rob Smaug . But why did he have so much to steal from? He's a Dragon! He is not the kind of dragon that eats gold and gems . He doesn't need wealth to buy a luxury cavern and/or pay his servant.
Why did Smaug gather his treasure?
7
For the record, the sole purpose of the mission is not to rob Smaug. The purpose was to get the mountain back, with the treasure as a benefit of that. – The Fallen Dec 5 '12 at 21:55
39
Because that's what dragons do. – Kevin♦ Dec 6 '12 at 2:40
31
Worries of hyperinflation. Sauron's been manipulating the M3, and the CPI in Middle Earth was nearly 5.2% at that point. Gold's always been the haven of those who worry about economic stability. – John O Dec 6 '12 at 4:38
24
Gold therapy: guaranteed to make your scales shine! Appear 1000 years younger! Be a hit with the ladies! Call 1800-EREBOR today. – Aditya M P Dec 18 '12 at 11:58
7
I'm interested in this question because my wife has the same problem as Smaug, tends to after gold and jewelry that's completely inedible. – FoxMan2099 Dec 20 '13 at 20:06
up vote 64 down vote accepted
It is just something that Dragon's do in Tolkien's legendarium, it's in their nature. From The Hobbit:
Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bag, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; and they can't make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of their armour. ... There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug.
Dragons are simply greedy by nature, and that combined with an inability to "make a thing for themselves" has apparently driven them to horde precious items made by others.
26
One might note, however, that this quote is from a speech by Thorin, so is his opinion of dragon motivations, not necessarily Tolkien's canonical definition of dragonhood. – cori Dec 6 '12 at 12:47
1
@cori That is a fair point, however the way the speech is laid out, especially where Thorin says "you know" seems to indicate that this is a common opinion known by everyone. To be fair that still may make it an inaccurate opinion, but it is backed up by the only canon examples of dragons that we see. – NominSim Dec 6 '12 at 15:10
4
"You know" (or similar) is a common idiom throughout The Hobbit where the author/narrator addresses the reader using it, and is normally used to convey info that - of course - the reader quite plainly does not know. I'd view this usage in a similar light, despite it being used by a character this time. (It is true however that it is backed up by the canon examples of dragons, so that point can stand). – user8719 Dec 6 '12 at 15:33
granted: it is presumably the generally held opinion of dragon motivation. Also granted: universally accurate given the available evidence. – cori Dec 6 '12 at 15:50
@mh. Certainly that is how it is used, but the concept behind its use is to indicate that it is "common knowledge" to "know". – NominSim Dec 6 '12 at 15:55
up vote 39 down vote
Aside from dragons gathering treasure being a generic mythology trope (e.g. Fafnir's hoard, which Tolkien would have been well aware of), an in-universe explanation is also appropriate.
Dragons in Tolkien do gather treasure; his other major dragon from the legends of the First Age - Glaurung - did the very same after he sacked Nargothrond - piled up all the treasure and sat on it. In the Third Age Scatha the Worm is also mentioned as having a hoard, which led to a fued between the Northmen and the Dwarves (the horn that Merry was given is mentioned as having come from this hoard).
So it's just something that Tolkien's dragons do. But why?
As creatures of Morgoth there is very likely an element of his spirit in them (this is nowhere confirmed in canon, but I'm imagining Morgoth feeding reptiles to create dragons in much the same way as he fed a wolf to create Carcaroth, although their obvious intelligence and sentience suggests a possible Maiar source (I'm deliberately ignoring the Lost Tales concept of dragons here); either way we don't know and we've moved away from the topic a bit now); when Morgoth lusted after and stole the Silmarils from Formenos, he also took a lot of other jewels with him, which he also did not need and which he begrudged having to feed to Ungoliant. So there's a clear element of basic avarice, especially avarice for items one does not actually need, running through Morgoth and his dragons.
up vote 6 down vote
Tolkien's day job was as a teacher of Old English literature, among other things. The third part of the Old English saga/poem 'Beowulf' tells how the hero had to deal with a dragon who was angered because some low-life had sneaked in, and stolen a golden cup from his cavern-hoard of treasure. The dragon emerged and devastation ensued. Eventually the dragon is slain, but the hero dies. The idea of dragonish desire for treasure was certainly present in literature before 1000AD, and was also picked up in C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn-Treader. Perhaps it was all metaphorical for humans with an overwhelming lust for glittery stuff. We all know some bling-heads! They probably had them back then too. Some of the Anglo-Saxon gold-work with enameling and carnelian insets are unbelievably intricate and beautiful, check the Sutton Hoo treasure on google images. I can see why dragons would covet it. There are a lot of scholarly articles on the dragons of Old English literature, try google scholar. The bibliographies of a few articles should get you on the road to a better answer.
up vote -4 down vote
I dunno. The Tolkien explanation is fine and all, based on historical literature. But, for a better, more 'realiztic' explanation, such as for one that could be used in D&D adventuring and such (which basically takes the elements of tolkiens' world and expands upon it), I always had the thought that dragons (let's face it, they all seem to be male) needed gold and gems and such to reproduce. I've even read online that Tolkien had elements of the dragons reproducing on their own to some extent. As is the basic drive of almost every living thing in our world. I always thought that the females needed to digest the heavy metals and/or gems in a pre-natal nutrient kind of thing (as in the D&D world, there are different types of dragons and such) and that all had to do with how dragons were born and such.
|
i don't know
|
Who was the better known wife of Earl Leofric of Chester?
|
Leofric | earl of Mercia | Britannica.com
earl of Mercia
Cenwulf
Leofric, (died Aug. 31, 1057, Bromley, Eng.), Anglo-Saxon earl of Mercia (from 1023 or soon thereafter), one of the three great earls of 11th-century England , who took a leading part in public affairs. On the death of King Canute in 1035, Leofric supported the claim of Canute’s son Harold to the throne against that of Hardecanute; and, during the quarrel between Edward the Confessor and Earl Godwine in 1051, he played the part of a mediator. Through his efforts civil war was averted, and in accordance with his advice the settlement of the dispute was referred to the Witan.
Because Chester was his principal residence and the seat of his government, he is sometimes called Earl of Chester. His wife was Godgifu, famous in legend as Lady Godiva . Both husband and wife were noted as liberal benefactors to the church, among their foundations being the famous Benedictine monastery at Coventry .
Learn More in these related articles:
Edward (king of England [1002?-1066])
1002/05 Islip, Eng. Jan. 5, 1066 London; canonized 1161; feast day originally January 5, now October 13 king of England from 1042 to 1066. Although he is often portrayed as a listless, ineffectual monarch overshadowed by powerful nobles, Edward preserved much of the dignity of the crown and managed...
1 Reference found in Britannica Articles
Assorted Reference
(died 1057). Leofric was an Anglo-Saxon earl of Mercia (central England) from 1023 or soon thereafter. He was known as one of the three great earls of 11th-century England. He took a leading part in public affairs.
Article History
Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback.
MEDIA FOR:
You have successfully emailed this.
Error when sending the email. Try again later.
Edit Mode
Submit
Tips For Editing
We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.
Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience.
You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.
Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources.
At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.)
Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions.
Submit
Thank You for Your Contribution!
Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article.
Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed.
Uh Oh
There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later.
Close
Date Published: July 03, 2007
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leofric
Access Date: January 20, 2017
Share
|
Lady Godiva
|
What sort of creatureis a 'Mandarin'?
|
Hereward (1035 - c.1072) - Genealogy
Genealogy
Join the world's largest family tree
Gender
Hereward "The Exile", thegn of Mercia
public profile
Share your family tree and photos with the people you know and love
Build your family tree online
Share photos and videos
Hereward
Also Known As:
"Herwardus", "Hereward le Wake", "Hereward The Wake", "Herwardus de Brunne", "Hereward of Mercia", "The Exile", "Hereward the Outlaw", "Hereward the Exile", "Hereward the Banished?", "Hereward the Banished"
Birthdate:
Mercia, Leicestershire, England, United Kingdom
Death:
in Crowland, Lincolnshire, England, United Kingdom
Immediate Family:
About Hereward "The Exile", thegn of Mercia
Hereward The Wake
"le Wac" means "the Banished"
---------------------
Historian Paul Dalton has written an excellent article entitled "The Outlaw Hereward 'the Wake': His Companions and Enemies" [Chapter 1, pp. 7-36, in Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society c. 1066-1600 edited by John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton, Ashgate Publishing, 2009. It is available on Google Books.
-------------------------------
Excerpt from A Brief History of The Anglo -Saxons" by Geoffrey Hindley "With the country in turmoil, 'the English people from the Fens' had flocked to Swein of Denmark, thinking his army was planning to occupy the region. At about this time the monks of Peterborourgh heard that on of their tenants, Hereward of Bourne, was marching on the Abbey because he and his men had heard that, with the death of Abbot Brand, the Conqueror had handed the place to the Norman soldier/ churchman Turold of Fecamp. In what followed the once 'golden borough' crashed to 'wretched borough' , plundered of its treasures by foes and friends alike, claiming to save them from the alien invaders. Pirates, we are told, sailed up to the minster wharf and tried to break in. When the monks reisted the attackers set fires. THey then plundered the abbey of its gold, from t crown on the head of the crucified Christ hanging on the rood screen to many other crosses and gold and silver ornaments of all kinds, as well as precious manuscrpts. Even the talismanic arm of St Oswald was carried down to the ships and, with the rest of teh booty taken off to Ely - supposedly for safe keeping away from teh depredations of the Normans.
There Hereward, known to history and legend as Hereward the Wake , joined by Earl Morcar of Mercia and Bishop Aelfwine of Durham, held out with hundreds of desperate rebels, their hope fixed on the Danish fleet in the face of news of King William's progress, Ely Abbey, on its island among the fenland marshes was well suited for a stronghold, but as at Alfred's Athelney resitstance couldnot be infefinite.
By the spring William had flayed his rebel kingdom back to obedience. In a campaign that historian David Douglas rated 'one of teh outstanding military achievements of the age' , he was once more master. AT this pint the Danes came to terms with the Norman king and sailed away to Denmark, with much English booty in their holds. Now , too, the leaders of Ely's lost cause made what peace they could while Hereward made good his escape into the half-light begtween legend and history. The Conqueror is said to have pardoned him and he supposedly crossed over to France. There, acccording to Geoffrey Gaimar, the French historian of the English, writing his "Estoire des Agnleis" for the wife of a Norman lord in Lincolnshire, Hereward was run to ground and mudered by a party of vengeful Normans. ....."
------------------------------------------------------
http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/ENGLAND,%20AngloSaxon%20nobility.htm#Leofricdied1057B
LEOFRIC. The Genealogia Fundatoris of Coventry Monastery names “Leofricum postea comitem, et Edwinum occisum per Walenses, et Normannum occisum cum Edrico duce Merciorum per Cnutonem regem” as sons of “Leofwinus comes Leicestriæ”[223]. The De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis names "Lefricus de Brunne, nepos comitis Radulfi cognominati Scalre", when recording that he was father of "Herwardus"[224]. This "comitis Radulfi…Scalre" has not otherwise been identified nor any possible relationship with Leofric. Simeon of Durham records that King Canute appointed "Leofric" as Earl of Mercia after his brother Northman was killed in 1017[225], although this was apparently during the lifetime of their father. He and his wife founded the abbey of Coventry in 1043[226]. “Leofricus comes” founded the monastery of Coventry by undated charter[227]. ”Leofricus comes…et conjux mea Godgyve” donated property to Evesham Monastery by undated charter which names “frater meus Normannus”[228].
m GODGIFU, sister of THOROLD de Bukenhale, Sheriff of Lincolnshire, daughter of ---. She is named as wife of Earl Leofric by Florence of Worcester, who specifies that she and her husband founded monasteries at Leominster, Wenlock, Chester and Stowe[229]. The Annals of Peterborough record that “Thoroldus vicecomes et frater germanus Godivæ comitissæ Leycestriæ” founded Spalding Monastery in 1052[230]. Her family origin is also indicated by the undated charter under which “Thoroldus de Bukenhale…vicecomiti” donated Spalding monastery to Croyland abbey which names “domino meo Leofrico comite Leicestriæ et…comitissa sua domina Godiva sorore mea…et cognati mei comitis Algari primogeniti et hæredis eorum”[231]. The De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis names "Aediva trinepta Oslaci ducis" as wife of "Lefricus de Brunne, nepos comitis Radulfi cognominati Scalre", when recording that they were parents of "Herwardus"[232]. "Oslaci ducis" could be "Oslac" recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as "earl [of Northumbria]" in 966[233], but any precise relationship has not been identified. ”Leofricus comes…et conjux mea Godgyve” donated property to Evesham Monastery by undated charter which names “frater meus Normannus”[234]. Godgifu wife of Leofric granted property to St Mary's, Stow by charter dated [1054/57][235]. She was the Lady Godiva of legend.
Leofric & his wife had [two] children:
2. [HEREWARD . The De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis names "Herwardus" as son of "Lefricus de Brunne, nepos comitis Radulfi cognominati Scalre" and his wife "Aediva trinepta Oslaci ducis", being the "Hereward the Wake" of semi-legend[260].
m firstly TURFRIDA, daughter of ---. The De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis records that "Herwardus" married "Turfrida", adding in a later passage that she became a nun "in Cruland" after she was repudiated[261].
m secondly as her second husband, ---, widow of DOLFIN, daughter of ---. The De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis records that "Herwardus" married secondly "uxor Dolfini comitis"[262].]
--------------------
http://www.robinhoodloxley.net/mycustompage0013.htm
HEREWARD THE WAKE, The Last True Englishman and Hero of Britain
Hereward was the son of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia and his mother was Lady Godiva. He was the uncle of Edwin and Morcar who were the last surviving members of the English royal house and he was born at Bourne in Lincolnshire where the Domesday Book confirms that he held lands there and also in Warwickshire and Worcestershire.
Earl Leofric was very harsh and the people of Coventry suffered greatly because of him. His wife, Lady Godiva was very different, she was a gentle, pious, loving woman who had already won an almost saintly reputation for sympathy and pity by her sacrifice to save her husbands oppressed citizens at Coventry, where her pleading won relief for them from the harsh earl on the pitiless condition of her never-forgotten ride. Happily her gentle self-suppression awoke a nobler spirit in her husband and enabled him to play a worthier part in England’s history.
Lady Godiva wanted Hereward to become a monk, but Hereward would have none of it and refused to study. He was a wild wayward lad, with long golden curls, eyes of different colours, one grey, and one blue. He had great breadth and strength of limb, and a wild and ungovernable temper, which made him difficult to control. He spent his time wrestling, boxing, fighting, and all manly exercises. Despairing of making an ecclesiastic of him, his mother set herself to inspire him with a noble ideal of Knighthood. When he reached the age of sixteen or seventeen he became the terror of the Fen Country, and at his fathers Hall of Bourne he gathered a band of youths as wild and reckless as himself, who accepted him as their leader and obeyed him implicitly, however outrageous were his commands.
In all of Hereward’s lawless deeds, however there was no meanness or crafty malice. He took his punishment when it came with equable cheerfulness. He robbed merchants with a high hand, but made reparation liberally counting himself well satisfied with the fun of a fight or the skill of a clever trick. His band of youths met and fought other bands, but they bore no malice when the struggle was over. The only flaw Hereward had in his character was he would not admit anyone was stronger than he, or more handsome, but credit due, he had both attributes in abundance.
Hereward’s father could do nothing to control his son, so Leofric begged an audience with the king (Edward the Confessor), and formally asked for a writ of outlawry against his own son. This done Hereward rode away, followed into exile by Martin Lightfoot, who left Leofric’s service for that of his outlawed son. Though the king’s writ of outlawry might run in Mercia, it did not carry more than nominal weight in Northumbria, where Earl Siward (note the connection for Siward was the father of Waltheof) ruled almost as an independent lord. In Northumbria lived his godfather Gilbert of Ghent, and his castle was known as an excellent training school for young aspirants to the knighthood. Sailing from Dover, Hereward landed at Whitby (this is near Robin Hood's Bay) and made his way to Gilbert’s castle, where he was well received, since the cunning Fleming knew that an outlawry could be reversed at any time, and Leofric’s son might yet come to rule England. (This was before the Norman invasion.) He soon showed himself to be a brave warrior, an unequalled wrestler, and a wary fighter, who outdid them in all manly sports. Gilbet kept in his castle a large white Polar bear which was feared by all for its enormous strength, it was called the Fairy Bear, but it was no fairy. They said it bore some kinship to Earl Siward who had a bear on his crest and he was reputed to be as fierce as one. The bear was kept in a cage and for added security one leg was chained, but this particular day when Hereward was returning with Martin from his morning ride they heard a commotion. Inside the courtyard stood the escaped bear with the broken chain dangling, and with no way of escape stood a petrified girl called Alftruda. The bear made a rush toward the girl and Hereward sprang forward with his battleaxe in his hand. He swung it round his head and split the skull of the furious beast, which fell dead.
A romantic love story follows which results in Hereward leaving for the continent where he fought in the armies of foreign princes. While in Flanders he learned how his aged mother was suffering insults at the hands of the Normans. His father was already dead and the estates had become the property of a Norman. On his return to England he found that the new Norman owners had not only taken the land, but also slain his brother, whose head was set above the door of the house. He revealed himself to some of his relatives and friends collected an armed band and like an avenging thunderbolt, he descended upon the killers and slew them all with his famous sword Brainbiter. Next day fourteen Norman heads had replaced that of his brother above the door. News of Hereward’s exploits spread making him the hero of the countryside. Soon other armed bands joined him and he became the leader of a mixed band of English and Danish warriors, who flocked to join him at his new base at the great Abbey of Ely.(Remember, it was to Ely where the wealthy fled after the Harrowing of the North.)
Visiting the monastery at Peterborough he received from the hands of the Saxon Abbot the military belt and sword, which constituted a kind of knighthood. The Normans used to say that he whose sword had been girt on by a clerk in a long gown was not a true knight but a citizen without prowess, but they soon came to respect him when they measured swords with him. After the abbot of Peterborough died the Normans put one of their own warlike men called Turbold in his place with the intent of subduing the “Saxon rabble” around Peterborough. Hereward feeling no doubt that the treasures of Peterborough Abbey would be better in English hands than those of the hated Norman acted quickly and when Turbold finally rode into Peterborough at the head of an armed force he found that the town had been reduced to ashes and the church stripped of every valuable object it had ever contained.
Hereward made many raids against the Normans and greatly harassed them for four or five years. At last in 1072 William felt it was necessary to take vigorous measures against the English leader. Hereward had established a camp of refuge in the Isle of Ely in the midst of the Fens where it was very difficult to reach him. The ground was treacherous, affording no footing for an army, and yet there was not enough water for the warriors to approach the camp by boat. Archers could find no suitable standing place and the mailed knights dare not take their horses among the soft soil and reedy pools. What could be done?
William who was always a man of action decided to construct a causeway across the Fens at their narrowest point from Aldreth to Ely and engaged a large number of workmen to cut trenches so that the water might be drained off. Then he raised a bank of stone and turf, but all the time Hereward was on the alert and constantly stopped the operations. He raided here there and everywhere and for months and the Normans could do nothing more than blockade the English rebels. During Williams third attempt at building a causeway, he camped at Brandon. Hereward rode there on his horse, a noble beast called Swallow and on his way met a potter, who agreed to exchange clothes with him and lend him his wares. In this disguise Hereward got into William’s camp and overheard his plans. When William ordered his men to attack Ely the third time Hereward’s men hidden in the reeds set fire to the vegetation and the wind did the rest. The flames rapidly engulfed the Normans and those who tried to escape were either drowned in the marsh or picked off by English arrows.
Then some treacherous monks of Ely, growing weary of the privations they had to suffer, went in secret to the king and offered to show him a way across the Fens. William agreed and a band of Normans was led across the Fens. Hereward and his men were surprised and a thousand of them were killed and their camp captured. Hereward and five of his comrades fought on and crossed the marshes at a place where the enemy did not dare follow. Thus they escaped into Lincolnshire and were hidden by some Saxon fisherman. Still the disaffected English rallied to Hereward and he made constant raids upon the Normans greatly harassing them, killing many, putting the rest to flight and seizing their horses. Then one day he took prisoner his old enemy Ivo Taillebois and promised to give him his liberty on condition that he went to William carrying proposals of peace.
The king was only too glad, for he had come to respect Hereward and preferred to have the brave English leader as a friend rather than as a foe. Hereward went to Winchester where he swore allegiance to William and gained the king’s favour who restored his lands. This is confirmed by the Domesday book. One night however he was set upon by a band of envious Normans and although he managed to kill fifteen of them with his famous sword Brainbiter he was stabed in the back and fell dying, a hero to the end.
The author of the Gesta, writing no more than fifty years after William’s assault on Ely, tells us that he remembers seeing fishermen dredging Norman skeletons, still in their rusty armour, out of the fen. Songs were being sung about Hereward in taverns a hundred years after his death; and in the thirteenth century people still visited a ruined wooden castle in the Fens which was known as Hereward’s Castle. But later he was supplanted by another outlaw-hero, Robin Hood, as a symbol of resistance to oppression.
PICTURE-Hereward the Wake leaving home after being outlawed.
-----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/myths_legends/england/cambridgeshire/article_1.shtml
Awake the Hereward (written by Emma Borley for BBC Legacies)
Famed through folklore, immortalised through myth, Hereward the Wake, The Banished, has been depicted as an action-hero of Anglo-Saxon descent. It is believed that he was born around 1032 and spent the best years of his life resisting the mighty force of "William the Bastard" (or "Conqueror" as he is perhaps more formally known!).
His adventures and escapades were recorded in prose and verse within just 40 years of his death (ie. De Gestis Herwardi Saxons – "The Exploits of Hereward the Saxon", researched and compiled in the 12th century by monastic scholars and the Domesday book).
However, exactness and detail may well have been lost in the enthusiastic endeavour to remember a hero, so we have to be careful in presenting such history today as time often merges fact and fiction. However, based on the documents listed above, we can perhaps assume the following picture of Hereward the Wake, The Banished.
French resistance
The Normans were not the only invaders England had to endure. About 150 years earlier, Danish forces occupied the Eastern part of England, ousting the Anglo-Saxon rulers. It was not until the King’s School, Ely, old boy, Edward the Confessor became King that Anglo-Saxon rule resumed. After Edward’s death, leaving no heir, an unlikely truce was forged between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons as they united against the foreign invasion led by William, Duke of Normandy.
William introduced a continental-style feudal system and the Norman and French invaders took over from their Anglo-Saxon and Danish counterparts in all positions of power across the land.
He had a personal vendetta to settle
The new rulers spoke a different language, brought new customs and a new legal system which heavily favoured the invaders.
The invasion, however, was by no means an overnight success. Lincolnshire and parts of East Anglia were densely populated areas at that time. Rich and fruitful soils meant that landowners fought hard to retain their property and their rights. The neighbouring Isle of Ely became the headquarters of the resistance against the Normans - it was a great hiding place with its swamps and marshy terrain providing an almost impenetrable fortress to William’s army.
It was here, at Ely, that Hereward joined the resistance "prompted into action by personal vendetta and patriotism” ('Hereward of the Fens – The Battle of Ely and Involvement of Peterborough and Ely monasteries incorporating De Gestis Herewardi Saxonis', Trevor Bevis 1995).
As a young man, Hereward gained a reputation as a hell-raiser, hanging around in gangs, challenging his father’s authority, and generally upsetting the neighbouring nobility. Worn down by his son’s behaviour, his father eventually banished the young Hereward to the continent with the blessing of King Edward.
Legend recalls that he occupied his time there in battles of honour and love and taking down the odd bear and giant too. However, all was not well on the home front. Word reached the young warrior of tragedy at home. Both his father and brother had been murdered, his mother had been raped and his lands had been seized – all at the hands of the Normans.
To make matters worse, the patriotic Hereward returned to find his beloved country undermined by foreign rule. He learned of a band of resistance fighters holed out in the Isle of Ely and swiftly joined their fight. He quickly won their respect and became their leader, heading a series of damaging attacks against the Normans.
The spoils of war
One of the most famous of those attacks involved the plunder of Peterborough Abbey. At the Abbey, some 24 miles from the Isle of Ely, Abbot Brand (possibly Hereward’s uncle) died and word got out that William was to replace him with the Norman, Turold, reputed to have a stern reputation and strong military leanings. Hereward got wind of this appointment and led his men onto the Abbey to plunder
Peterborough Abbey, now the Cathedral, was plundered its many riches (indeed, prior to the attack, Peterborough was renamed "Gildenburgh" meaning "Golden Borough" a reflection of its vast treasures).
Hereward and his men escaped with hordes of loot from the Abbey back to the waiting cover of the fens. They defended their actions by declaring that they were protecting the religious artefacts from the sacrilegious Norman hands, and acting on behalf of their people.
The Isle of Ely itself was an 11th Century Vietnam. Guerrilla warfare ruled as dense marshland covered tracks, thick reeds absorbed telltale sound and canny knowledge of the layout offered the only guarantee against drowning. Added to that, the land provided well for its protectors: food was plentiful as was wood and water, and with full support of the Monks at the Ely Monastery and the resistance was a credible force.
One of the first things that William did after the invasion was to erect motte and bailey castles in key positions around the country to provide power-bases for his rule. The one at Cambridge gave his soldiers easy access to the Midlands and the North. The fen approach still remained impassable and threatened the Norman strategy with the resistance easily able to target the foreign soldiers on the open road and withdraw quickly back to their inaccessible base.
The Monks at Ely Cathedral supported Hereward with food and water: William knew that he had to act against this band of fen-men. He ordered many attacks on the Isle of Ely, with little success (even going so far as to employ a witch, who bared her bottom at William’s foe in an act of repulsion!). Finally, he found the resistors’ Achilles heel: the Ely monastery whose monks fought along side and gave succour to the rebels.
'Betrayed' Accepting that the Isle of Ely was virtually impenetrable, he decreed that surrounding lands owned by the church and the monks be divided up to eminent Normans who would simply guard the perimeter of the Isle and so starve out the resistance. It is said that the monks got to hear of William’s plan and fled to Bottisham (just outside of Cambridge) taking with them all the treasures of the church. They then sought a peace treaty with the King in return that he honoured their ownership of their lands and possessions.
The church shifted their allegiance and lost the support of their hero. Little more is reported of Hereward other than he escaped from the stranglehold around the Isle of Ely, earned a begrudging respect from the King (who was well aware of Hereward's reputation as a first-class strategist and soldier) and lived the rest of his life resisting the Normans in battles carried out near Peterborough.
Hereward was no myth, but indeed was quite a legend: So, a hero and legend, Hereward will go down in history as the Robin Hood of the fens and the blur between fact and fiction will perhaps never be resolved. Winners always write the history books and so it is hard to find the truth almost 1,000 years on (the Normans had control of the literate section of the community, i.e. the Monks and so a certain amount of spin would have been injected into the recorded histories).
The last true Englishman
However, we can report that a Hereward did indeed exist and was a landowner in the Lincolnshire area (according to Domesday entries) and that a Hereward led the resistance movement based at Ely against the Normans on a mission to reclaim his families land. And, according to Trevor Bevis, it is a Hereward who is depicted as "the strategists dream and an ideal leader of men". Perhaps then, we can best sum up Hereward the Wake as all three – hero, myth and legend, indeed "the last true Englishman".
-----------------------------------------------------------
|
i don't know
|
"Who advertises themselves with the slogan ""We never forget you have a choice""?"
|
Top 100 Slogans, Company Slogans and Ideas
6. Amtrak: See America at see level
7. Calvin Klein Jeans: Nothing comes between me and my Calvins
Some of the top 100 slogans tell you that you're different from the rest:
8. Apple Computers: Think different
9. BMW: The ultimate driving machine
10. Campari: The first time is never the best
11. The Independent (newspaper): It is. Are you?
12. Adidas: Impossible Is Nothing
Some of the top 100 slogans urge you to unleash your inner bad boy or girl:
13. Brut Aftershave: Splash it all over
14. Courage Beer: It's what your right arm's for
15. Esso (1964): Put a Tiger in Your Tank
16. Hai Karate Aftershave: Be careful how you use it!
17. Levi's Jeans: Have you ever had a bad time in Levi's?
18. Marcus Valley Pickles: At last. A pickle that bites back
19. Max Factor Cosmetics: To bring the wolves out - Riding Hood Red
20. Arpege Perfume: No bottles to break - just hearts
Some of the top 100 slogans make you feel warm and fuzzy inside:
21. American Airlines (1973): Rest, keep warm and drink liquids
22. British Egg Marketing Board: Happiness is egg shaped
23. Cadbury's Flake: Sixpence worth of Heaven
24. Carnation Milk: Milk from contented cows
25. Post Office (1964): Someone, somewhere, wants a letter from you
26. Ralston Purina Pet Food: All you add is love
27. Allstate Insurance: You're in good hands with Allstate
28. British Airways: We'll take more care of you
29. Alpo Dog Food: Doesn't your dog deserve ALPO?
30. Pillsbury Foods: Nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven
Some of the top 100 slogans urge you to clarify your priorities:
31. Friends of Animals: Extinct is forever
32. Red Cross (1961): The greatest tragedy is indifference
33. United Negro College Fund: A mind is a terrible thing to waste
And some of the top 100 slogans are just cute and/or funny:
34. Adelma Mineral Waters: Fresh Squeezed Glaciers
35. American Coach Lines: If man were meant to fly, God would have lowered the fares
36. Central Park Zoo: Come to the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria. Let the animals watch you eat for a change
37. Matchbox: We sell more cars than Ford, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and Buick combined
38. Mohara Suits: Only 1 out of 25 men is color blind. The other 24 just dress that way
39. Alba Dry Milk: Skim milk does not come from skinny cows
40. Smucker's Jam: With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good
The top 100 slogans sell you on the business's competence:
41. Big Ben Clocks: Victory won't wait for the nation that's late
42. British Caledonian Airline: We never forget you have a choice
43. Castrol Motor Oil Castrol: liquid engineering
44. Hyundai: Prepare to want one
45. Levis: Quality never goes out of style
46. Compaq: Has it changed your life yet?
47. UPS: Moving at the speed of business
48. Tata Safari (Indian car maker): Reclaim Your Life
49. New York Times: All the news that's fit to print
50. Wall Street Journal: The daily diary of the American dream
But for many of the top 100 slogans, there's just that certain je ne sais quoi (or else they've been hammered into our brains for so many years they might as well be hardwired):
51. A&W Root Beer: That frosty mug sensation
52. Alka Seltzer: Try it, you'll like it
53. Brylcreem: A little dab'll do ya
54. Clairol Hair Coloring: Does she or doesn't she?
55. Dial Soap: Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?
56. Energizer Batteries: It keeps going, and going, and going....
57. Gordon's Gin: It's got to be Gordon's
58. Hanes Underwear: Just wait'll we get our Hanes on you
59. Kellogg's Rice Krispies: Snap! Crackle! Pop!
60. Maxwell House Coffee: Good to the last drop
61. Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
62. Wendy's: Where's the beef?
63. Virginia Slims Cigarettes: You've come a long way, baby
64. Camel Cigarettes: I'd walk a mile for a Camel
65. Burger King: the home of the Whopper
66. Subaru: The beauty of all wheel drive
67. Buick: Wouldn't you really rather have a Buick?
68. A-1 Steak Sauce: A-1 makes hamburgers taste like steakburgers
69. Acura: The True Definition of Luxury. Yours.
70. Busch Beer: Head for the mountains
71. Alka Seltzer: I can't believe I ate the whole thing!
72. American Express Charge Card: Don't leave home without it
73. Bounty Paper Towels: The quick picker upper
74. AT&T (1982): Reach out and touch someone
75. Timex: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking
76. Apple Computers: The Power to Be Your Best
77. Budweiser Beer: When you say Budweiser, you've said it all
78. Avis Rental Car (1960s): We're number two. We try harder
79. Bank of America (1980): Think what we can do for you
80. Wheaties Cereal: Breakfast of Champions
81. Barnum & Bailey Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth
82. M&Ms: Melt in your mouth, not in your hand
83. Tide Washing Powder: If it's got to be clean, it's got to be Tide
84. Benetton: The United Colors of Benetton
85. Campbell's Soup: M'm! M'm! Good!
86. Benson & Hedges Cigarettes: Pure Gold
87. Taco Bell Restaurants: Head for the Border
88. Bic Lighters (1975): Flick your Bic
89. Visa Credit Card: Visa - It's everywhere you want to be
90. Borden Inc: If it's Borden's, it's got to be good
91. Schlitz Beer: Schlitz ... the beer that made Milwaukee famous
92. Sprite: Obey Your Thirst
93. Yellow Pages: Let your fingers do the walking
94. Hewlett Packard: Expanding Possibilities
95. Winston Cigarettes: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should
96. Toyota: Oh what a feeling
97. Sun Microsystems: We put the . in dot.com
98. Kentucky Fried Chicken: Finger-lickin' good
99. McDonald's: You deserve a break today
100. Hallmark Greeting Cards: When you care enough to send the very best
|
British Caledonian
|
Which everyday objects are featured in the painting 'The Persistence Of Memory'?
|
Offering Employees Important Perks When You Can't Give A Raise
Offering Employees Important Perks When You Can’t Give A Raise
March 18, 2013 - By Flavio Martins
We are currently inundated with reports about how high the unemployment rate is; how new graduates can’t find jobs; how even skilled and experienced people have no luck finding positions.
You’d think just putting a hand lettered “Help Wanted” sign in the window would generate a long line of overqualified applicants. The fact is, the cream always rises.
The best and the brightest job applicants, those very ones that you want and need are always snapped up quickly.
So how can you become the one doing the snapping, when you can’t begin to match the big salaries offered by the rich local companies and the huge multinationals? Very easy. Just use your imagination. The very fact that, even in these dismal economic times, you are still in business, and in a position to hire new employees, means that you are very innovative, and fast on your feet in business.
In the 1980s, British Caledonian Airways had an advertising slogan which said “We never forget you have a choice” and that’s the exact attitude you must take to attract the very best new people.
Great business benefits you can offer when you can’t compete with higher salaries
How can you compete with big money? Here are a few thoughts that you can work with:
1) A four-day work week
Work longer for four days, get a three-day weekend, every weekend. That’s worth its weight in gold to many employees right there. If you can’t do that, try flex hours so people can set their own schedules to avoid traffic and fit in better with their family timetables.
2) Work from home
This is not only a very attractive alternative for employees, but can also save you a lot of money. You don’t need to expand your office space to accommodate new hires as your company expands. You don’t have to suffer from absenteeism or traffic and weather related tardiness. You don’t have to pay for employee parking or lounges or lunches.
3) Business prepaid cards
Business prepaid cards are stored value cards and are associated with big credit card companies like VISA, Mastercard or American Express. You can issue a card, for example the PEX VISA® prepaid card, to individual employees for use at millions of outlets, or only at vendors that are approved by the administrator of the master account. Business prepaid cards are rechargeable too, so, every month you can re-fund your employees’ individual cards.
Prepaid cards are the fastest growing sector in the financial industry today. It’s easy for you to keep track of business expenses and predict exact company outlays; employees like using prepaid cards because they no longer have to account for every little purchase, keep track of sales slips, or turn cards in to be reimbursed.
4) In-house day care, or day care reimbursements
As new mothers approach the end of paid maternity leave, they may find themselves facing a difficult decision. Staying home or returning to work may be driven by economics and personal career goals. By offering in-office or nearby day care, you can get their skills and experience working for you.
Clearly, there are several inexpensive ways of attracting the best professionals to work for you. Not all employees are motivated solely by their paycheck. By thinking outside the box you can gain an advantage over your competitors in offering perks that motivate and cultivate loyalty from your employees!
DDCP specializes in covering the latest news of interest to small business owners, including business prepaid cards.
1 Comment
Erik Ayers, February 8, 2016 at 7:05 pm - Reply
I like all these ideas. But one of the things are looking at with GoodSeeker is the power of simply showing employees (and customers) that their efforts (especially the small things matter). I have found that “giving” the perk of a story that shows someone how their efforts relate to a bigger purpose goes pretty far. The platform we are out to build enables a user to quickly capture and share examples of the things they and their coworkers do to make a positive impact in the form of short stories. (You can even recognize customers.) Then we encourage them to share publically to share what’s special about their culture.
|
i don't know
|
In which film were 'Dan Gallagher', 'Beth Gallagher' and 'Alex Forrest' the main characters?
|
Dimitri Ioannou - Media Studies blog (Thrillers): Fatal Attraction - The character of Alex Forrest
Monday, 21 January 2013
Fatal Attraction - The character of Alex Forrest
In ‘Fatal Attraction’, there are many different characters involved in the film, however, the main characters in ‘Fatal Attraction’ are the married man Dan Gallagher, his wife Beth Gallagher, his daughter Ellen Gallagher and Alex Forrest, in which the events in the film occur around these characters, Alex Forrest calling Dan’s house telephone at all times throughout the day, Alex Forrest turning up at their apartment which is up for sale, Alex Forrest taking Dan and Beth’s daughter from school, sending Dan a cassette of verbal abuse, and turning up at their family home (once they have moved), which mostly occur in domestic settings.
In ‘Fatal Attraction’, Alex Forrest is a mentally unstable, disturbing and obsessive woman, who has a split personality, due to her being extremely calm compared to her actions in the film, in which Alex Forrest’s appearance is extremely noticeable because of her bold eyes (which are eye-catching), which adds to her evil streak of actions in the film. Furthermore, throughout the film Alex Forrest has many different aspects of psychological behaviour, as her taking Dan and Beth’s child from her school, calling home at all times throughout the day, and sending Dan the cassette to play, all play with Dans and Beths mind. Alex Forrest’s character in ‘Fatal Attraction’ is extremely effective, as she is unstable, disturbing and obsessive throughout the whole film, in which she plays with Dan’s mind to get her own way (over a series of times).
Throughout ‘Fatal Attraction’, there are many effective sequences that make ‘Fatal Attraction’ an extremely good film, such as Dan’s reaction when Alex calls home for the first time, Dan driving and listening to Alex’s cassette playing, and the end sequence, when Dan is in the dark isolated house, Beth is upstairs and the mirrors are misty as the kettle boils.
The sequence of Dan’s reaction to when Alex calls home for the first time is effective because this sequence puts Dan at edge, as he thinks the affair has been forgotten about, and his wife is right next to him in bed, in which Dan has to change his tone and the way he talks to her, so his wife doesn’t suspect he has had an affair, in which the audience want to see where the storyline is going to go.
The sequence of Dan driving and listening to Alex’s cassette playing is also effective because this sequence also puts Dan at edge, because the cassette playing of Alex abusing him shows she is willing to go to every extent to get her own way, no matter who she hurts in the process.
The end sequence of Dan being in the dark isolated house, with his wife Beth upstairs in the bathroom, and the mirror being misty, while the kettle boils is extremely effective, as it is a simple sequence, however, it is effective because Alex Forrest pops up out of nowhere, and the audience don’t know if Dan is going to get upstairs in time to save his wife from Alex Forrest, because the kettle is boiling and he can’t hear his wife screaming.
All the sequences stated above are effective on the audience watching, as they keep the audience on the edge of their seats because they don’t know what is going to happen next, and they want to know where the storyline is leading to. Furthermore, I would take the idea of the end sequence (Dan being in the dark isolated house, with his wife upstairs in the bathroom, and the mirrors being misty, while the kettle boils) to help me create my own effective thriller, as the idea is simple and achievable, yet extremely effective.
Posted by
|
Fatal attraction
|
What does the word 'whisky' literally mean?
|
Fatal Attraction (1987) - IMDb
IMDb
There was an error trying to load your rating for this title.
Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later.
X Beta I'm Watching This!
Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.
Error
A married man's one-night stand comes back to haunt him when that lover begins to stalk him and his family.
Director:
a list of 48 titles
created 03 May 2011
a list of 30 titles
created 22 Jul 2011
a list of 24 titles
created 17 Jul 2013
a list of 25 titles
created 11 Dec 2014
a list of 23 titles
created 8 months ago
Search for " Fatal Attraction " on Amazon.com
Connect with IMDb
Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.
You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin.
Nominated for 6 Oscars. Another 7 wins & 16 nominations. See more awards »
Videos
A violent, suspended police detective investigates a brutal murder, in which a manipulative and seductive woman could be involved.
Director: Paul Verhoeven
A computer specialist is sued for sexual harassment by a former lover turned boss who initiated the act forcefully, which threatens both his career and his personal life.
Director: Barry Levinson
A married couple try everything to get each other to leave the house in a vicious divorce battle.
Director: Danny DeVito
A millionaire offers $1,000,000 to a young married couple for a night with the wife.
Director: Adrian Lyne
A remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder (1954).
Director: Andrew Davis
Two NYC cops arrest a Yakuza member and must escort him when he's extradited to Japan.
Director: Ridley Scott
A New York suburban couple's marriage goes dangerously awry when the wife indulges in an adulterous fling.
Director: Adrian Lyne
A romance writer sets off to Colombia to ransom her kidnapped sister, and soon finds herself in the middle of a dangerous adventure.
Director: Robert Zemeckis
This is the sequel to "Romancing the Stone" where Jack and Joan have their yacht and easy life, but are gradually getting bored with each other and this way of life. Joan accepts an ... See full summary »
Director: Lewis Teague
A woman advertising for a new roommate finds that something very strange is going on with the tenant who decides to move in.
Director: Barbet Schroeder
A woman gets involved in an impersonal affair with a man. She barely knows about his life, only about the sex games they play, so the relationship begins to get complicated.
Director: Adrian Lyne
Edit
Storyline
Happily married New York lawyer Dan Callagher has an affair with his colleague Alex, and the two enjoy a love weekend while Dan's wife and kid are away. But Alex will not let go of him, and she will stop at nothing to have him for herself. Just how far will she go to get what she wants? Written by Sami Al-Taher <[email protected]>
See All (230) »
Taglines:
A look that led to an evening. A mistake he'll regret...FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. See more »
Genres:
18 September 1987 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
Affairs of the Heart See more »
Filming Locations:
In early script drafts, Alex Forrest's name was Sean Forrest. See more »
Goofs
When Dan pulls in to the driveway, Alex's car is not there. It is visible in the next shot through the back window. See more »
Quotes
See more »
Crazy Credits
Barbara Harris is sometimes credited under the name Barbara Iley. In the final credits here, under 'Party Guests', she is credited under both names. See more »
Connections
WHEN I FALL IN LOVE
(1952)
One Of The Most Memorable Movies Of The '80s
28 January 2007 | by ccthemovieman-1
(United States) – See all my reviews
You don't hear much about this film anymore, but in its day, this was the most-talked about movie of the year. It was a 'favorite topic of conversation about the office water cooler' for a number of weeks. At the time, it was a shocker. Nowaways.....who knows? As we become more and more desensitized to violence, sex and profanity, it takes a lot more to shock us.
Still, this movie had memorable moments that have stayed with us who first saw it at the theater 20 years ago. Most of those memorable scenes, if not all of them, involve Glenn Close's character, "Alex Forrest." Man, this is a woman who would not be denied what she wanted: in this case, married man Michael Douglas.
No sense going into all the details. Everyone knows them by now, anyway. Looking back, I think the film was a good lesson for men (or women) thinking about cheating on their spouses and assuming nothing bad will happen as a result. Men may commit more crimes, but that old adage about a "woman scorned" certainly is demonstrated here in spades! Douglas' character, "Dan Gallagher," certainly can attest to that, but he is anything but a sympathetic character. Both actors do a superb job in here, but kudos also to the rest of the Gallagher family, played by Anne Archer (wife "Beth") and Ellen Hamilton Latzen (daughter "Ellen.")
Also, the cinematography shouldn't be overlooked. The widescreen DVD certainly brought out how nicely this film was shot and directed. This two-hour film keeps your attention all the way. The only thing I would change is the language, toning it down a bit. Otherwise, it's a classic thriller and one of the most famous films in the '80s.
45 of 52 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes
|
i don't know
|
"Which movie of 1966 used the tag line ""For three men the Civil War wasn't hell. It was practice !"""
|
Tagline Guru | Movie Taglines
Movie Taglines
TAKE YOUR TAGLINE TO THE NEXT LEVEL:
Since the dawn of the motion picture industry, those who produced and exhibited films realized early on how important it was to advertise them effectively. The grandiose language used to entice the moviegoing public was pivotal in drawing “boffo” box office.
Over time, as movie audiences became more sophisticated, so did the ad campaigns launched by the studios. The movie tagline became a shorthand method of expressing the central theme or appeal of the film. In many instances, especially with respect to low-budget “B” movies, the taglines were more memorable than the films themselves.
Today, with the rise of independent film and the widespread use of sloganeering, the movie tagline has evolved into a modern art form acknowledged for its use of humor, irony, double meaning, hyperbole, and understatement.
More than 1,500 movie taglines were reviewed to produce the 300+ nominated taglines included on the list below. The Top 100 American Movie Taglines, which were drawn from this list, are ranked in Tagline Guru’s Movie Tagline Survey .
Movie Tagline List
How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Forget what’s legal...do what’s right!
Life is in their hands. Death is on their minds.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Handcuffed to the girl who double-crossed him.
Thank God it’s only a motion picture.
In space no one can hear you scream.
Families that slay together stay together.
There’s something about your first piece.
Things are about to get a little hairy.
American Werewolf in Paris, An (1997)
The animal is out.
Houston, we have a problem.
Eight legs, two fangs, and an attitude.
Earth. It was fun while it lasted.
Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.
A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.
As Good As It Gets (1997)
Disco sucks.
And you thought Earth girls were easy.
Bad Girls from Mars (1991)
In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people.
Don’t call me babe!
They will suck you dry.
A hard cop and a soft dame.
Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail.
If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!
...and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!
Man has made his match...now it’s his problem.
Scream now, while you can still breathe.
He’s a cop who’s not.
They’ll never get caught. They’re on a mission from God.
They’re young...they’re in love...and they kill people.
Everyone has one special thing.
One nation under the gun.
Every man dies, not every man really lives.
The monster demands a mate.
Bride of Frankenstein, The (1935)
Love is a force of nature.
War is hell, but peace is f%$#ing boring.
An epic of miniature proportions.
Bug’s Life, A (1998)
He’s a man of peace in a savage land...Suburbia.
Not that it matters, but most of it is true.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The snobs against the slobs!
These women are serious about their taste in men.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989)
If you’ve got a taste for terror, take Carrie to the prom.
They had a date with fate in Casablanca!
The true story of a real fake.
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
It’s not who you love. It’s how.
This ain’t no chick flick.
Sometimes it’s too late to tell the truth.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Check your soul at the door.
Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Is there a problem here?
They took everything he had...except his rage.
One dream. Four Jamaicans. Twenty below zero.
Live your life at the point of impact.
Good girls want him bad. Bad girls want him worse.
See it with a bud.
How many times can you die for love?
Laugh...or I’ll blow your lips off!
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)
You scream. You die.
This is the weekend they didn’t play golf.
He charges $10 but he’s willing to negotiate.
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999)
Suddenly, life was more than French fries, gravy, and girls.
You don’t assign him to murder cases. You just turn him loose.
Nice guys finish last. Meet the winners.
There is a reason why you are so messed up.
Grab life by the ball.
Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story (2004)
It can be Hell getting into Heaven.
Dishes. Relationships. Wind. This guy breaks everything.
After a night they can’t remember comes a day they’ll never forget.
Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)
What the one doesn’t have, the other is missing.
A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it.
Movies were his passion. Women were his inspiration. Angora sweaters were his weakness.
His story will touch you, even though he can’t.
Now Freddy’s a daddy, he’s killing for two.
Nightmare on Elm Street, A: The Dream Child (1989)
Success didn’t go to his head, it went to his neighbor.
He will erase your past to protect your future.
She brought a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees.
No actual Europeans were harmed in the making of this film.
Take me to your teacher.
Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)
For three men the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was practice.
Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (1966)
Every father’s daughter is a virgin.
This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.
Where there’s a will, there’s a relative.
The story of two people who got married, met, and then fell in love.
Even a hit man deserves a second shot.
He’s having the day of his life...over and over again.
It never forgives. It never forgets.
His genius undeniable. His evil, unspeakable.
Some houses are born bad.
The story of a man who was too proud to run.
Think you’re alone? Think again.
Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007)
A thousand hours of Hell for one moment of love.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
A comedy of trial and error.
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
From the book that couldn’t be written comes the motion picture that couldn’t be made!
You won’t know unless you go.
From the brother of the director of Ghost.
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)
He’s out to prove he’s got nothing to prove.
One city, three stories tall.
How many eyes does horror have?
Night of the Lepus (1972)
The night the unsinkable sank.
Night to Remember, A (1958)
Garbo laughs!
Swingers (1996)
On every street in every city, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
Once you stop screaming, then you’ll start talking about it.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974)
Love is in the hair.
There’s Something About Mary (1998)
Man is the warmest place to hide.
They transplanted a white bigot’s head on a soul brother’s body.
Thing with Two Heads, The (1972)
You can go there even though it doesn’t exist.
Does for rock and roll what “The Sound of Music” did for hills.
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Collide with destiny.
|
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
|
Inuktitut and Danish are the official languages of which island country?
|
B-Movie - TV Tropes
B-Movie
You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account
Share
by John Gara of Buzzfeed
.
"Life is like a B-movie: you don't want to leave in the middle of it, but you don't want to see it again."
— Ted Turner
The Great Depression hit Hollywood almost as hard as it hit other industries; a third of the audience disappeared between 1929 and 1933. To combat this, the major studios distributed feature films in pairs meant to be screened as a Double Feature . The longer and bigger-budgeted of the two films was called an "A-movie", while the secondary feature was called a "B-movie".note There was also a species known as a "programmer", which could be used as either At first, the studios maintained separate production units to make the Bs; these units served as training grounds for talent on the way up and as last stops for talent on the way down. Later, the studios just bought pictures from "Poverty Row" studios like Monogram, Mascot & Republic; again, some stars were able to use these pictures to make or remake their careers, notably John Wayne and Roy Rogers .
Some of the ground rules for B-movies date back to these early origins: they were and are produced on a limited budget with cast who are not exactly household names. While B-movies may occasionally have very well-written scripts and gripping plots, the primary goal is not art or staying power, but cheap, disposable entertainment. As such, B-movies tend to be genre pieces, in such categories as western (by far the most popular B-genre in Hollywood's Golden Age), horror , Science Fiction , or crime . B-movies are often heavily trope - laden , and a particularly successful one can become a trope maker for big-budget films in the future. During the 30's and 40's, also, B-series were often highly successful; for example, Andy Hardy , Charlie Chan , The Cisco Kid , The Saint , and even Sherlock Holmes (in the sequels produced by Universal).
As the studio system collapsed, beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1950s, the double feature faded from profitability and, thus, the need for major studio�distributed Bs declined. On the other hand, the overall decline of the majors left room for independents with a B mentality — American International Pictures and Roger Corman being by far the most prominent — to flourish. In the 1960s and 1970s , the term B-movie came to be synonymous with what were previously called " exploitation films " — low-budget cash-ins with an emphasis on sensationalism, sexuality, and gore — and the phrase is understood in those terms to this day.
During the "Golden Age" of the B-movie in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the films were widely distributed and screened in older cinemas colloquially called "grindhouses," supposedly because the movies would be shown over and over again, grinding down the film. Since the dawning of cable TV and home video in The '80s , few B-movies see theatrical release, but are typically produced as TV movies or Direct-to-Video releases, or released directly over the internet . Syfy (formerly the Sci Fi Channel) in particular produces many original B-movies , and Mystery Science Theater 3000 maintained interest in the genre throughout the '90s, with its rereleases of classic B-movies with three characters making snarky comments on the action. While many B-movies are "bad" in terms of writing and execution, some prove to be So Bad, It's Good . Those that attempt seriousness are usually full of narm .
However, several B-Movies of the 1940s and 1950s, came to be Vindicated by History . The restrictions of The Hays Code often focused more heavily on the A-Picture, with the B-Movie falling Beneath Suspicion , this meant that directors, paradoxically, had more freedom on a B-Movie than an A-Picture. Several films, especially Film Noir , which today are regarded as classics were B-Movies in their day.For example, Detour, by Edgar G. Ulmer, would later be cited by the likes of Martin Scorsese , Fran�ois Truffaut and Errol Morris as a major masterpiece of cinema.
A lot of later movies could be called B-movies — if not for their A-list cast and large budgets, then for their hammy acting and cheesy lines. (See Krull , Flash Gordon and the Dune movie.) Starting with Star Wars , many blockbusters were derisively named "a B-movie with a budget." Actual B-movies tend to not get too widely noticed these days, but as the style has come to be appreciated for its camp value, there have been a number of successful big-budget movies that emulate B-movie tropes and production values in a sort of Affectionate Parody . The style saw a resurgence in the late 2000s as the rise of streaming video and ready access to video recording and editing made low-budget filmmaking and distribution easier than ever.
Contrast Epic Movie . See There's No "B" in "Movie" for when a character is a fan of one of these, and The Mockbuster for a particular form of Z-movie
common today.
B-movies of note include (chronological order, please)
Charlie Chan Carries On (1931) the first of the Chinese-American detective's features; now, sadly, a Missing Episode .
White Zombie (1932): Starring Bela Lugosi and made, according to some sources, in less than two weeks (foreshadowing most of the rest of Lugosi's career), this is almost certainly the first film to deal with zombies, and was the inspiration for the name of Rob Zombie 's first band.
Reefer Madness (1937): Exploitation film portraying the dangers of marijuana use in an, um, highly exaggerated manner . Remade as a Musical Comedy in 2005.
Child Bride (1938): A schoolteacher in the Ozarks campaigns to stop the practice of older men marrying young, underage girls. The film claims to draw attention to the subject of child marriage and be critical of it; so why it therefore needed an extended scene of a 12-year-old Shirley Mills skinnydipping is a mystery.
The Saint in New York (1938) was the first screen appearance of Simon Templar.
Under Western Stars (1938) was the debut under his brand-new stage name of an already popular singer (in The Sons of the Pioneers), Roy Rogers ; in his career, he would amass more than a hundred film or television credits and earn the nickname, "The King of the Cowboys."
Stagecoach (1939): Western Ensemble Cast film about stagecoach passengers attempting to avoid Apaches. Its star was a nobody cowboy actor named John Wayne who had appeared in over 80 films and blown several previous attempts at stardom (and was paid less than most of the other cast members), and its director, John Ford , was widely considered insane. Made on a B-film budget and not expected to do much, it managed to become a massive hit, made Wayne into a superstar , and garnered an Oscar win for supporting actor Thomas Mitchell. Remade in 1966 and 1985.
Dumbo (1941): Rare example of an animated B-movie, the film was put into production on a very low budget, using cheaper watercolors instead of gouache for the backgrounds and a more cartoony style for the character animation than Disney's previous animated films. Intended to be a filler movie to help the studio recoup some of the losses that they'd suffered from Fantasia flopping, the film ended up becoming a smash hit and a classic on its own.
The Mad Monster (1942): A Mad Scientist turns a man into a werewolf, and sends his creation to slaughter the scientists who discredited him .
Hitler's Madman (1943), shot super-cheap in seven days by "Poverty Row" studio PRC, was so good that MGM bought the film and gave it wide distribution.
Detour (1945): Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the "B" director who gave the world The Black Cat , this Poverty Row piece is considered by some to be the first true Film Noir . Sadly, for leading man Tom Neal, the film would prove a case of Life Imitates Art . In a further oddity, the 1992 remake starred Neal's son, Tom Neal Jr.
The Other Wiki calls Crossfire , a 1947 murder mystery shot in three weeks for $500K, the first B-movie nominated for Best Picture.
Gun Crazy (1949) : A couple with a mutual fascination for weaponry go on a crime spree. Inspired by Bonnie and Clyde , it would itself be used as inspiration for Bonnie and Clyde . Very loosely remade in 1992 with Drew Barrymore .
The Thing from Another World (1951) : A group of military personnel at an isolated polar base discover a crashed flying saucer and its sole surviving inhabitant, a being that can absorb and imitate other life forms. Adapted from the 1938 short story " Who Goes There? " by John W. Campbell . Remade by John Carpenter in 1982; video game sequel to the remake in 2002; a prequel to the 1982 film was released in 2011. Bits of the original can be seen in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) , as the film on television in the various houses.
Kansas City Confidential (1952): Above-average "B" Film Noir , it was the first of several "City Confidential" pictures of the era , and the reference for L.A. Confidential .
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) : The Trope Maker for the convention of the monster being created by the bomb (predating Gojira by a single year), and one of the first giant monster movies per se following a hiatus that had been ongoing since 1933's King Kong . A ferocious dinosaur is awakened by an Arctic atomic test and terrorizes the North Atlantic and ultimately New York City.
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) : A team of astronauts land on the moon and discover a race of women who mind-control the team's only female member and seek the use of the team's rocket to get to Earth. In case you're wondering; no, despite the title, the women aren't catgirls .
Glen or Glenda? (1953) : Following the suicide of a transvestite, "Dr. Alton" and "the Scientist" offer a Fauxlosophic Narration ("Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep !") on the life of a man afraid to tell his fiancee he is a cross-dresser and a pseudohermaphrodite who undergoes sexual reassignment surgery. The directorial debut of Ed Wood ; and a foretaste of what people could basically expect from his career.
Project Moonbase (1953) : 20 Minutes into the Future , the US government has built a permanent orbital space station and seeks to construct a base on the moon itself as well. In order to do this, they need photographs of the dark side. An expedition composed of two men and an unruly female colonel whom the general threatens to spank into complacency are sent to do it. The colonel is the least of the problems, however, as one of the men is a saboteur.
Robot Monster (1953) : An alien named Ro-Man hunts the last humans alive on earth, but ends up falling in love with the inevitable sexy young scientist's daughter and consequently has a crisis of conscience , leading to much earnest solilioquizing ("At what point on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet? Yet I must — but I cannot!"). Ro-Man, it might just be mentioned, is played by a man in a gorilla suit wearing a toy plastic space helmet. Oh, and did we mention his master computer constantly spews bubbles? Music by Elmer Bernstein .
Devil Girl from Mars (1954) : A Martian dominatrix arrives on Earth in search of men for breeding stock, and terrorizes a British country inn.
The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) : A rural family contends with the forces of an alien that takes control of the minds of animals - and eventually humans too.
Bride of the Monster (1955) : An exiled European scientist (played by Bela Lugosi) abducts people with the intention of turning them into a race of atomic supermen so he can take over the world. By Ed Wood .
Creature With the Atom Brain (1955) : An American gangster and an ex-Nazi scientist team up to create zombies by removing the brains of corpses and replacing them with atomic energy, whereupon they set them upon the gangster's enemies.
Day The World Ended (1955) : After a nuclear war, a small group of people is confined to a rural property. Tensions soon mount between them , and they also contend with a mutant dwelling nearby. By Roger Corman .
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) : A giant octopus is disturbed by atomic tests and makes its way to San Franscisco. Oh, but because Ray Harryhausen wasn't given enough money, the said octopus only has six arms. Call it a "hextapus".
King Dinosaur (1955) : A new planet moves into our solar system and four scientists (two couples) are sent to explore Planet Nova. In between romantic interludes, they face an iguana masquerading as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The directorial debut of Bert I Gordon , who - despite somehow being far less well-known - can pretty much join the ranks of Roger Corman , Coleman Francis and Ed Wood in terms of the rate at which he churned this breed of movie out.
Tarantula (1955): Tarantula injected with a growth serum breaks out of a lab, grows into a giant monster , ravages the Arizonan countryside, and is defeated by an air-strike with a pilot played by a 25-year old Clint Eastwood .
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) : A scientist is contacted by aliens who, in order to avoid conflict, want him to arrange a meeting of world leaders which they can inform of their intentions to take over the earth.
It Conquered the World (1956) : An alien from Venus resembling a giant zucchini with arms and a face arrives on Earth and mind-controls people with a flock of bat-like creatures plus the aid of Lee Van Cleef .
The Mole People (1956) : A team of archaeologists discovers a race of humans living underground beneath a glacier atop a mountain in Mesopotamia, who keep the eponymous mole people as slaves.
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) : A spaceship freshly returned from Venus crashes into the sea near Italy. An embryo washes up on the beach and is found by a small boy, who sells it to a zoologist. A reptilian monster hatches from the embryo and quickly grows to enormous proportions, whereupon it terrorizes Rome. A movie with special effects by Ray Harryhausen .
The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) : Colonel Glen Manning is exposed to radiation and he starts growing to tremendous size, cutting off the blood supply to his brain thus causing him to go mad. By Bert I Gordon .
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957): A group of scientists study an irradiated isle and find giant land crabs with human intelligences from eating the previous group of scientists. The Page Image.
Beginning of the End (1957) : An enterprising female journalist comes across a destroyed town and learns of a scientist that's been using radiation to make vegetables grow to giant sizes. It seems that a swarm of grasshoppers broke into a silo containing some of said vegetables, ate them, became irradiated themselves, grew to enormous proportions and are now running amok, headed towards Chicago. By Bert I Gordon .
The Black Scorpion (1957) : A volcano unleashes a hive of giant scorpions that attack Mexico City.
The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) : A giant, hovering alien brain possesses the body of a scientist and attempts to take over the world in its first step to become the master of the universe.
The Deadly Mantis (1957) : The eruption of a volcano in the south seas causes the north pole to shift location into warmer climates , causing a giant prehistoric praying mantis frozen in an iceberg to thaw out. It attacks military installations in the arctic, and then makes its way to Washington D.C. and New York City.
The Giant Claw (1957) : Earth is attacked by a Giant Antimatter Space Buzzard. Translation: a puppet that looks like Big Bird's evil twin . Thus beloved for some of the most hilariously out-of-sync shots of 'horror' and 'wonder' in history - the puppet was created & filmed long after the actors' reaction takes.
Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) : Bulbous-headed aliens that kill via injecting their victims with alcohol descend upon a town named "Hicksburg" and are defeated by the resident teens.
The Monolith Monsters (1957) : A meteorite lands in the American southwest scattering mysterious black rocks everywhere. When the rocks come into contact with water, they grow into giant pillars that threaten a small town.
The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) : An earthquake in the Salton Sea unleashes a horde of prehistoric mollusk monsters that terrorize the citizens of California's Imperial Valley.
Not of This Earth (1957) : An agent from a planet whose race is dying of an incurable blood disease comes to Earth to gauge the viability of human blood as a replacement. By Roger Corman .
The 1988 remake was done on a bet by Jim Wynorski that he could do it on the same budget and schedule. It shows and the acting exactly what you would expect when the best you can afford wouldn't make a HS drama club. Some of the special effects, however, would have been right at home in Star Trek .
The Vampire (1957): A man takes pills derived from the blood of a vampire bat, and becomes a vampire himself.
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958) : Exactly What It Says on the Tin . A Distaff Counterpart to The Amazing Colossal Man.
The Cyclops (1958): Bert I. Gordon hokum about some people crashing their plane in Mexico and encountering a giant radioactive "cyclops" (really just a dude who has half his face melted off so he only has one remaining eyeball).
Fiend Without a Face (1958): A British-American coproduction based on the short story The Thought Monster. It tells the tale of a legion of invisible brain-sucking abominations that are unleash upon rural Canada. Because this is the 50s, the culprit(s) turn out to be a well-intentioned scientist whose experiments have gone wrong, with a healthy dose of ye olde magical radiation. It's up to Major Jeff Cummings of the US Air Force to stop those (dare we say it?) fiends without faces.
Attack of the Puppet People (1958) : The lonely owner of a doll factory uses a ray to shrink people that he thinks are going to abandon him and keeps them as his pets. Although the shrunken people do try to get back to normal size, they don't ever strictly ''attack'' anyone . By Bert I Gordon .
The Blob (1958): A glob of jelly comes to earth in a meteorite and starts getting bigger by engulfing people. It is defeated via dousing with fire-hydrants and airlifted to the Arctic. Remade in 1988 .
The Brain Eaters (1958) : A rocket-like structure emerges from the ground, and monsters resembling dust bunnies with two drinking straws stuck into them emerge from it, mind-controlling the residents of a nearby town. The film had enough similarities with the novel " The Puppet Masters '' (1951) to allow author Robert A. Heinlein to sue the creators for plagiarism. The case ended with an out-of-court settlement. The film is also remembered for a small part played by then-obscure Leonard Nimoy .
The Crawling Eye (A.K.A. The Trollenberg Terror) (1958) : Two sisters and a UN scientist go to a resort in the mountains of Switzerland, where an ominous radioactive cloud has been looming nearby. Two men venture to the proximity of the cloud; one turns up decapitated and the other an entranced maniac. It seems the workings of a tentacled blob of flesh with a giant central eye are afoot.
Queen of Outer Space (1958) : Opinions differ over whether this was tongue-in-cheek hack work or the most misogynistic sci-fi movie ever made. Probably the quintessential space-explorers-discover-a-world-populated-entirely-by-beautiful-women movie (e.g. Cat-Women of the Moon , Missile to the Moon, the British Fire Maidens from Outer Space , and the spoof Amazon Women on the Moon ).
The Screaming Skull (1958): A woman is haunted by the ghost of her new husband's late wife.
The Alligator People (1959) : A newly-wedded couple are on a train when the husband receives a telegram and runs away, vanishing without a trace. The wife, after years of searching, turns up at the Florida plantation where he once lived, whereupon she discovers that a treatment for a medical condition the husband had has turned him into a human/alligator hybrid.
Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) : In the swamps of Florida, a pair of the eponymous People in Rubber Suits abduct local hicks and take them to an underwater grotto to feed on their blood.
A Bucket of Blood (1959): A waiter desperate to befriend the local beatniks kills people and makes sculptures from their bodies.
The Hideous Sun Demon (1959): An accident with radiation turns a scientist into a lizard man when he's exposed to sunlight.
The Giant Behemoth (1959) : The dumping of radioactive waste off the shores of Cornwall, England, awakens a prehistoric monster than can project electric shocks and radioactive beams, whereupon it makes its way towards London. Was originally going to be about a blob of radiation, but executives demanded it be reworked into a knockoff of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which was made by the same director).
The Giant Gila Monster (1959) : A small town in northern Texas is terrorized by... well, read the title.
House on Haunted Hill (1959) : An eccentric billionaire invites 5 strangers to an old mansion for a party, wherein they will each be afforded if they can only survive the night. What do you suppose the odds are that they get locked inside and that the house turns out to be inhabited by ghosts, murders and other terrors? By William Castle ; remade in 1999 .
The Killer Shrews (1959) : Some people trapped on an island are terrorized by... well, again, read the title. Every bit as fun/silly as it sounds, fortunately.
The shrews are transparently played by German Shepherds in body wigs.
Invisible Invaders : Invisible aliens attack the earth by possessing corpses.
Night of the Ghouls (1959). The sequel to Bride of the Monster. Involves two female ghosts, a scarred giant, a phony psychic, and an Occult Detective .
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) : Aliens resurrect the dead as vampires zombies that look like vampires to stop humans from building a bomb that will " explode particles of sunlight ." With model-kit flying saucers, gravestones made of cardboard, and an airplane cockpit consisting of a shower curtain and two folding chairs; this is just one of many films contending for the title of the "worst movie ever made", but it is generally regarded as the winner. By - who else? - Ed Wood. Remake in development, with The Angry Video Game Nerd himself in a bit part.
Teenagers from Outer Space (1959): An alien soldier helps a space teen stop his former comrades from making Earth into a space farm for giant lobsters.
First Spaceship on Venus (1960) : An artifact from Venus is discovered in the Gobi Desert, so a Five-Token Band space crew is sent to the planet to investigate for aliens. Honestly not too shabby.
Horrors of Spider Island (1960): A modeling troupe crashes on an island, where their manager becomes a were-spider.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) : A teenage florist cultivates a relationship with a sentient plant that feeds on human blood. Directed by Roger Corman . Adapted as a musical in 1982, which in turn spawned a 1986 film adaptation . It's also the only possible case where a character first portrayed by Jack Nicholson was later portrayed nearly identically by Bill Murray .
The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) : Following a gratuitous opening topless scene that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REST OF THE MOVIE , a defecting Soviet scientist played by Tor Johnson wanders into a nuclear testing range, contracts radiation, grows into a hulking monster (the eponymous Beast), kills a couple, then two boys get lost, then the beast is killed, and then a rabbit sniffs his corpse. Somewhere during production, the film's soundtrack was lost, forcing its thoroughly inept director, Coleman Francis, to dub it with a drunken-sounding Fauxlosophic Narration instead. The end result is another contender for the title of the worst movie ever made.
Gorgo (1961) : A sea monster is captured by sailors off the Irish coast and brought to London for display. But then the monster's mommy shows up... By the same guy that did The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth.
Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961) : A group of kids wanders around doing random things, whilst Sonny Chiba battles aliens from Neptune. Though ostensibly a children's film, it incorporates genuine WWII footage into destruction sequences; something which did not sit too well with the MST3K crew.
Konga (1961): Anglo-British co-production, set in London, which shamelessly rips off the name of another well-known film . A mad scientist returns from Africa with a pet chimpanzee, Konga, and lots of carnivorous plants which he uses to produce a growth serum. He injects Konga with the serum, causing him to become a man in a gorilla suit. The scientist hypnotizes the ape with a flashlight and commands it to kill his enemies, including the boyfriend of a teenage girl he wants to date . His wife finds out and tries to reprogram Konga, giving him more of the serum. She is eaten by a plant, while Kongo grows to giant size , picks up the professor and goes on a rampage through London, pursued by the army.
Reptilicus (1961) : A piece of tail is found in the mines of Lapland and brought to Denmark, whereupon it regenerates into the eponymous giant lizard and terrorizes Copenhagen.
The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) : After his girlfriend is decapitated in a car crash, a scientist keeps her severed head alive in a pan and searches for a replacement body. Said girlfriend is not pleased with the circumstances.
Carnival of Souls (1962): The Sole Survivor of a car crash is tormented by a mysterious man. Often considered one of—if not the—best B-movies ever made, it got a re-release from The Criterion Collection and was remade by Wes Craven in the 1990's.
Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) : Five astronauts land on Uranus (the eponymous planet) and are mind raped by a giant alien brain. A bit less narmy than standard 60s B-grade sci-fi/horror fare.
Battle Beyond The Sun (1962): Based on (as in Cutand Paste Translation ) a Soviet hard-SF film (Nebo Zovyot (1959)), about a space race to the planet Mars between two rival post-nuclear superpowers (conveiently disgusing the fact the good guys are Russian and the bad guys American). Notably, a student Francis Ford Coppola worked on the adaptation, whose additions included a scene involving a fight between two alien gag monsters.
Mondo Cane (1962) : Documentary by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi about strange and depraved cultural practices around the world. Progenitor of the Mondo subgenre, also called "shockumentaries". Title translates in English to "A Dog's World".
Beach Party (1963) : An anthropologist studies the mating habits of teenage surfers at a beach, and boyfriend Frankie ( American Bandstand staple Frankie Avalon) and girlfriend Dolores ( The Mickey Mouse Club veteran Annette Funicello) try to make each other jealous by flirting with others. Another priceless cultural artifact from American International Pictures . Followed by way too many sequels, semi-sequels and rip-offs; many of which didn't actually even have anything to do with the beach.
Blood Feast (1963) : The world's first splatterfest , directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, about an Egyptian caterer who graphically murders a bunch of women in Miami as part of a ritual to resurrect the goddess Ishtar. The first in Lewis' unofficial "Blood" trilogy.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) : Woman goes to Rome and gets entangled in a string of murders based upon the alphabetical order of the victims' names. Progenitor of the Giallo subgenre.
The Raven (1963) : Very, very, very loose adaptation of the poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe ; starring a young Jack Nicholson . The most well-known of Roger Corman 's series of B-movies based on the works of Poe.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1963) : Martians, upset that their children have became obsessed with Earth TV-shows, kidnap Santa Claus along with two Earth children so they can engage in some more wholesome fun. Too bad Santa's a drunk... erm, that is, still needed on Earth. Made (in)famous by its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) : Dr. James Xavier, a scientist, gives himself X-ray vision . Alas, he starts to be able to see through the fabric of spacetime, and goes insane. One of Roger Corman 's more competent, more critically-acclaimed works. The "X" of the title stands for "Xavier".
'The Time Travelers'' (1964) : A group of scientists attempts to create a window to the future but ends up creating a portal to it instead. They step through, and end up trapped in the future; in which the Earth as been decimated by nuclear war reducing it to a barren wasteland. They team up with underground-dwelling survivors, who are in the process of building a spaceship to escape to Alpha Centauri. Alas, the mutants who dwell in the waste are out to put a stop to this.
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) : The residents of a deep southern town lure six tourists to obtain revenge for the town's destruction at the hands of Union troops during the Civil War by sacrificing them in the rituals of its annual festival. Can you say " Gorn "? Good, we knew you could. Second in Herschell Gordon Lewis' unofficial "Blood" trilogy.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) : Battle of the sexes by Russ Meyer about a gang of Amazonian go-go dancers who murder a young woman's boyfriend and take off with her, then scheme to rob an old redneck of his large, hidden stash of money by seducing his sons. While it didn't create sexploitation, it's the Trope Codifier .
Monster A-Go Go (1965) : Upon landing back on earth in a field, an astronaut emerges as a mutated monster. After killing some people, he is caught by some scientists, but then escapes again... at least, according to the narrator . Then, it suddenly turns out that there never was a monster... the astronaut actually landed in the Pacific, completely normal. If you're thinking "what?", don't worry, so are we . Originally starting out as Terror at Halfday in 1961, its director, Bill Rebane, ran out of money halfway through and dropped it. Four years later Herschell Gordon Lewis needed something to screen as a double feature with his own Moonshine Mountain so he bought this, finished it with footage of people sitting around and talking while reading script pages pasted to the floor, and this incomprehensible piece of garbage was the result. If this isn't in the running for "Worst Movie Ever", it's only because it barely counts as a movie in the first place.
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (1965): A short that is one of the last surviving artifacts of the Spook Show, which combined a film with audience participation. Frat boys and sorority initiates spend the night in a supposedly haunted mansion, complete with a Mad Scientist named Mad Doctor , Big G the Gorilla and No Fourth Wall .
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) : One of the best, most beloved, most important and most influential B movies of all time; about three unscrupulous gunslingers competing to find a buried cache of coins in the midst of the The American Civil War . It is frequently regarded as both the single greatest western movie of all time and as hailing the end of that said genre, due to the acting, the characters and the eclectic beauty in its cinematography and music.
"Manos" The Hands of Fate (1966) : A family on vacation takes a wrong turn outside of El Paso, Texas, landing themselves in the clutches of a cult dedicated to the titular god of primal darkness. Made on a bet for a tiny budget, with a camera that can only record for 30 seconds at a time and no ability to record sound. Another contender for the title of "worst movie ever", made into a cult classic by its rerelease on Mystery Science Theater 3000 .
Red Zone Cuba / Night Train To Mundo Finé (1966). Three prison escapees find themselves forced into fighting in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and meet an ill fate while pursuing a treasure they learned about from a P.O.W. there. As of 2011, rated 6th worst movie of all time on Imdb. Best remembered for a surprisingly awesome theme song
sung by John Carradine himself. Like Manos, it's been skewered by both Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Agony Booth .
Quatermass and the Pit / Five Million Years To Earth (1967) : British construction workers unearth a millions-of-years-old crashed UFO, the existence of which is tied to centuries worth of poltergeist phenomena in the region. Adapted from a BBC serial aired in 1958, the best-known of four serials to feature Prof. Bernard Quatermass, the original and its remake have been cited as a key influence of everything from Doctor Who to The Tommyknockers to Babylon 5 .
Night of the Living Dead (1968) : Originator of the Zombie Apocalypse movie. The distributors of the film neglected to include a copyright notice in the end credits of the released version, thereby (by the laws of the time) entering the film and its associated concepts into the public domain. Remade in 1990 and again in 2006 . An animated remake is in development.
Equinox (1968): Low-budget film that launched the career of Dennis Muren, who would later go on to win an Oscar for effects on Star Wars and become a founding member of ILM. Later re-cut by Jack Harris (of The Blob fame).
Hercules in New York (1969) : We all gotta start somewhere. For Arnold Schwarzenegger , it was here. A lightning bolt wielded by Zeus consists of a piece of bent rebar painted silver; that is all you need to know.
Love Camp 7 (1969) : Two female British agents go undercover at a Nazi prison camp to get information from a scientist imprisoned there, but end up subject to the same torture and humiliation betrothed upon the other inmates. Progenitor of both the Nazisploitation and Women-in-Prison subgenres.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) : An all-girl rock band goes to Hollywood hoping to make it big and slips into decadence... as only 1970's celebrities could. "This is my happening, and it freaks me out!!" Directed by Russ Meyer, but most notable for being written by none other than... Roger Ebert !!!; who had became friends with Meyer after writing positive reviews of several of his films.
Cold Sweat (1970): A man's wife and daughter are kidnapped by criminals from his past. Stars Charles Bronson .
The Dunwich Horror (1970) : Loosely based on the short story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft .
I Drink Your Blood (1970) : A coven of Satanist hippies loosely based on the Manson Family descends upon a quiet little country town and molests a local girl. The girl's grandfather confronts them but is dosed with LSD. The brother/grandson seeks revenge by injecting some meat pies with blood from a rabid dog and feeding them to the hippies. Can you guess what happens next?
Nam's Angels (1970) : A gang of bikers is recruited by the US military to undertake a rescue operation of a CIA agent imprisoned by the Viet Cong with motorcycles armed with machine guns mounted on the front. Sound manly enough for you?
The Big Boss (1971) : After The Green Hornet failed, Bruce Lee went back to Hong Kong and was catapulted into stardom with this film. About a man sworn-to-non-violence going to live with his cousins and getting on the wrong side of a local drug lord.
Evel Knievel (1971): Why the most famous daredevil of the era chose to have his biopic done as a surreal semi-exploitation serio-comic flick is anyone's guess, but the result is unforgettable. Starring George Hamilton, who also produced, and Sue Lyon of Lolita fame.
Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) : From the duo that brought you Mondo Cane (above); examines the degrading conditions in which African slaves lived in pre- Civil War America in horrifyingly graphic detail.
The Omega Man (1971) : 20 Minutes into the Future , a war between America and the USSR has decimated the planet. The only survivors are Charlton Heston, Rosalind Cash, a handful of children, and a clan of Evil Albinos that want to smush them all. Adapted from the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson . Previously adapted as The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Remade under the title of the original novel in 2007.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) : Progenitor of the Blaxploitation genre; essentially a manifesto for an African-American revolution. Director/writer/producer/lead actor Melvin Van Peebles is the father of actor/director Mario Van Peebles. Melvin appears in unsimulated sex acts in the film, and even contracted an STD during the filming.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) : Two nameless men (James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) touring across the US in their 1955 Chevy 150 challenge another (Warren Oates) in a 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge to a cross-country race to Washington D.C. A female hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) drifts between the two parties. No character is shown reaching Washington during the course of the film; its tone is of endlessness and existentialism. It is also regarded as a nostalgic time-capsule of Route 66 prior to it being overtaken by the Interstate Highway System.
Vanishing Point (1971) : An enigmatic car delivery man named Kowalski drives a 1970 Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco, running afoul of the police in the process. Very similar in tone to Two-Lane Blacktop and Easy Rider , and along with Gone in 60 Seconds (below), arguably the Ur-Example and Trope Codifier of the car chase movie.
Black Mama, White Mama (1972) : Blaxploitation/women-in-prison, with Pam Grier. The girlfriend of a pimp tries to steal money from him and is thrown in jail. The leader of a local anarchist group is thrown in too, and the two get chained together. They escape, and must put aside their differences to survive.
Deep Throat (1972) : Porno about a woman whose doctor discovers her clitoris is located in her throat. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what happens next. Started a trend of couples going out to see porn together called "Porno Chic", caused a big brouhaha over censorship, and is the most successful film of all time in terms of box office returns (reportedly million) in ratio to budget ( + 25,000 for music).
The Legend Of Hell House (1973). A group of paranormal investigators attempt to solve the mystery of Belasco House, a manor in Campbell Country which was the site of depraved orgies and mass murders and which has Driven to Suicide everyone attempting to dwell therein since. Adapted by Richard Matheson from his much more graphic novel of the same name .
The Vault of Horror (1973) : Five men wind up trapped in the basement of an office building and pass the time by recounting nightmares they've each been having in which they die to each other. Adapted from short stories from the eponymous comic series. Sequel to Tales from the Crypt.
Death Line (1973): Also known as Raw Meat. The last survivor of an inbred family of cannibals trapped after a London tunnel collapse in the 19th century emerges to terrorize a student and his girlfriend. The police get involved after a Minister of Parliament is murdered at the same tube station. Stars Donald Pleasence .
Black Christmas (1974) : A group of sorority girls are stalked by an unseen Serial Killer at Christmas-time . Considered one of the Trope Makers of the Slasher Movie .
Caged Heat (1974): Often called the quintessential example of women-in-prison pictures, this was the feature debut of director Jonathan Demme, who went on to bigger and better things. Roger Corman was an uncredited producer.
The Driller Killer (1974): An artist goes completely Ax-Crazy and starts killing people with his trusty drill . One of the most notorious Video Nasties .
Foxy Brown (1974): Spiritual Successor to Coffy (above) where the eponymous Foxy Brown (also played by Pam Grier ) seeks revenge after her boyfriend is gunned down by the mob.
Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974) : A gang of car thieves is contracted by a drug lord to steal 48 high-end cars, an endeavour which culminates in a car chase that lasts for 34 minutes and in which 93 cars are destroyed. Competes with Vanishing Point (above) for the title of the Ur-Example and Trope Codifier of the car chase film. By H.B. "Toby" Halicki. Remade in 2000.
The Street Fighter (1974): When a mercenary refuses to assassinate the heiress to an oil company for the Yakuza , they come after him due to him knowing about their plans. He offers his services to protect the heiress. What originally started as a low-brow Bruce Lee cash-in eventually evolved into something all of its own.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) : Five hippies going to visit the vandalized grave of one of their number's grandfather fall prey to a murderous backwoods family of cannibals, one of which, Leatherface, wields a chainsaw. Bashed on its release, regarded as a classic nowadays. Turned into a franchise , including three sequels, a remake and its sequel, and an alternate sequel to the original. By Tobe Hooper .
Truck Turner (1974): Blaxploitation starring Isaac Hayes (yes, that Isaac Hayes), where the eponymous Truck Turner has a hit placed on him by the wife of a man he kills.
The Candy Tangerine Man (1975): A pimp has to deal with The Mafia trying to muscle in on his business.
Criminally Insane (1975): A morbidly obese woman kills anybody who gets between her and food.
Death Race 2000 (1975): 20 Minutes into the Future the champion of a cross-country automobile race in which pedestrians are run over to accumulate points in order to placate the populace spars with his competitors and with a resistance movement. Regarded as a satire on society's voyeuristic obsession with violence and a herald of present day reality TV shows . Remade in 2008; both versions produced by Roger Corman.
Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) : Buxom, nymphomaniac dominatrix Ilsa tortures prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp to prove women can withstand more pain than men and castrates men unable to resist ejaculation long enough to satisfy her sexual appetite. Launched the popularity and typical tropes and cliches of the "Nazisploitation" subgenre , but was not the progenitor of said subgenre (with that honor falling to Love Camp 7, above). Probably best known for being filmed on the former set of Hogan's Heroes .
Race With the Devil (1975): Two couples vacationing in an RV witness a sacrifice committed by a Satanic cult. They inform the police, but no evidence is found. Once on their way, however, the cult goes after them, and they are forced to take measures to defend themselves.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975): Newly-engageds find themselves stranded at the castle of a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, on the night he plans to bring life to his perfect creation. Oddball musical comedy (adapted from the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show) that remains popular as a midnight movie to this day, and holds the record for the longest theatrical release, having shown in at least one American cinema, once a week, in the US from 1975 to the present day. Possibly the ur-film of the Cosplay subculture.
Supervixens (1975): A man dumps his sexually-insatiable wife, whereupon a cop starts having an affair with her but eventually murders her. The cop tries to pin the blame on the man. The man flees across the country, being sexually-assaulted at every turn by a series of mammoth-breasted women whom all have the prefix 'super' in their name. By Russ Meyer.
Alice, Sweet Alice (1976): A young girl is murdered immediately before her First Communion. The killer continues stalking her grieving family. Eventually, the girl's older sister becomes a suspect. Features the film debut of Brooke Shields.
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) : A man kills a gang member and takes refuge in a police station that is about to be decommissioned. The gang proceeds to besiege the station, and the police and criminals-awaiting-transfer within must work together to defend themselves. By John Carpenter. Remade in 2005.
Bloodsucking Freaks (A.K.A. The Incredible Torture Show) (1976) : Master Sardu runs a theatre which puts on shows which feature women being tortured and killed in grotesquely depraved ways. Unbeknownst to the audience, these acts are not staged but are authentic, and the women are not actresses but kidnapped and captive victims. Doesn't just take Refuge in Audacity , it invades Audacity and takes no prisoners.
The Food of the Gods (1976) : Still hungry for more after Ro-Man, the Giant Antimatter Space Buzzard and the Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits? Well, this little ditty features giant chickens. Okay; technically only in one scene - it's mostly about giant rats - but said one scene makes it all worth it. By Bert I Gordon .
Tentacles (1977) : Jaws ... WITH AN OCTOPUS!
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) : Tomatoes across the US inexplicably come alive and kill people by... roaming over them while making mumbling noises. Three sequels and an animated adaptation.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) : Followup to Night of the Living Dead wherein zombies have begun taking over the earth and a group of survivors attempts to ride the situation out by barricading themselves in a shopping mall. Frequently regarded as the best zombie movie of all time, and also a brilliant satire regarding consumerism. Remade in 2003.
Deathsport (1978) : In the year 3000, after the great "Neutron Wars" have turned Earth into a wasteland populated only by mutants and warriors, a city-state abducts one of the warriors and forces him to participate in the eponymous deathsport; which consists of gladiator battles performed atop motorcycles. Something of a Spiritual Successor to Death Race 2000 .
The Evil (1978): A group of people awaken an evil force in a house one of them has moved into.
Halloween (1978) : While not the first slasher film, is the one which launched the typical tropes and cliches of the genre which people now come to expect of it in addition to sparking the boom in popularity of the genre during the 80s. Spawned 7 sequels. Remade in 2007, sequel to the remake in 2009.
I Spit on Your Grave (1978) : Counterpart to The Last House on the Left (above) about an attractive young aspiring author from New York who gets brutally gang-raped by a gang of rednecks while vacationing in the woods and subsequently goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against them. The most famous of the Rape and Revenge genre, this movie was completely trashed on its release, it nowadays is seeing the occasional critical revision postulating it as a feminist anti-rape manifesto.
Laserblast (1978): Two aliens kill another alien but forget to pick up the laser cannon he's carrying. Some kid finds it, and he goes on a murderous rampage. Cheap stop-motion aliens , a character getting mutated into a monster by a salt shaker he wears around his neck, and other calamities ensue. Known also for featuring a Take That to the then-recent Star Wars (talk about writing checks your body, er, film can't cash) and because, according to Leonard Maltin, it's better than Taxi Driver .
Ms 45 (1981) : After getting raped, a mute New York woman goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against men . Think Taxi Driver , only with a woman.
My Bloody Valentine (1981) : Not to be confused with the band , who named themselves after it. A miner survives a mine accident and murders those who were supposed to be monitoring the safety but were at a Valentine's Day party instead, warning the town residents that they must never host another party again. 20 years later, some people make the mistake of disregarding this warning, and the obvious ensues . Remade (in 3D) in 2009 .
Nightmare (1981): An Ax-Crazy mental patient with horrible nightmares slashes his way to a suburban family.
The Pit (1981): A young, troubled child finds a pit with monsters in it, and feeds his tormentors to them.
Porno Holocaust (1981) : Some castaways wash ashore on an island inhabited by a sex-crazed, radioactively-mutated monster. Don't be fooled; the only thing about this movie that's any more offensive than any other like-minded porn/exploitation flick is the title. By Joe D'Amato.
The Prowler (1981): A WWII veteran kills his girlfriend after she leaves him, then starts stalking college students at a graduation party decades later.
Sadomania (1981) : Women-in-prison. A couple falls into the hands of some woman running a boot camp/brothel, wherein the wife is made a slave. The man schemes for her to escape. There's really no point in attempting to explain the plot beyond this; although one scene apparently involves a woman being raped by a dog. By Jesus Franco.
It Came from Hollywood (1982) a Clip Show movie celebrating B-movies.
The Evil Dead (1981) : A group of college kids spending the weekend at a cabin in the woods accidentally unleash demonic powers after discovering an ancient book of the dead. Spawned the acting career of Bruce Campbell , who would become a latter-day B-movie superstar, and the directorial career of Sam Raimi. Sequel/remake Evil Dead 2 in 1987, followed in 1992 by Army of Darkness , both tended more towards comedy (and the latter towards fantasy/action) than horror; followed in 2015 by Ash vs. Evil Dead , a dark comedic TV series picking up 30 years later. Remade in 2013 ; the main character, Ash Williams, has since been featured in spinoff comics ( including one based on an aborted sequel to Freddy vs. Jason .)
1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982): A gang leader defends a Rebellious Princess from worse gangs and corporate scumbags in a Wretched Hive future Bronx. Most notable for its sequel, Escape 2000 , which was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 .
Death Screams (1982): A machete-wielding killer stalks promiscuous people in a small town.
Forbidden Zone (1982) : The Hercules family obtains a house with a door in the basement leading to the Sixth Dimension. Everything is fine until the daughter, Frenchy, ventures in. What ensues involves Satan, a dancing frog, and which overall one could get the same experience of by overdosing on LSD . Made by the band Oingo Boingo.
Madman (1982): An Ax-Crazy farmer hunts down and kills anybody who says his name.
The Man Who Saves the World (1982) : After crash-landing on a desert planet, two Earth soldiers face off against an ancient wizard with plans of intergalactic domination. Often referred to as "Turkish Star Wars", owing to the massive amounts of Stock Footage lifted from that film. Sequel in 2006.
Parasite (1982): A scientist is infected with parasitic worms he created.
Pieces (1982): A Serial Killer stalks a college campus and dismembers students with a chainsaw to build a body resembling his dead mother.
Tenebrae (1982) : A popular American horror writer in Rome gets entangled in a case involving a murderer getting the inspiration for his kills from his latest novel. By Dario Argento. Often regarded as the best Giallo film of all time.
Visiting Hours (1982) : A He-Man Woman Hater attempts to murder a Straw Feminist after he sees her defending a woman who murdered her husband on the news. But she survives the attack, so he plans a trip to the hospital to finish the job.
BMX Bandits (1983) : Classic Australian children's flick about three biker kids who find some walkie-talkies belonging to a gang of bank-robbers, whom they are subsequently pursued by. Notable as the big-screen debut of Nicole Kidman .
Conquest (1983): A warrior with a bow that shoots arrows of light teams up with a rogue to take down the mad queen of a barbarian wasteland.
Hawk the Slayer (1983): A man gets a magic sword and battles his Evil Overlord brother .
Hundra (1983) : A distaff rip-off of Conan the Barbarian (1982) by Matt Climber about a man-hating amazon woman named Hundra whose village is destroyed by a tribe of bull-worshippers and whom an oracle tells to find a male to mate with and continue her people, an endeavour which takes her to the bull-worshippers' city to contend with their leader. Best known for its gratuitous scenes of nude horseback riding and the aforementioned lead villain being killed via being smothered by a slave girl's buttocks. Climber likes to make the occasional claim that he practically invented the concept of the female warrior with this film, despite the actual concept being Older Than Dirt .
A Night to Dismember (1983): Dismembered bodies start piling up after a mentally ill murderess is released from the asylum.
Sleepaway Camp (1983): Teenagers at a sleepaway camp are stalked by a killer who goes after anybody who torments a shy, young girl. Became a Cult Classic for its Twist Ending , and got three sequels.
Videodrome (1983) : The head of a pirate television station becomes a key figure in a plot on the government's part to cleanse the country of low-lifes obsessed with sex and violence by having him broadcast a snuff television show that causes hallucination-causing fatal brain tumors. Much better than it sounds, but just as much a Mind Screw . Meant as a satire on how the media influences our minds and as an indirect result our bodies too. By David Cronenberg .
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) : A group of teenagers are preyed upon in their dreams by the spirit of a man their parents lynched. Another cash-in on Halloween's success, though more original than Friday the 13th. Introduced another of horror's most iconic killers; Freddy Krueger. Six sequels, including a crossover with Friday the 13th ; remade in 2010.
Don't Open Till Christmas (1984): A Christmas slasher with a twist: Instead of having a killer in a Santa suit , the killer's targets are men in Santa suits.
The Noah's Ark Principle (1984) : Before his giant Summer Blockbusters , Roland Emmerich began his career with the most expensive student film ever to be produced in Germany, about a space station that could be used to control the weather. Story's not much to speak of, but the sets and special effects are phenomenal for their budget; no doubt one of the factors that enamoured Emmerich to Hollywood.
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) : A young boy witnesses his parents being murdered by a man in a Santa suit. Later, he is abused by the mother superior of the orphanage he is sent to. Though he initially appears to get over his childhood trauma in adulthood, he finally cracks when he's forced to wear a Santa suit himself for his job, and embarks on a murderous rampage .
The Terminator (1984) : A cybernetic assassin from the year 2029 arrives in the present day, on a mission to assassinate the mother-to-be of the child who will become the leader of the human resistance against the machines. A classic example of a B-movie done good: on a limited budget with one previously noteworthy star and an unknown director, it became a box office and critical hit, launched the career of James Cameron , gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his trademark Catch Phrase , catapulted Michael Biehn into his career as an action actor, and spawned four sequels, a bunch of novels, video games, a TV series, comics, and countless homages, parodies and imitations.
The Toxic Avenger (1984) : A nerdy janitor at a health club falls into some barrels of toxic waste and turns into the eponymous Toxic Avenger. Under his new guise he becomes a superhero (of sorts) cleaning up his hometown of Tromaville and contending with its corrupt mayor. Virtually ignored on its release, it has since obtained a cult following dedicated enough to afford it three sequels and a short-lived cartoon series. Probably Troma Entertainment 's best-known film franchise.
Invasion U.S.A. (1985) : Chuck Norris saves America from Dirty Communists .
Nudo e selvaggio Massacre in Dinosaur Valley; Cannibal Ferox 2 (1985)
The Stuff (1985) : A sweet, sticky, addictive white substance is discovered in a mine and is sold as junkfood termed 'The Stuff'. Its popularity hurts the industries of other varieties of junk food, so a saboteur is hired to find out what it is and get rid of it. Said saboteur discovers that 'The Stuff' is actually sentient and takes over the bodies of those who consume it, turning them into zombies.
The Return of the Living Dead (1985) : Toxic gas stored at a secret Army facility is accidentally released into the atmosphere, provoking a Zombie Apocalypse . Created by John Russo, writer of Night of the Living Dead, as an indirect sequel thereof. Originated the meme of zombies specifically desiring to eat the brains of the living, and groaning "Braaaaaaaaains!" while shambling about. Four sequels .
Trancers (1985): A future cop time travels to the 20th Century to stop a mind slave-creating madman from changing the timeline.
Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986): The first and finest of Troma 's other major franchise, in which locating a high school next to a nuclear power plant with No OSHA Compliance is shown to be an unwise zoning decision .
Dead End Drive-In (1986) : 20 Minutes into the Future , two teens get imprisoned at a Drive-In Theater along with 190 other delinquents. While most are content to just stay there placated by the junk food and violent movies, the hero ain't, and he starts scheming to escape. By the same guy that did Turkey Shoot and BMX Bandits.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986): A Serial Killer who is Walking the Earth meets a fellow sicko whom he teams up with in homicide. Notable for being very, very disturbing. Watch at your own risk.
Predator (1987). A film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger which involves an alien species Hunting the Most Dangerous Game . It was the first of a franchise including sequels, video games, comics, et cetera and so on .
Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare (1987): A heavy metal band go to an abandoned farm to write some music, and are tormented by a horde of demons.
Rolling Vengeance (1987) : A distraught young trucker whose family has been killed by a local redneck family turns his homemade monster truck into a tool of vengeance to hunt down those responsible. Has all the popular earmarks of an exploitation movie, including violence, destruction, cashing in a fad (in this case the popularity of monster trucks in the late '80s) as well as exploiting a loophole in Canadian tax law in order to get funding.
Street Trash (1987) : A liquor store owner finds a case of old wine called "Tenafly Viper" in his cellar, and sells it to the local hobos at a dollar a bottle. Those who drink it, unfortunately, are doomed to melt into rainbow-colored goop. Don't even get us started on the scene where a gang of hobos plays catch with a severed penis.
Zombie Vs Ninja (1987) : A guy's family is killed and the said guy is left for dead. An undertaker who can summon zombies to sharpen his fighting skills takes him in as his apprentice and teaches him kung-fu, until he can avenge his family. There's an unrelated plot (the film is actually two films tacked together) about Highly Visible Ninjas with oh-so-Asian-sounding names like Duncan and Bob, and never do said ninjas and aforementioned zombies meet .
Sex Lies And Video Violence
Left Behind (2000) (2000); starring Kirk Cameron, the first film of the massively popular (in evangelical Christian circles, anyway) novels, it was released to video before it went to theaters.
Versus (2000): A Yakuza who just escaped from prison does battle with an immortal necromancer seeking to open a portal to the Other Side.
Dagon (2001) : A pair of tourists find themselves stranded in a small town in Spain inhabited by half-monster abominations who worship a fish god. Adapted (very loosely) from Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
Stitches (2001): A demon tricks people into giving her their souls and skin.
28 Days Later (2002) : A British bicycle courier awakes from a coma in a deserted hospital, to find that, while he was out, Britain has been entirely depopulated by a "rage" virus that rapidly turns human beings into violent cannibals. Shot on a budget of million, it grossed million internationally and revived the Zombie Apocalypse genre, spawning numerous imitators throughout the 2000s. Sequel in 2007.
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) : A man in a nursing home who insists he is Elvis, and a fellow resident who insists he is JFK despite being black fight a mummy. Intentionally bad, of course.
Eight Legged Freaks (2002) : Some spiders escape from a farm in a small town in Arizona and ingest toxic chemicals spilt in a pond. They grow to tremendous proportions and terrorize the place. Yes, this premise or something akin to it had been done a million times before, but this is the first time such a movie had a decent budget.
Arachnia (2003): College students survive a plane crash caused by a meteor shower that also awakens prehistoric spiders.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003): Directorial debut of Rob Zombie , about a group of teens in the 1970s encountering a clan of psychos while investigating a nearby legend. Got a sequel in 2005.
The Room (2003) : A young man's life is TORN APART when his girlfriend starts cheating on him with his best friend. Written, produced, directed by, and starring Tommy Wiseau, of whom it's hard to say at any given moment whether he's taking the movie seriously or treating it as intentionally bad . Became a cult classic and theatrical screenings have developed a Rocky Horror-esque series of call-and-responses from the audience.
Flywheel (2003) was the first film from Sherwood Pictures ministry, the church-sponsored studio that has created a series of B-pictures catering specifically to the evangelical Christian audience; so far, those include Facing the Giants , Fireproof , Courageous and War Room.
Kill Bill (2003/2004) : A two-part epic about a woman seeking revenge on the five people responsible for the death of her unborn child, the last of whom is the titular Bill. The movies are a shameless homage to samurai movies, Spaghetti Westerns , Rape and Revenge flicks, horror movies, and so many more . Regarded as some of the best movies ever made thanks to the extremely strong performances from its cast, and Quentin Tarantino 's amazing direction/writing.
Dark Harvest (2004): A group of friends go to a farm one of them inherited and are attacked by vengeful Scary Scarecrows .
The Call of Cthulhu (2005) : In the year 1927, a man now interned in a mental institution recounts his efforts in researching a network of cults around the world, based around the worship of an ancient, dormant god whose dreams inspire madness, insanity, and mass murder around the globe. Possibly the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ever made, shot as a silent film, in black and white, with cardboard backdrops and a stop-motion Cthulhu.
Feast (2005) : A pack of ambiguous monsters attack a bar. The patrons barricade themselves inside and try to survive. The primary point of the film (if it can be said to have one) seems to be Playing With various Death Tropes . Two sequels.
Komodo Vs Cobra (2005): An environmental activist group lands on an a secret U.S. military island where experimentations of plants and animals have gone wrong.
Evil Bong (2006): A group of stoners purchase a bong from a magazine. The bong is cursed, and transports them into another world. Got three sequels.
Hatchet (2006): Reconstruction of 1980s slashers about some Mardi Gras partiers going into a section of the Louisiana bayou that is haunted by a hatchet-wielding ghost. Got two sequels.
The Pumpkin Karver (2006): A boy tormented by the ghost of a man he killed to protect his sister encounters a Serial Killer during a Halloween party.
Transmorphers (2007) : No, not Transformers , Transmorphers. By the Asylum. It's actually The Matrix or Terminator made on a sub-zero budget .
Starrbooty (2007) : The world's greatest secret agent goes undercover as a street hooker in order to rescue her niece, who has been kidnapped by an evil cosmetics magnate who sells women's genitalia to celebrities. The title character is played by RuPaul, and almost all the other female characters are played by professional drag queens or transgender males, resulting in what Diamanda Hagan called "quite possibly the only softcore porn-drag-blaxploitation-comedy ever made". Produced on a budget of based on an earlier series of live-action shorts RuPaul appeared in in the late '80s.
Zombie Wars (2007): A group of post- Zombie Apocalypse soldiers encounter a farm where smart zombies breed people.
100 Feet (2008): A woman under house arrest is tormented by the ghost of her abusive husband, whom she killed in self-defense.
Dead Snow (2009) : A bunch of med students go for a vacation in a cabin in the mountains of Norway , and contend with a force of nazi zombies .
Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) : Another one not to be fooled by the title of. About two slackers who liberate a town of a curse that turns its girls into Lesbian Vampires on their 18th birthdays.
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) : And you thought Zombie vs. Ninja, Zombie Strippers and Lesbian Vampire Killers were titles to fool you into thinking the movies in question would be so bad they're good . The two eponymous beasties get freed from an arctic glacier and proceed to terrorize the world; prompting the requisite scientist protagonists to lure them to the bays of major coastal cities to capture them. One of the few productions of the Asylum not to be a Mockbuster .
Paranormal Activity (2009) : A budget film that became a blockbuster. Used similar aesthetics to The Blair Witch Project (above), including consumer-grade camcorder footage and horror based far more on anticipation and psychology than on actual gore.
RoboGeisha (2009) : And you thought The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police were awesome! Two geishas get recruited into the army of a steel tycoon with world domination plans and given cybernetic implants. Includes, among other things; katanas coming out of hips and armpits, circular saws coming out of mouths, breast machine guns, breasts that squirt acid (again), a woman transforming her lower body into a tank, a giant robot, buildings that bleed, and a man getting impaled in the eyes with a pair of fried shrimp ! SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW.
Machete (2010) : "Mexploitation" revenge flick by Robert Rodriguez . The title character (Danny Trejo), a disgraced former federale turned illegal immigrant day laborer, sets out on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against an anti-immigrant senator ( Robert DeNiro ) after being drawn into an Evil Plan on his part to justify the mass deportation of Mexican laborers. Spun off from one of the fake trailers Rodriguez produced for the above-mentioned Grindhouse. Features Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, and Lindsay Lohan in minor parts. Sequel in 2013, similarly featuring cameos by Lady Gaga, Jessica Alba, and introducing some guy named Carlos Estevez .
A Serbian Film (2010): A retired porn star, now married with a son, is offered an outrageous sum to appear in what turns out to be a Snuff Film with themes that would make Marquis de Sade blush.
Sweaty Beards (2010): A Butt Monkey Viking tries to become a Berserker and avenge his parents death in a swordfighting tournament.
The Human Centipede (2010) : A mad scientist kidnaps three people in order to make them into the titular human centipede by sewing them together mouth-to-anus. A sequel in 2011 was banned in the UK.
Rubber (2010): A French-made, but performed in English, horror-comedy about an intelligent, ambulatory automobile tire that kills people.
Drive Angry (2011): A film that is very much a Spiritual Successor to Grindhouse , combining elements of both a devil-worshipper movie and a driving movie, involving a man (played by Nicholas Cage) driving out of hell to rescue his granddaughter from the Satanists who want to sacrifice her to end the world, while at the same time being followed by a man who simply calls himself "The Accountant" and who steals every scene he's in . It bombed at the box office, but could potentially become a cult classic.
Hobo with a Shotgun (2011): In a City with No Name which has become a Wretched Hive of scum and villainy, a nameless drifter (Rutger Hauer) spends his begging money on a shotgun and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who prey on the innocent. Also spun off from a Grindhouse trailer.
Mega Python Versus Gatoroid (2011): An animal activist and a park ranger confront/cause a massive ecological disaster involving enhugened snakes and supermutated alligators. This Made-for-TV Movie is primarily noteworthy for the big show-stopping battle between its lead monsters: 80s pop princesses Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. Really!
12/12/12 (2012): A woman is impregnated with a very unusual baby connected to the Mayan doomsday prophecy.
Elfie Hopkins: Cannibal Hunter (2012): An Amateur Sleuth encounters the Cannibal Clan who moved in next door.
V/H/S (2012): A group of thieves watch several horrifying video tapes while trying to find a particular one. Spawned two sequels .
Attack of the 50 Foot Zombie (2013): A gypsy curse causes a woman to come back from the dead, who then grows 50 feet tall shortly after stumbling into a vat of radioactive waste. The story gets even more absurd after that.
Axeman (2013): Camping teens encounter an axe-wielding local legend.
Dead in Tombstone (2013): Danny Trejo dies and comes back to hunt down his former gabg to avenge his demise and save himself from eternal damnation.
Jug Face (2013): A girl tries to flee her backwoods community after she learns she's to be sacrificed to the local Eldritch Abomination .
Savaged (2013): A girl is raped and murdered by rednecks, possessed by an Apache ghost, and comes back to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge .
Tasmanian Devils (2013): centers around a group of friends that get attacked by extremely large tasmanian devils.
|
i don't know
|
In which sport was Graeme Obree briefly world record holder in 1993, only to lose it to another Briton shortly afterwards?
|
The Red Bulletin_1209_UK by Red Bull Media House - issuu
issuu
Orlando Duque / Flying Lotus / Grizzly Bear / Ger Hartmann / Torey Pudwill / Kristen Stewart / Vampire Weekend
a beyond the ordinary magazine
September 2012
British cycling‘s maverick genius Storm surfers
Chasing the world‘s wildest waves
Future M u s ic
music grind e New YorkLockha it inJessethBoykins to mingakNickeHook, How (featur rt) and Tiombe E
xc v i d e lu s i v e o s on F r e e ou r Tabl e t Ap p
THE WORLD OF RED BULL
September HOMEMADE FOR SPEED ‘Flying Scotsman’ Graeme Obree is using both pedal and brain power to set new bike records
60
RED BULL STRATOS An update on the mission to dive from the edge of space, by man-in-the-suit, Felix Baumgartner
KRISTEN STEWART Inside the mind of the Twilight star, Hollywood’s best-paid actress
WELCOME COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKO LIM. PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL CALVER, GETTY IMAGES, GIAN PAUL LOZZA/RED BULL STRATOS, PALANI MOHAN
06
18
From the heights of kites in Bali to the depths of Galway Bay, via the world’s deadliest waves and the world’s most recorded musician, The Red Bulletin ranges far and wide this month. There’s music from Flying Lotus, Mathew Halsall, La Galaxie and John Cale – but so there should be. Those guys are pros. What about the rookies trying to break New York City’s music scene? Three fledgling stars reveal how far you can get on self-belief and tips. Also doing things his own way is Graeme Obree, builder of bicycles that could make him the fastest man on two (pedalled) wheels. Speaking of fast, how can you travel 28m in three seconds? By taking part in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. We’ve got the full story of the tour’s Ireland stop. Enjoy the issue.
“ We built a kite
that needed 75 people to fly it. It was too big ”
24
SPIRITS IN THE WIND The Bali Kite festival is among the world’s most spectacular displays of craft and tradition, and the scene of great battles between rival kite gangs
THE WORLD OF RED BULL
September 52
48 86
HEALING HANDS He’s the ‘go-to guy’ for athletes teetering on career breakdown: physio-guru-magician Gerard ‘Ger’ Hartmann
TOUGH BREAKS Californian street skater Torey Pudwill on how to recover after a double-hard inury
74 BERNARD PURDIE
This drummer sticks out: aged 73, he’s worked on about 4,000 albums over the course of a remarkable 50-year career
40
“ We know everyone thinks we’re mad ”
STORM SURFERS A team of weather scientists, moviemakers and surfers scour the world for the stormiest surfing conditions, to shoot big-wave films in near-lethal waters
08 Gallery: the images of the month 14 Bullevard: sport and culture on the quick 22 Hero: Matthew Halsall, man of jazz 20 Kit Evolution: mountain bikes 23 Lucky Numbers: Ryder Cup
PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKO LIM, PATRICK BOLGER, ATIBA JEFFERSON/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, PHILIPP HORAK, ROD OWEN
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND How to crack the New York music scene, from those who know how tough it can be, including Azealia Banks’s producer
THE WORLD OF RED BULL
“ I want
people to listen to my music in their cars ”
82 LOST IN MUSIC IN NEW ORLEANS
Local DJ Brice Nice gives the low-down on where to go in the Crescent City for hip-hop, cabaret, drag bingo and naked karaoke
Flying Lotus
36
MASTER OF INVENTION He has been likened to Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, but LA beatmaker Flying Lotus likens himself to Bugs Bunny. What’s up with that?
76 MAXIMUM AIRPLAY
Thomas Herzig is the Pneumatic Architect, building castles full of sky – his trademark inflatable ‘pneumocell’ creations fuse Gothic master building techinques with modern construction technology
PHOTOGRAPHY: THOMAS BUTLER, GETTY IMAGES, DANIEL GEBHART DE KOEKKOEK, GREG FUNNELL
more
MIND’S EYE
Worldly goings-on Events for the diary Our cartoonist
Dublin’s Le Galaxie Columnist Stephen are bent on bringing Bayley says the old key-sounds pursuit of luxury back to the future leads to vulgarity
90 NIGHTLIFE
A glamorous club, an exotic cocktail, a midnight snack, the best in music and much, much more: everything you need to get you through the night
RED BULL STRATOS
“Now we need to keep cool”
Felix Baumgartner explains what happened on his final test jump – and what happens next for the real thing
could fail while we’re up there or, worse still, a short circuit could send the capsule up in flames. Of course a break of just two or three weeks between the penultimate and final jumps would have been ideal, because we were all at the top of our game. But now we have to stick with the same professional attitude which has already taken us to the edge of space twice. Once the capsule is repaired, we’ll check it over in the pressure chamber and if it’s all systems go, we’ll take it straight to Roswell and then the real jump will take place in the first two weeks of October. We’re professionals, and we do our job properly and calmly. I’ve succeeded in all my prior projects with this attitude. Yes, I feel like a caged tiger right now, but we won’t jeopardise all the hard work of the last five years at the last minute. If I don’t complete this mission, it might be another 60 years before someone else gambles on a project of this scale. Hopefully, we’ll see each other again in October. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
“You can’t buy the spare parts for my capsule in the supermarket”
06
Rough landing The capsule’s built-in crush pads absorbed the impact as designed on an early jump. But in the final test there was a hard landing, which has resulted in a delay. “When we took the capsule off the truck, everyone could see we had a problem,” says Baumgartner. “It looked like it had been in a traffic accident with an alien.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOERG MITTER/RED BULL STRATOS, BALAZS GARDI/RED BULL STRATOS
T
he second test jump went well, even if the days and nights leading up to it were exhausting. It seemed like an eternity before the capsule door opened at 29,610m and I could jump. I had no control over my position for the first 16 seconds I was in free fall, but everything was under control within six seconds of the first test jump. Yet now we can say we’ve shown twice that we can do this, which is also why I couldn’t believe it when I found out that something had happened to the capsule. A crew member who went to salvage the capsule once it landed told me what happened. At first I didn’t think the message was all that important. During the first manned flight, the capsule landed hard in the desert, but our technicians built crush pads onto the underside of the capsule for things like this, which should have softened any impact. Sadly, our project leader Art Thompson confirmed the bad news and when we took the capsule off the truck, everyone could see we had a problem. It looked like it had been in a traffic accident with an alien. The results of the investigation back at the factory: we have to change a lot of the lifesupport system, even though my survival cell remained intact. As with an F1 car that’s crashed into a barrier, you can’t go back to the grid without undergoing thorough checks first. And you can’t buy spare parts for my capsule at the supermarket. They have to be space-approved and come from specialist firms that also supply NASA, for example. You have to wait weeks for many of these parts. We can’t and won’t allow ourselves to lift off with equipment that might be faulty. To explain, let’s use our batteries as an example: if the inner structure is damaged, the electricity
Felix Baumgartner
Established in Ireland in 1904
DUNDALK Tel: 042 9320789
SURF SHOP Open in Lahinch
OPEN 7 Days a Week
TU R PAN , C H I NA
REMOTE CONTROL
After a three-hour hike through the Gobi Desert, American mountain biker Cameron Zink enjoys a welldeserved adrenalin payoff. He was filming for new bike doc Where The Trail Ends, released later this month, a project with one central aim: to push the boundaries of big-mountain freeriding in some of the most remote places on Earth. “This is what mountain biking is to us,” says Zink, “and the future of what it will be to the world.” Get up on the downhill: www.wherethetrailends.com Photography: John Wellburn/Red Bull Content Pool
09
L AN G J Ö KU LL , I C E L AN D
NOW YOU SEE IT
The ice caves in Langjökull, Iceland, are ephemeral beauties. Made of frozen snowmelt, they usually only last a year. “It’s extremely rare for caves of this size to form,” says photographer Tyler Stableford, who accompanied travel journalist Mark Jenkins to Langjökull (Icelandic for long glacier) to view these amazing feats of nature. Stableford’s portfolio is precious: all that’s left from this image is the man and his climbing gear. The rest is meltwater. Mark Jenkins’s travel diary: www.thehardway.com Photography: Tyler Stableford
11
WHITE NILE RIVER, UGANDA
A GOOD SOAK
“We feel more humble than proud,” said professional kayaker Steve Fisher after becoming one of the first people to cross the Inga Falls near the Congolese city of Matadi. Almost 71,000 cubic metres of water per second rush through the Congo River here, placing it among the world’s most fierce and rapid estuaries. To prepare for the expedition, the crew trained on the White Nile River in Uganda you can see in this picture. The greatest risk Fisher and his three colleagues faced was whirlpools appearing out of nowhere. A documentary showcasing the expedition’s highs and lows, The Grand Inga Project, has just been released. Movie trailer here: www.ingaproject.com Photography: Greg Von Doersten/Red Bull Content Pool
12
WETSUITS Category Font: Myriad Pro Regular
20% cyan 20% magenta 20% yellow 100% black
Process Color 12% magenta 100% yellow
Sp
20% cyan 20% magenta 20% yellow 100% black
Fade
12% magenta 100% yellow 23.59% magenta 96.31% yellow
1 color logo version
WETSUITS Pyro stretch insulation / EVOflex composite super stretch material / Vaporlock seams / Nano Tritec kneepads 100% Black 2011 Ad Campaign Logo Sheet
prime wetsuit available in 3/2mm blue / orange /black
www.bodyglove.eu email:[email protected] or call +44 (0)1642 486104 | @Typhoon_Int For stockist info go to:www.typhoon-int.co.uk
Body Glove and the Hand Design are registered trademarks of Body Glove International, LLC.
Fade
Multi color - fade in logo version
Bullevard Sport and culture on the quick
Ball Four For the firsit time in 23 years, Clint Eastwood is acting in a film he hasn’t directed: in Trouble With The Curve (out Nov), he plays a baseball scout whose career is fading. A great ball movie like these?
THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES 1942 Just 13 months after Lou Gehrig died, Gary Cooper starred as Lou; Babe Ruth played himself.
BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY 1973 Another disease-on-the-diamond flick (see above), it contains Robert De Niro’s break-out role.
IN YOUR FACE
The colourful and highly profitable world of Takashi Murakami
Andy Warhol might well have invented Pop Art, but Takashi Murakami has perfected it. His style – in his paintings, sculptures, films and animations – screams out and captures your attention whether you want it captured or not. Garish flowers with grinning faces, cartoonish characters (Western and Japanese definition) and cute little animals, all depicted in bright, glossy colours. The 50-year-old from Japan is as controversial as he is lauded, not least for his overt blurring of the boundary between art and commerce. He has designed bags for Louis Vuitton and album covers for Kanye West, and his merchandising brings him almost as much money as his auction sales. A new book, Ego,, documents his recent, and largest, solo exhibition, in Doha, Qatar, a highlight of which was a 91m-long painting of Buddhist monks in apocalyptic Manga style.
Murakami and two key motifs, cute animals and flowers
www.rizzoliusa.com
14
BULL DURHAM 1988 Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon: who knew baseball was funny and sexy?
PICTURES OF THE MONTH
SUGAR 2008 A teenage Dominicano heads to the US to play in the Majors. Little-seen, but big surprises.
Taken a picture with a Red Bull flavour? Email it to us: [email protected] Every month we print a selection, and our favourite pic is awarded a limited-edition Sigg bottle. Tough, functional and well-suited to sport, it features The Red Bulletin logo.
EVERY SHOT ON TARGET San Francisco Before the Laguna Seca MotoGP, Germany’s Stefan Bradl practises in the city. Cameron Baird
Soled! First-rate sporting footwear
WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: PICTUREDESK.COM (3), GETTY IMAGES (2), KOBAL COLLECTION (2), SHAWN BRACKBILL, NAIM CHIDIAC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, NIKE, GEOX, ADIDAS
NIKE HYPERKO Boxing Manny Pacquiao’s boots have kept his orthodox stance steady: he’s the only man to win belts at eight weights. Lilou, one of three co-headliners of six-part B-Boy doc Break’n’ Reality
365 days and nights of breaking it down Omar O Delgado, Ali Ramdani and Fabiano Carvalho Lopes are better known, to an increasingly large audience, as Roxrite, Lilou and Neguin. Their status as three of the greatest talents on the breakdancing and B-Boy scene is unquestioned, but what goes on in their heads when they’re not spinning on them? The result of the trio being trailed for a year by a camera team is Break ’n’ Reality, a candid and fascinating six-part web documentary produced by Red Bull Media House and available now on iTunes, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. The series’ highpoint comes when the three men meet at the World Championships in Moscow for a grand showdown that tests both their abilities and friendship. www.redbull.com/breaknreality
GEOX F1 RED BULL Motor racing Fireproof, lightweight, and comfortable. Sebastian Vettel puts his foot down wearing these.
KEEP IT FRESH
At 70, John Cale has a new album and wish-list collaborator: Snoop He’s had a greater impact on rock history than almost any other musician, as the Velvet Underground’s songwriter alongside Lou Reed. He also discovered artists such as Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. As a solo artist, 70-year-old multi-instrumentalist John Cale switches from poetic pop to avant-garde and, as evidenced by his new album the elements of hip-hop. On the new album, you use Auto-Tune software, aka the Cher effect. It’s all the rage in hip-hop. You can only use the effect in small doses. It gets annoying pretty quickly. I do listen to rap, but I used AutoTune on the song Mothra to recreate a robotic voice.
Who do you like in hip-hop? I’d like to work with Snoop Dogg, or Kokane, a guy from his crew with three voices: a high Marvin Gaye voice, a sweet middle-of-the-road voice and then that growl. He sometimes uses all three in a single song. One of your lines goes, ‘Say hello to the future, and goodbye to the past.’ Is that a sort of motto? I don’t want to repeat myself. Or write something that’s already been written, because then I’d have to scrap a song that I really invested emotion in. I don’t listen to a lot of radio. I take care with my hearing habits. Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood is released on October 1: www.john-cale.com
John Cale: 50-year musical visionary keeps his radio turned off
ADIDAS ADIZERO Discus, hammer Flat design and an extra-polished front end add a few kphs to the rotational speed one needs when throwing stuff across the infield.
WE HAVE A WINNER!
Madrid At the Plaza de Toros, 25,000 fans get behind Red Bull X-Fighters. Jörg Mitter
Agra British freerunner Ryan Doyle unearths the impossible: a new way to see the Taj Mahal. Sebastian Marko
Dallas A full-on finals day for Red Bull Game Breakers, a 7-on-7 version of American football. Garth Milan 15
B U L L E VA R D
The last one to reach the church is eliminated
Running battle
DJ spins life story online A fly-on-the-decks look at the world of the superstar DJ begins online this month. I Am Benga follows the titular 25-year-old south Londoner as he prepares to release his first solo album, Chapter 2 (out in October). His journey takes him via helicopter to the Snowbombing festival in Austria, the Red Bull Studios to rehearse his debut live show, and back home to Croydon: it seems even world-class DJs find time for a cup of tea with Mum. The first of six weekly episodes goes live on September 25. www.redbullstudios. com/iambenga MeTube: behind the scenes with Benga, on the internet soon
Lyme Regis English wakeboarding: Dominik Hernler at Red Bull Harbour Reach. Ben Dean 16
From left: Sam Halliday, Alex Trimble, Ben Thompson and Kevin Baird are Two Door Cinema Club
BRING HOME THE BEACON
After attaining Olympic honours, County Down’s Two Door Cinema Club are now touring their second album, a disc filled with fidgety indie anthems : Your bandmate Alex sang at the Olympic opening ceremony. How did that happen? : People were suggesting these famous names to Danny Boyle, but he wanted Alex because he likes his voice. So he got in touch and of course Alex said yes. Another famous fan of yours is Prince Charles, right? Well, we met him. In 2010 he was at Glastonbury to meet Michael Eavis and we were one of the band’s playing the festival. He thought we were from Wales at first, and when he found out we’re from Ireland he seemed a little bit scared.
Denai Alam At Red Bull Under My Wing, fledgling Malaysian biking talent is nurtured. Victor Fraile
What was it like making your new album, Beacon, in Los Angeles? We wrote most of the songs in the cold and rainy winter months in Glasgow. Recording them in California changed how we were feeling about them. It made us much happier. Plus, I really enjoyed the food. You just feel bad if you’re not eating healthy in LA. What are the beacons in your lives? We’re constantly on tour and writing new songs. Everything is new and exciting. So we don’t really know what our beacon is but whatever it is, it’s definitely drawn us towards it. Tour dates: www.twodoorcinemaclub.com
Salzburg A flock of rare sculptures aluminium
austrianicus takes off at the airport’s Hangar-7. Helge Kirchberger
WORDS: RUTH MORGAN. PHOTOGRAPHY: RUTGER PAUW/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GETTY IMAGES (2)
In Red Bull Steeplechase, 250 runners will punish themselves over 21 miles of the Peak District, checking in at four churches, with steeples, on the way. But there’s a cruel twist: at each holy place, the rear of the racing pack will be eliminated, leaving just 40 hardy souls to complete the course. Spectators are encouraged to spot the differences in runners pre- and post-race at the start/finish line at Castleton, Derbyshire. The race begins at 9.30am on Sunday October 7. www.redbull.co.uk/steeplechase
B U L L E VA R D
WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT?
KRISTEN STEWART Aged 22, she’s Hollywood’s highest-earning actress and, as Bella in Twilight, the star of teenage dreams for girls and boys the world over. How did it ever come to this?
COM PAN Y TOW N GIRL
Born in Los Angeles on April 9, 1990, to a script supervisor mom and a stage manager/producer daddy, Kristen Jaymes Stewart grew up inside the entertainment industries. She auditioned from a young age, but was no precious princess. “Look at a picture of me before I was 15,” she told Vanity Fair, of her nongirlie ways. “I am a boy.”
GR EY PR
ID E This year’s blockbuster boo k Fifty Shades Of Grey, has its roots in the Twilight universe. Author EL James originally wrote a story in which Bella and Edward did more that just look moodi ly into each other’s eyes. Posted online, the story’s character names were cha nged, it was extended to book length, then bought by millions. Guess which actors are being mooted for the movie. K-STEW AND R-PATZ
Stewart and Pattinson’s on-screen romance continued into real life, where the going rate for a paparazzi shot of them together off-set hit US $100k – close to Stewart’s daily income as Hollywood’s highest-earning actress ($34.5m, from May 2011-May 2012, says Forbes magazine). In July, Stewart was spotted canoodling with the director of her Snow White movie: for she apologised, Pattinson fumed. PR the next Twilight film or love in turmoil?
LADY LOOKS LIKE A DUDE
The boyish thing worked in Stewart’s favour: in 2001, her first speaking role in the movies was a rebellious little tomboy in The Safety Of Objects. The following year, she played Jodie Foster’s diabetic daughter in Panic Room. On both occasions, she sported the sort of floppy hairdo reminiscent of a young River Phoenix.
INTO TH E TW ILI GH
Before her split with Pattinson, Stewart is said to have declared a desire to start a family with him. Any offspring will almost certainly be a regular human child, unlike the half-vampire, half-human – or ‘dhampir’ – child their Twilight characters brought into the world. And for her first role post-Bella, Stewart has chosen Cali, a gritty action film involving fake snuff films and revenge. Revenge!
T
teen years, so did her As Stewart grew into her errated Undertow rep as an actress. In the und Jamie Bell: with nes sce (2004), she shared . Her 10th movie after iot) (Ell y Bill t Me la Bel When ed by the critics: Panic Room got her re-notic The Wild. Penn Into , ma dra 7 200 n’s Pen Sean Catherine r cto dire to t suggested Stewar n fantasy novel tee a ng ppi pre n the , cke Hardwi , is Twilight. say y the as t, adaptation. The res
BELLA RINGIN G; TILLS TOO
A teen movie based on a best-selling novel about a girl who falls in love with a vampire is being cast in early 2008. Kristen Stewart is playing Bella. At the director’s house, some English kid from the Harry Potter films turns up to test for the vampire part. Stewart and this Robert Pattinson fellow kiss. All three present feel the fizz. Twilight makes 10 times its budget at the box office. A film franchise is born.
18
THE ROAD TO SUCCE SS
VAMPIRES SUCK A sign of success in today’s Hollywood is a parody of your film made by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. The two have written and or directed several, including Scary Movie, Meet The Spartans and Twilight take-off Vampires Suck. Instead of Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, there’s Jenn Proske as Becca Crane. To do Bella, Proske says she lowers her voice and has to “smile a lot. Kristen Stewart doesn’t.”
Since embarking on The Twilight Saga Stewart has made six other films. The final Twilight film comes out in November, but before that she can be seen in an adaptation of the Jack Kerouac novel On The Road. “I like pushing myself,” she said, of the film’s sex scenes. “We admire Kristen’s career choices,” millions of teenage boys online are paraphrased as saying. On The Road is released worldwide in September and October: www.ontheroad-themovie.com
WORDS: PAUL WILSON. ILLUSTRATION: LIE-INS AND TIGERS
LIFE AFTER TW ILIG HT
B U L L E VA R D
HARD & FAST
Top performers and winning ways from around the globe Play time: if strangers share songs, will they make beautiful music together?
TURN ON, TUNE IN… MAKE OUT?
WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCY NICHOLLS, NIELS TOFTEGAARD, SVEN MARTIN, C BAHN/USOS, HONDA, JOERG MITTER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL. ILLUSTRATION: DIETMAR KAINRATH
Mixtapes, 21st-century style: introducing Speed Listening, a new night out for music lovers and, if all goes well, lovers Forget Spotify playlists and online charts. There’s a much more appealing way to discover new music – and meet the people who are recommending it. Speed Listening brings together the tracks and their like-minded curators at a new club night in London, run by Alice Shyy and the rest of the Team Note Well collective. : What is Speed Listening? : It’s a fast-paced and fun way to trade music tracks with lots of folks in one whirlwind night. Team Note Well hosts with cakes and smiles. We make a welcoming atmosphere for anyone who cares about any kind of music. How does it work? Come armed with headphones and a music player loaded with about six varied tracks you would like to share with a complete stranger. When it’s go-time, find your place at a table with the number you get, and introduce yourself
to the person in the seat in front of you. Plug your headphones into their player and have them do the same with yours. Give each other feedback on your initial song selection, then pick new tracks accordingly. Rotate to the next person. Each round lasts about seven minutes. Is it only for single people? Initially, dating wasn’t on the radar. Then people started dating and we decided to indulge that side of things. We’ve teamed up with Tastebuds.fm, a music dating site the past couple of times, so it’s been good for singles. But Speed Listening is focused on music and friendship, so don’t put too much pressure on pulling or it’ll never happen. How many people show up? The most was between 60 and 70. We’re trying to keep the night more intimate, though, so that you can listen to half the room without getting fatigued. Next date: September 20 at The White Horse, 153 Hoxton Street, London: www.thenotewell.com
New Zealand rider Brook MacDonald (centre) claimed his first downhill MTB World Cup victory in Val d’Isere, France. Honda World Superbike rider Jonathan Rea made history when he became the first Briton to win the prestigious Suzuka 8 Hours race in Japan.
Australian surfer Julian Wilson was dubbed ‘The Comeback kid’ after a late run of wins brought him a first-time victory at the US Open of Surfing.
At the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour stop in Madrid, Levi Sherwood (NZL, left in photo) beat local hero and 2011 overall champ Dany Torres (right).
19
B U L L E VA R D
KIT EVOLUTION
Wheel Progress Two decades of tweaks and weight loss separate a rare treasure of mountain-biking from a spearhead of cycling technology
LONG, SLIM, LOW
In the 1990s, a more elongated sitting position was considered sportier. Pressure on the front and aerodynamic, but poor control off-road
RIGID FORK
When the suspension fork was introduced in 1990, many cross-country riders rejected it, believing that it squandered power
GEARS
Shimano Deore XT: then state-of-the-art, seven gears at the back, three sprockets at the front. Made light work of any hill
1992
MARONÉ KAMPFMASCHINE
The Red Bull Maroné team, with racers Gerhard Zadrobilek, Ekkehard Dörschlag and Manfred Kornelson, cleaned up at the MTB World Cup, and other major races such as Red Bull Dolomitenmann, on bikes made in Peter Maroné’s prestigious Salzburg workshop. Raised chain stays, a sporty seat position and an aura of victory make this a silver dream machine for enthusiasts.
20
Ultra-taut square chain stays made from aluminium. Total bike weight: 13.44kg
Weight reduction over 20 years: 41 per cent
EASIER RIDE
The rider sits much more comfortably on the bike. Wider handlebars and shorter stem make for more responsive handling
GEARS
Ten sprockets in the back, two chain wheels in the front: the SRAM XX has one less gear than a 3x7 formation and weighs much less
SUSPENSION FORK
WORDS: WERNER JESSNER. PHOTOGRAPHY: KURT KEINRATH
The DT Swiss XRC 100 has 10cm displacement and is locked using the handlebars. At 1.27kg it weighs the same as the rigid fork
2012
SCOTT SCALE SL
Weight reduction plus more functionality equals more speed. The frame, suspension fork, handlebars, stem, seat, seat post, crank and rims are all made from carbon, each part optimised for functional perfection. (Disc brakes and suspension fork are standard cross-country MTB components.) With a more comfortable seat position, this bike is much faster than the Maroné, uphill and downhill. www.redbulldolomitenmann.com
At 899g, the Scale SL’s frame is mountain-biking’s lightest. Total bike weight: 7.91kg
21
B U L L E VA R D
SYNCHOPATOR INNOVATOR
MATTHEW HALSALL
At the tender age of 14 he toured the world. Now he’s taking jazz into the 21st century, with his trumpet, record bag and record label
Born September 11, 1983, Warrington, UK First contact Aged six, at a jazz big-band gig he attended with his parents, he pointed at the trumpet. They bought him a cornet instead – he was too small to play a trumpet. Second wind In his mid-20s he started to focus on his own production. “I felt I needed to play music for my generation”, he says, “to make my own version of jazz music.”
Musician, DJ and label owner in one, Halsall loves multi-tasking
22
It’s nothing new for Matthew Halsall to see an enraptured audience follow his every move when he’s playing trumpet. Halsall, 29, was just 14 years old when his audition for the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra left its leader lost for words. He was hired on the spot, becoming the youngest member (by five years) of one of the world’s best youth big bands. Having never left his hometown of Manchester, Halsall’s first tour with the band took him to Malaysia. “That was exciting,” he says. Halsall is a trumpeting genius, but that doesn’t stop him working hard to improve, constantly tweaking his technique and honing his playing style. “As a musician you’re always going somewhere,” he says, referring to both his own musical development and the itinerant life led by someone with muchdemanded talents. He has, after all, visited continents in the same way he has visited many musical styles. He has played in classical ensembles and funk, soul and reggae bands, before returning to the jazz fold a few years ago. Halsall has developed his own original jazz language: slowed-down, gentle, soulful, melodic, full-bodied, intense and completely modern. “Matthew really only plays what needs to be played,” says saxophonist
Always on top: Matthew Halsall in his trademark worker cap
Nat Birchall. “None of his notes are played just for the sake of playing them, everything has meaning.” Another fan is music guru Gilles Peterson, who chose Halsall’s 2011 release, On The Go, as his jazz album of the year. “If I could watch any jazz band in the UK, any, I would choose Matthew Halsall’s band,” said Peterson, at his annual Worlwide Awards. “It’s always high-level, spiritual jazz music.” This month, Halsall releases his fourth album, Fletcher Moss Park, on Gondwana Records, the label he founded in 2007 to launch his acclaimed debut, Sending My Love, and currently runs from an office at home in Manchester. Although Halsall’s heart is devoted to the trumpet, he flits from concert hall to club, swapping his instrument for DJ decks. “It keeps your ears fresh,” says Halsall, who also keeps his head warm with a trademark cloth worker cap. Halsall was a hit at festivals across Europe over the summer, both front of stage playing trumpet with his band and behind the decks with his bag of records. His “dream goal” is to produce “an album that has solo piano tunes, orchestra tunes and jazz tunes. I want to really take my time and put my heart and soul in to it.” Don’t bet against him realising his vision.
“My dream goal is to do an album that has solo piano tunes, orchestra tunes and jazz tunes. I want to take my time and put my heart and soul in to it”
Music, tour dates and more: www. matthewhalsall.com
WORDS: OLIVER PICKUP. PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON HUNT, RICHARD KABY
Name Matthew Halsall
B U L L E VA R D
LUCKY NUMBERS
RYDER CUP
For American and European golfing stars, honour trumps prize money at the sport’s most prestigious team event, to be held this year at the Medinah Country Club, about 40km from downtown Chicago
1,000
The first biennial golfing match between the USA and Great Britain and Ireland was held in 1927; since 1979 the Americans have played against all Europe. Home advantage alternates each time, with the 2001 match postponed a year due to 9/11. The competition was founded by Samuel Ryder, an English seed merchant, who donated its 43cm, solid gold trophy. The cup is topped by a figure of Abe Mitchell, whom Ryder employed as coach on an annual salary of £1,000. Mitchell missed the first Ryder Cup due to appendicitis, but took part in 1929, 1931 and 1933.
60
WORDS: ULRICH CORAZZA. PHOTOGRAPHY: SHUTTERSTOCK (2), CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES (5)
1
Billy Casper of the USA went unbeaten in his eight appearances at the Ryder Cup between 1961 and 1975 (7 victories, 1 draw) and also won as captain in 1979. His points total of 23½ remains the US record. (Despite such a superb record, and three Majors, the 100kg Buffalo Bill has always remained in the shadow of golf’s Big Three: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player.) Englishman Nick Faldo is Mr Ryder Cup, with overall records for appearances (11), matches played (46) and points scored (25).
192
The Ryder Cup
With 26 titles – 25 wins and one draw which, according to the regulations, meant the title was successfully defended – the USA is the winningest team, their opponents managing only 12 titles, including one draw. From 1935 to 1985, the trophy stayed in the US with the exception of 1957. British captain Henry Cotton suffered the greatest humiliation in 1947 against a high-quality US team. Sam King beat Herman Keiser in the final round of single matches to prevent a clean sweep, but an 11-1 scoreline is the Cup’s greatest debacle.
8
Jack Nicklaus
At the 1969 Ryder Cup, golf witnessed an ultimate sporting moment. America’s icon Jack Nicklaus sank a birdie putt at the 18th during his singles match, the last round of a gamesmanshiptinged contest, against Tony Jacklin. The Englishman was left with a 60cm putt to halve the round and tie the match overall, but Nicklaus conceded the putt, as the rules allowed him to do, and the final match score was 16:16. “I don’t think you would have missed that putt, but in these circumstances, I would never give you the opportunity,” Nicklaus whispered to Jacklin, with whom a close friendship subsequently developed.
Bernhard Langer
Samuel Ryder
At Kiawah Island in 1991, Bernhard Langer, a known perfectionist, is said to have asked his four-ball partner Colin Montgomerie how far away a sprinkler, measuring 15cm, was from the flag on the green. The Scot attests that he replied, “192 yards”. Langer’s retort: “From the front or the back of the sprinkler head?” Despite his thoroughness, Langer came up short, missing a subsequent putt to draw the match, which would have meant the European team making a rare title defence on US soil.
18
Billy Casper
Walton family
The 1995 Ryder Cup at the Oak Hill Country Club marked the high point in the career of the relatively unknown Philip Walton; his most notable result before then (and since, it turned out) was a 13th-place finish at the 1989 Open Championship. At his one and only Ryder Cup, the Irishman and partner Ian Woosnam lost their morning foursome, but on the final green of the penultimate singles match, he scored Europe’s winning point. “Maybe the Americans know me now,” he said after the win. “Tell ’em I’m related to all those Waltons on that TV show.” 39th Ryder Cup, September 27-30, Medinah, Illinois, USA: www.rydercup.com/2012
23
ACTION
Spirits in the Wind
The Bali Kite festival is among the world’s most spectacular displays of craft and tradition. Far from nostaligic, it’s modern, relevant and a source of kudos for rival kite gangs Words: Jeremy Torr Photography: Palani Mohan
24
“These kites are a very important part of our culture”
In
Bali, when the trade winds kick in, the weather changes. Around May, the wet season slows to a stop as strong, dry, clean winds blow from the south. The skies clear, the rain disappears and the paddy fields turn parched and barren under your feet. Look up and it’s the opposite. Everything springs to life in the sky. White fluffy clouds pop up to make postcard views. Birds flit and swoop like dogfighting pilots, and tall clumps of bamboo whisper quietly. But despite this feeling of well-being, rice farmers know they will have to irrigate. If they don’t, they won’t get a good rice crop. The farmers don’t just irrigate. They invoke the spirits of the skies to help the rice grow.
Flying Spirits
“I started making and flying kites before I was 10,” says Si Nyoman Adnyana, a respected village elder and local historian. “I’m 77 now, so that’s a lot of kites,” he laughs. Si Nyoman is one of the founders of the Bali Kite Festival and competition, held each year at Pantai Padang Galak on the south side of Bali. It is, he admits, much more than a festival. It’s a homage to the wind, the seasons, the earth, and the balance of nature that gives a good harvest. “It’s not just about the flying, although that is good in itself, but it’s about what the kites mean to us,” he explains. 26
“The kites in Bali are a very important part of our culture.” Most Balinese kites are black, red and white – either in stripes, patterns or chequers. These colours represent Hindu deities, and legend says the Hindu god Shiva loved kite flying – so the colours honour his sport. Built to traditional designs, the kites are also rigged with bamboo bows, strung with rattan strips that make a hypnotic humming,
The benefits of blessing kites
Religious rituals are a vital part of the kite flying, with priests blessing each one and the team members. Each kite can take up to a few months to complete, and moving them causes traffic tailbacks for miles
27
Getting the kites into the air demands a uniquely Balinese kind of chaotic teamwork
ACTION
“Last year we built a really big one. It needed 75 people to fly it. It was too big”
warbling noise as they fly. The Balinese people say the sounds bring a sense of harmony and fertility to the fields below. So flying the kites over rice fields is much more than just a sport, it’s a celebration of renewal. And it is very popular. The 50,000 people who flock to the Bali Kite Festival each year from all round the island underline just how popular it is. “The kite-flying festival is really a big thing for our village community,” says Kadek Suprapta, organiser for the black-clad Danginpeken Banjar team. “If somebody joins a banjar [Balinese community] and then finds out they don’t have a kite team, the chances are they will leave and join another. There’s that much prestige that goes with kite flying.” This might seem a bit of an over-reaction until you see your first kite. Then you realise why they are such a big deal. These are not kites like we usually see in the park. They’re monsters. “It takes us months to get one of the big janggan kites ready,” says Kadek. It can weigh up to 300kg, span about 3-4m and be about 10m long. Add the 200m-long, 2m-wide tail and the overall weight can top 400kg. It takes about 10 team members just to carry it to launch. These kites are so big that when the banjar transports one to the flying field, traffic stops. Admittedly that’s because there can be up to 70-80 more banjar members following the kite, banging on gongs, waving banners and flags, carrying smaller kites and offerings, and just being part of the procession. “Last year we built a really big one but it was too much,” admits Kadek. “It needed nearly 75 people to fly it. It was too big.” Now take the Danginpeken team, multiply it by hundreds of other teams, each with several kites, add a few tens of thousands of spectators and cram it all into a 1km square windswept patch of rice paddies by the beach and you start to get some idea of the scale of the Bali Kite Festival. It’s gob-smacking. “It’s a celebration as well as our offering to the gods and part of our Hindu beliefs,” says 29
People power
The sheer size of the kites means a team of 40 or more people are needed to carry, launch and fly each one. And there are 1,200 at the festival...
30
ACTION
have good experience to make the kite fly and make a good sound.” Danginpeken must be doing it right as their kite designer, Made Lumbun, is 61 and still using the same design as his grandfather. So far he has built kites for 25 festivals and his banjar has won its class 15 times since 1956. “It’s the mask. It brings us power,” says Kadek seriously. “The mask and the artistry of our kite is our tradition.” That, and of course the teamwork of the kite crew.
More than a crew
Si Nyoman. Each janggaan (dragon-style) kite is adorned with a unique mask, often complete with a solid gold crown, that is blessed by a priest and given ritual offerings before it can be allowed to take to the air. Every year the mask is fitted to a new kite, and helps bring the allimportant balance to each one. “Balance is very important,” explains Kadek. “The kite builders should be happily married, and
Every team is a super-cool looking group of very fit young guys between about 14 and 27 years old. They have to be fit to carry, launch and fly their huge kites. They’re all tagged out in signature T-shirts, matching udeng (headdresses), and aviator shades. Many wear cowboy-style facekerchiefs, even full black balaclavas. They might be mistaken for a street posse were it not for the reverence they show for the kite and the rest of the team. Sure, they’re not shy of parading their toughness, but it’s based on traditional pride, not on pushing back against society. “Some people might say they are aggressive, but they’re not,” says Kadek. “It’s pride in the banjar they are showing.” Being part of the community is being part of the culture, the tribal belonging that drives the teams to build ever bigger, more impressive, better looking and more harmonious kites. But kites that never forget they’re a homage
(WO)MEN ONLY
The tradition in all the banjars is that making and flying kites is a menonly business. But that doesn’t mean no women take part. The women are the only ones allowed to make the special satab, tiny plaited flowers made of bamboo slivers that are tied to all the kites to bring harmony. And only women may prepare the offerings used by the priest when he blesses the kite at the temple. The kite needs male and female aspects, each doing their bit to bring a positive result.
KITE GUIDE
The Bali Kite Festival has classes for three traditional and one modern class of kite. The traditional are the bebean (fish-shaped), pecukan (leaf-shaped) and janggan (dragon-shaped). The new class is creasi, in which anything goes: from flying turtles to motorbikes to lions or waitresses – all monster size, of course. The bebean are the most traditional and the pecukan symbolise positive and negative, the grandest and most important are the jenggan.
31
In Bali, street cool doesn’t come from having an iPhone
Eyes on the skies
When more than 20 of the monster janggan kites take to the air at once, it’s a truly gob-smacking sight
to the wind and the seasons and the importance of the harvest. “I’m 22, and I’ve been in the Segara Manik team for about four years,” says Ketut Tara, smoking clove cigarettes as we talk, the muscles in his sinewy arms flexing. He doesn’t look a traditional type. He has a plug in his ear lobe, tattoos, and a street-tough attitude. But, he emphasises, his loyalty to the banjar is what brings him to the kite team. “We’re not gangsters, but we have to be strong because we do this to win. Even if we don’t win it’s good, too. We’re just happy to be here,” he grins. In Bali, street cool doesn’t come from having an iPhone, designer gear, a racing moped or pulling tricks on a skatey. In Bali it comes from being part of a traditional festival. Sure, the cool is there, but so is tradition, says Kadek. “Technology should bring us progress, but should also help us develop our culture,” he explains. “In this case that means bigger, better, winning kites.” Old-time kiter Si Nyoman agrees. “One obvious thing about the Kite Festival is that it’s growing bigger every year,” he says. “And the best thing is it’s the young men who are making it happen.” And make it happen they do. The tension mounts as the line pullers stretch out their 400m of line across dry rice paddies, weaving between other teams, over canals, between food stalls, past hundreds of spectators – even across the sea wall. The launchers gather like coiled springs under the kite, waiting for the signal from the team leader. It’s not easy choosing the right time; there could be other kite lines in the way, a cross gust of wind or even someone standing on the tail. The team’s gamelan gong orchestra ups the beat to a frenzy, the commentator 33
ACTION
“When we gather to make the kite, we know we belong”
shouts encouragement and the kite is hurled into the air, often catching just a small breeze and falling sideways until the line stretches, snaps, and then hauls the huge structure into the air. A great cheer goes up, and the kite climbs majestically, the team whooping with joy.
Old and new
JUDGMENT WAY
Balinese kites are judged, among other things, on their appearance, build, ability to fly, stability, speed and sound. The winner in each class is chosen by a committee of judges after a couple of days’ deliberation. Several kites will often fly at once, with lines coated in glass, which cut through other kites, sending them crashing to the ground. Some of these ‘fighting kites’ also use tiny hooks sewn into the lines to cripple other lines or sails.
WHEN
The Bali Kite Festival is organised by the Bali Kite association and held at Pantai Padang Galak in Sanur every year at the start of the dry, windy season, usually at the end of July.
34
Unlike Western-style designs, these kites are alive. The bamboo struts flex with the wind, changing shape and profile. The joints between struts use natural cords, wrapped and knotted so the pressure of the wind can make them move. The hummers buzz loud and soft and the tails flap as the teams strain on the line to get more height than the next team. Occasionally a kite will snag another’s line and plunge to the ground, which can be dangerous. But it’s a festival that, in Kadek’s words, is part of the umbrella of his people’s culture: “When we gather to make the kite, we talk, we work together and we use our traditional skills – we know we belong.” Tradition and the beliefs that go with it run strong in Bali. But they don’t rule the team’s life. As one team member put it: “I go to the temple every day to pray. But I also go to the nightclubs every weekend to have a good time.” It seems in Bali they have mastered the art of balance, of harmony, of purusha and prakriti. Here’s to a good harvest. www.balikitefestival.com www.redbull.com/balikitefestival
Party time
A successful launch, flight and landing result in a huge cheers and manic celebrations
35
MASTER
OF INVENTION
Flying Lotus has been likened to Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, but when he’s making records – some of the most innovative and fresh-sounding music you will hear – he thinks of himself as Bugs Bunny. What’s up with that? Words: Florian Obkircher Photography: Thomas Butler
“I WANT PEOPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC IN THEIR CARS, NOT JUST WHEN THEY’RE PARTYING”
36
: How do you come up with such unique electronic beats? : I have no idea, I swear. There is no button that I push, but I think it has to do with me messing around with stuff in my studio that aren’t really instruments. I’ll pick up my cup of pens and just record them falling on the table, and in the sound that it makes you find some weird and interesting rhythms. That brings to mind a quote from Miles Davis: “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” That’s true. A big part of my process is just experimentation and then I find the right pieces within it, I see myself as some kind of assembly man. I have all these pieces and then I’m like, “Well, these pieces go together and these pieces go together” and then you’ve got a track. How do you keep working like that? My guiding principle is: there aren’t any rules. I remember that when a piece I’m working on is too conventional. Then I try to think of myself as a cartoon character, because everything’s possible in cartoons. That helps blow up the limitations of your imagination. I am Bugs Bunny and I can pull beats or whatever out my pockets. Listening to your new album, Until The Quiet Comes, doesn’t bring to mind cartoons. It sounds more like the
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LANDERPHOTO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
A
guy from Los Angeles packs his bags and flies to Melbourne to take part in the Red Bull Music Academy 2006. There he spends two weeks jamming with other rookies, all taking instruction from giants of the music industry, and makes the track Tea Leaf Dancers, the first to draw attention to its maker, Flying Lotus, and a precursor to the album Los Angeles, which would take the electronic music world by storm two years later. Critics compared Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, to Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, because he does with his laptop what they did with their instruments: breaking down barriers and combining elements that weren’t thought to go together, gathering plaudits and inspiring other musicians in the process. On Los Angeles, Flying Lotus built a universe of sounds with samples of old jazz records, shimmering snatches of synth and hip-hop beats that could have come from Kraftwerk-style robots high on weed and experimentation. His second album, Cosmogramma (2010), was even more inventive and highly praised. Flying Lotus’s new album, Until The Quiet Comes, out next month, is a record from the future: electronic, psychedelic jazz and again those beats, which sound as if Ellison is sticking out a leg to trip up his drum machine.
“SLIPPING INTO THE ROLE OF A CARTOON CHARACTER BLOWS UP THE LIMITS OF MY IMAGINATION” soundtrack to a noir movie set in space. I like banging club music, but at home I listen to other stuff, like Portishead and Radiohead. Or fusion jazz by people such as Return To Forever and Weather Report. By the time I started working on this record, I was listening to my aunt Alice’s stuff a lot [Alice Coltrane, jazz pianist and wife of legendary sax John Coltrane]. At some point I started wondering, “Why are these the songs that I hold onto?” Why do you hold on to them? I want to be the person that makes the music you love forever. I want to be the person you listen to when you’re in the car on in your bedroom, not just on Saturday night. That was a pivotal decision for me at that time. Your album Los Angeles was extremely influential. Thousands copied your style. Were you flattered? I was in the beginning, but then it got annoying and suddenly the sound had a name – wonky – and I felt like I needed to separate myself from that scene. I had to move on, even if that’s risky from a career point of view. Is it a reflection of musical ambition today that nobody is willing to risk doing something really new? That’s not how I see things. MySpace turned the scene on its head in 2004. Suddenly, everyone could make his music available to the whole world. You could hear a tune in a club in LA which was produced by some guy in Argentina the night before. That sort of speed used to be unheard of in the music industry. The scene changed so fast because there were all these different players coming forward and everyone was inspired. Everyone was trying to take it to the next level. Yet music also lost value because of the immediacy of digital availability and the prevalence of illegal downloads. We have to come to terms with the new
ACTION
situation. I don’t make a shit-ton of money selling records, so giving away music isn’t weird to me. But I’d rather give things to people who support [music]. So for this record, and the previous one, people who pay for it get something for that – extras. I think if people buy my music today, they’re doing it to support me, not because they haven’t worked out how to download it illegally. I like to buy stuff too, especially from new artists. Every week I go on iTunes and buy a bunch of new tracks. Even if I just listen to them once, I pay for them because I feel like I’m helping a little bit. Does it make sense releasing a whole album under these circumstances? I think about that all the time. It’s changing so fast, and as much as I’m an album format type of person, in an oldschool sense, I have to accept that a lot of people who listen to my stuff don’t listen to it the way that I intended it to be listened. Some people might just buy a single track because Erykah Badu is on it, but that’s just what it is, man. That’s cool. The past year, I put a lot of things online just because I thought they would never have a home, so why not? But not my albums. I feel like it’s definitely a special thing for me, because I put a lot of thought into the flow of everything. Are you afraid that an album of yours will show up on a file-sharing site even before it’s been released? Ideally I’d have just liked to release Until The Quiet Comes without really announcing it – “Surprise! It’s the new Flying Lotus album!” – like Radiohead did with their last album. But then I changed my mind, because I spend so much energy doing this shit that I want as many people as possible to know about it. Plus, I’m not Radiohead. I’m not going to sell a million records just like that in a week. As was the case with a track on your second album, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke sings on the new record. How did that come about this time? By chance. I sent him a couple of tracks to ask him what he thought of them. He got back to me straightaway: “Amazing. I’ve already got ideas for vocals for one song.” Thom is fantastic. He knows what he wants, and what he doesn’t. That decisiveness makes him really nice to work with. Erykah Badu also guests on the album; last year you made a video for her. I actually started out studying film, but 38
to be honest I’m really bored of music videos at the moment. Music videos these days concentrate mostly on one thing: clicks. And cute kittens. “How many cute kittens can I squeeze into a three-minute video to crack the onemillion visitor mark?” As for cinematic and narrative ideas, there aren’t any. On the other hand, I understand that there’s no budget for music videos any more. Things were different in the 1990s. The videos made by Chris Cunningham [cult director of videos for Björk, Aphex Twin and others] cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they were masterpieces. I’d like to do something like that, not just music videos. Real movies!
“IF PEOPLE BUY YOUR MUSIC TODAY, THEY’RE DOING IT TO SUPPORT YOU, NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T WORKED OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD IT ILLEGALLY”
Is that why you were at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring? I played a couple of DJ gigs, but I was pretty disappointed with the Cannes experience because it’s not about movies at all. It’s about who’s wearing what on the red carpet. The choice of movies wasn’t particularly exciting either. OK, so there was the premiere of the new Wes Anderson movie [Moonrise Kingdom], but I could have watched that back home in Los Angeles a couple of days later. And many of the screenings I’d have liked to attend were black tie. So now I have to wear a tuxedo to go to the movies? What’s that all about? Next year you’ll be lecturing at the Red Bull Music Academy in New York. Six years ago in Melbourne, you were a participant yourself. What did those two weeks back then give you and your music? It was just before my debut album, 1983, came out. It was perfect timing. I made a lot of contacts, met musicians like Mark Pritchard and Kode9, who were people I looked up to, and we’re still in touch. I also produced the track Tea Leaf Dancers with Andreya Triana [a singer-songwriter and Academy participant from London], which is still one of my biggest hits. When your music is talked about, you often hear the word ‘futuristic’. How do you see the music of the future? I feel like the future of music is that it becomes more and more personal. There is something really beautiful about comedians, because they are always so aware of the now. They are aware of what’s making society tick, and I think musicians are embracing that more and more. There was this idea that music had to have a universal appeal to the masses, and everyone should be able to relate to these stories. Today young artists like Drake and Frank Ocean are making these very personal songs. They are like, “You might not understand my story, but I’m going to tell you anyway and you might not like it.” People are embracing that and I really like it, too. [Drake and Frank Ocean] are really big because people are like, “Wow, no one’s even really said that type of shit on a record before, people are not really talking about that on records”. Flying Lotus’s album, Until the Quiet Comes (Warp), is out on October 1: www.flying-lotus.com
THDE N I T E L L R E BU ES G ! A M P I G AP EYE-CATCHING MOVIN E X T R AO
RIES O T S Y R R D I NA
OTOS H P E V I E XC LUS
E E R F DOWNLOAD
www.redbulletin.com Find a list of all compatible Android devices at www.redbulletin.com
ACTION
CHASING the
DREAM
A team of surfers, weather scientists and filmmakers scour the world for the toughest surfing conditions following storms, so they can shoot spectacular big-wave sequences in near-lethal waters. Up close and personal with the swell chasers Words: Josh Rakic Photography: Rod Owen
40
Like father: big-wave surfer Ross Clarke-Jones tows his son, Kanan, into his first-ever big wave at a notorious reef break off the south coast of New South Wales, Australia
ACTION
in the
Tasman
the wind’s measuring about 282kph, and waves 20m high are being recorded. “We have to surf this swell,” says bigwave meteorologist Ben Matson, giving the green light for the Storm Surfers documentary film crew to be deployed off the south coast of New South Wales, 925km north of those cyclonic winds and big waves. According to Matson’s readings, those conditions are generating the same amount of power that Hurricane Katrina carried when it first made landfall in Florida in 2005. The easier part of Matson’s job is finding extreme surfing conditions. The hard part comes in judging whether or not they’re lethal. “The biggest waves are hitting off Tasmania, but they’re too big to ride,” says Matson. “We’ve got two locations in Tasmania, where we’ve got Jet Skis and everything ready to go, but those winds make it just impossible to surf. But we can’t just sit on our hands and let it go un-ridden. So we’re going to go with our back-up option. “It’s like a mountaineering expedition. We’ve dropped provisions at locations with Jet Skis in Western Australia, as well as Tasmania and New South Wales, all with crew just waiting to be deployed. I’m pretty positive we’re going to come away with some swell from here.” If it doesn’t arrive, Matson will shoulder most of the blame. During the making of Storm Surfers 3D, the team’s latest documentary, a day lost to a misjudged weather reading can suck as much as €38,850 from the film’s budget. At the nearby boat ramp, 21 crew members are already assembled and preparing the truckloads of filming gear and surfing equipment. “This swell is part of a weather pattern that actually started to hit the coast about four days ago,” Matson says. “Snow was starting to fall on the Alps, and I broadly predicted this weather pattern about a week ago. So yeah, it’s pretty much all on me now. It’s a little nerve-racking.” 42
From left: Crew members Jason Poole and Mark Glinderman with co-director Justin McMillan
It’s 4.30am, pitch-black, freezing cold. The Storm Surfers crew is at the Murramarang Beachfront Nature Resort in South Durras, New South Wales. As Matson scans the latest swell readings on his iPhone at a table showing the evidence of breakfast, legendary big-wave surfer Ross Clarke-Jones and two-time ASP world surfing champion Tom Carroll are already arguing. At 46 and 50 respectively, these two are more scared of retirement than wiping out on a giant wave. To them, the fact they could be pinned beneath the ocean’s frantically churning surface for more than a minute and a few kilometres off the Australian coast is merely part of a normal day’s work. They carry on like an old married couple. Awaiting the Jet Skis at the boat ramp, the two are bickering over whose surfboards will fit in the car. Both divorced, the pair are as close as two friends can be. If someone ever
pitches Grumpy Old Men meets Big Wednesday to Hollywood, these friends of 25 years are perfect for the leads. “We know everyone thinks we’re mad, and we’re always giving each other grief,” says Clarke-Jones, flashing his trademark grin. “I love stirring Tom up about his driving and stuff like that. He nearly killed me with a Jet Ski in Western Australia one time. But that’s just Australian mateship: nothing too serious. We’ve had serious times together, though, yelling at each other and getting physical, and that’s real, mates go through that. But I love him. “We’ve been through a lot of stuff together: competitions and competing on the [pro surfing] tour, businesses, divorces and jobs, becoming fathers. We’ve been through it all, and it’s cool to be still surfing and still like two kids together. It’s pretty funny, and I think that’s what keeps us young.” Carroll and Clarke-Jones first hung out while making the 1987 comedy surf film Mad Wax. Back then, Carroll was a poster boy of world surfing, and Clarke-Jones admits his friend did him a favour by getting him involved in the movie. Carroll retired from surfing in 1993, and family commitments kept him away from the scene for the best part of a decade. Clarke-Jones, however, never left the big-wave world and was a pioneer during the tow-in revolution of the late 1990s, when surfers began using Jet Skis to tow one another out to big waves. Storm Surfers was Clarke-Jones’s chance to repay the favour and reunite with his best friend. In 2005, director Justin McMillan and writer Chris Nelius made The Sixth Element, a documentary about ClarkeJones. A year later, the trio worked with Carroll to make the big-wave film Red Bull Tai Fu. With the introduction of Matson, and his well-honed swellprediction skills, Storm Surfers was born: actively chasing giant, unsurfed swells around the globe, rather than waiting and hoping for them to arrive. In 2008 Storm Surfers: Dangerous Banks debuted on the Discovery Channel. It was followed by Storm Surfers: New Zealand in 2010. Storm Surfers 3D will arrive in cinemas this year, and ClarkeJones is planning for more and more. “What makes me want to do this at my age? What age? I still feel like I’m a grommet. I still get off on it,” he says. “The adventure side of stuff, I love it. The waves don’t scare me. What scares me is not being able to do it anymore. I actually get off on it. It’s such an exciting,
Billabong big-wave award winner Maya Gabeira adjusts her fins (above) as Kanan Clarke-Jones contemplates what lies ahead
Above: Local surfers Paul Morgan and Brett Burcher get ready to join the big-wave session Below: Gabeira is the centre of attention at 6am
Below: The crew setting up shots at the off-shore reef break in New South Wales, Australia
ACTION
complete feeling after riding one. I like things that excite me, and big waves certainly do that. It doesn’t scare me – I love it. I don’t mind being underwater for a while. I’m confident staying underwater for quite some time, and after 25 years at it, it’s sort of become a second home for me down there.”
Back
at the boat ramp,
everything’s been loaded on board, including two €154,000 3D cameras, and the crew sets off for their destination – a reef break that springs from nowhere a couple of kilometres off shore whose exact location is a tightly guarded secret. It’s renowned for producing “bombs”, giant waves that literally explode from the inside out on impact. “It sounds like a jet, a 747, when a big wave crashes,” says Clarke-Jones, on deck and excited. “I’ve never stood behind a jet, but you know that sound when you’re close to an airport? You just get spat out. All the air shuts down and you just get thrown out. And waves that big, when you’re inside, it’s like a big mirror. The whole wave just lights up and there are reflections everywhere.” After a tension-filled build-up, the excitement turns to disappointment when, at first sight of the break, the biggest waves are topping out at around 3m. The sound of the ocean is deafening, but the crew is silent. Massive amounts of water are peeling over in sizeable waves, but they’re not big enough for Carroll, Clarke-Jones, and female big-wave surfer Maya Gabeira, who flew in from Los Angeles for a shot at the swell. Clarke-Jones is at a loss. He knows the swell is hitting much, much bigger down the coast, but he can’t just up and leave. This isn’t a solo operation. “I can’t stand knowing there are bigger waves elsewhere, and I’m stuck out elsewhere,” he says, almost angry at the ocean. “I want to surf big waves, and I know they are close by, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s frustrating as hell, to tell you the truth. It feels like you’re a prisoner. This is the type of thing I live for, and it’s agitating. But you can’t just think about yourself in these situations. You’ve got 20-odd crew, and you all suffer through these things. It’s hard.” Clarke-Jones’s 14-year-old son, Kanan, on the other hand, is relieved. He gets to make his Storm Surfers debut in ‘safe’ conditions, though Dad has done his best to make Kanan scared regardless.
44
Safety first: former world surfing champion Tom Carroll’s prototype flotation device didn’t work well after inflating too quickly. He christened it the Pamela Anderson The reef in New South Wales can throw up walls of water up to 7m and more. Locals make the most of the free ride out to the reef break
Cameramen and producers frantically race to and from the danger zone, trying to make the most of it. “Ultimately, we’d love to be seeing the boys riding 7m bombs every day, but at the end of the day, the story and characters are key,” says co-director McMillan. “In Deadliest Catch, they don’t always pull up a full pot. In fact, more often than not they don’t. But that’s what’s interesting – it makes them human. The jury is still out on whether Tom and Ross are human, but nonetheless, it certainly adds colour to the story.” After inspecting the break for himself by Jet Ski, a soaked, cold, dejected Carroll returns to the boat. An uncomfortable
Why Waves Get Big In simple terms, big waves come courtesy of high winds. Storm patterns create friction between the wind and the water. “The biggest surfable waves in the world occur most frequently at west-facing coastlines,” says Storm Surfers meteorologist Ben Matson. “This is because weather systems in the world’s biggest ocean basins – the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic – generally travel from west to east, setting up broad areas of swell-generating winds, known as ‘fetches.’ ” Reefs and sand play a significant part in creating the biggest waves, with shallow water forcing a wave to crest, which in turn creates a trough by sucking up the water below it. But the three most significant factors in monster waves reaching the ideal locations are:
wind speed, the amount of time in which the wind travels across the ocean, and the distance travelled by the wind. “A significant percentage of extra-large swell events are unsurfable,” says Matson, “because they are often accompanied by strong onshore winds, which creates choppy surface conditions. “Big-wave surfers need to be very patient when waiting for the ideal conditions to develop at their favourite breaks. It’s common to wait months, and sometimes even years, before the perfect combination of swell, wind, tide, and weather all coincide at the same time.” It’s only when the long-travelled waves finally reach the shore or reef that they begin to slow down and scale back in height, making them surfable – if you’re game.
45
Tom Carroll charges a big one and seems pretty satisfied (and inflated) about how it all went down Below: Kanan Clarke-Jones shows fine form as he catches his first big wave
46
ACTION
The
World’s DEADLIEST BREAKS WAIMEA, HAWAII The godfather of all big-wave breaks only appears once every few years. But when it does, it produces waves of up to 18m, and only 90m from the shore. If the waves start reaching 8m, Waimea hosts a pro surfing contest. MAVERICKS, CALIFORNIA The West Coast’s most renowned break, noted as much for its size (between 7 and 15m) and power as the monster boulders and even bigger great white sharks that lurk beneath the surface – all elements equally deadly.
There are few things that get a 3D water cameraman as excited as capturing an epic wipeout. Congratulations, Dean Cropp!
TEAHUP’OO, TAHITI With 3m sets the norm, it might not seem as intimidating as other big breaks, but what it lacks in height it makes up in brute power and force. It breaks 1km out to sea and just 1m above a razor-sharp reef. BANZAI PIPELINE, HAWAII The heaviest and deadliest of all, claiming more lives than every other surf break in the world combined. About 25 surfers have died here, including five in the past seven years alone. Waves hit more than 7m when it gets big. DUNGEONS, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA The 8m monsters here are accessible only by boat. Surfers crushed by the freezing righthander can be kept underwater for more than a minute – in sharkinfested waters. Home of the Red Bull Big Wave event since 2000.
Clarke-Jones quips he’s lucky to be on a Jet Ski at all after almost killing the both of them the week before in Western Australia. The near-fatal error came at Cow Bombie, one of the most notorious big-wave breaks in Australia. In giant swell and howling winds, Carroll towed his best friend into a monster wave, which then exploded, sucking Carroll and his Jet Ski back into the wave. Both men and machine were sent toppling over the 5m falls, the Jet Ski almost crushing them. The crew feared the worst. The situation looked dire as the two men went under. Carroll’s still hearing about it. “Ross has rubbed the salt in, but I’m used to that,” Carroll says with a chuckle. “I think his first words afterwards were, ‘What the hell are you doing? What did you do!’ It could have been so horrible, and it sort of woke me up. It was written on my school reports: ‘Carroll daydreams in class,’ it would say. And that’s what I’ve been like, all my life.” “No, you’re a tripper. You trip out,” interjects Clarke-Jones. “I get a bit frustrated with him driving the Jet Ski. He nearly killed me. Seriously, he could have killed me. That thing was aimed for my head, but he did well to hang on to it. Most people would have jumped off the ski, but as a friend, he actually stayed on it and tried to steer it away from me. “But I happened to turn around straight back under him, the poor guy. And I’ve kicked him while he’s down and ribbed him a bit, and I won’t let him live that one down, but I love the bloke. “It’s a mistake you make early on in the piece, and he’s never done that. In his defence, you have so much going on when you’re on the ski – the air switch, trying to clean the camera lens, the helmet on with people trying to speak to you, and you’re trying to commentate. It’s a lot for anybody to deal with, let alone Tom.” Clarke-Jones is smiling at his best friend, who smiles back. Clarke-Jones, Carroll and crew all know that death-defying footage is what sells, which is why they’re including it in the film. “Really, like racing cars, getting hurt and wiping out is what people want to see,” says Clarke-Jones. “As a driver or a surfer, you don’t want to wipe out, but you can appreciate that’s what people want to see. It makes good viewing. So a 3D wipeout is going to look really good.” And with that, the large grin appears once again on Clarke-Jones’ face, and soon turns into laughter. Catch a big-wave preview: www.stormsurfers.au
47
ACTION
Healing Hands
He’s the ‘go-to guy’ for athletes who fear injury might end their careers: physio-guru-magician Gerard ‘Ger’ Hartmann Words: Declan Quigley Photography: Patrick Bolger
F
or a man whose worldwide reputation is the product of endless hours of arduous manual labour, Gerard Hartmann’s hands are surprisingly soft. The firm grip is expected from a man at the very top of his field, but the hand that makes it could easily belong to a teenager just striking out into the workplace rather than a 51-year-old about to reflect on a physically demanding career. Countless world-class athletes in myriad sports from more than 20 nations have been kneaded back into life by Hartmann, whose reputation as a miracle worker spans the globe. The secret to youthful hands, it transpires, is a healthy alcohol-free diet, a positive outlook and the endless gallons of tiger balm soaked into his tenacious digits over two decades of teasing finely tuned musculoskeletal systems back into balance. Boundless energy may also be a factor. Just a few minutes in the company of the Limerick native is exhausting, as he powers through topic after topic with 48
three different people, all the while pummelling away at the body of this morning’s star client. Incredibly, Hartmann claims that a recent stomach condition has reduced his famous powerstation energy levels – which begs the question, what was he like before? “My vitality is probably a level seven as opposed to level 10,” he booms in his broad Munster accent. “The Duracell is definitely down a few beats. I am very careful with the clients I take as I just don’t have the ability at the moment to go and give, give, give all day.” Rock stars and other non-sportspeople also have Hartmann as their ‘go-to back guy’, but any inclination to see the gregarious former champion triathlete as merely a guru to the celebrities would be a folly. The walls of his impeccably presented private clinic are covered with framed photos, jerseys, singlets and truly touching letters of gratitude from oncevulnerable athletes made strong again by the force of his will, often in the face of medical advice to the contrary. He has an extraordinary collection of medals and trophies from grateful athletes, many of which are stored in the Hartmann Collection, a museum at the University
of Limerick. Among his proudest possessions is one he keeps at home: the 1988 marathon silver medal given to him by Douglas Wakiihuri. Hartmann’s renown is, as a result, at least as strong in the remotest parts of the Kenyan Rift Valley as it is in his native Limerick, which helps explain the presence of Vivian Cheruiyot on a massage plinth in the treatment rooms alongside his spacious rural Limerick home. A niggling ankle injury needs remedial attention and the reigning world 5,000 and 10,000m champion has dashed straight from victory in a Diamond League meet in Rome to Limerick for a series of sessions with Hartmann. Nothing can be left to chance. Cheruiyot, 28, has worked with Hartmann for years and the many times track and crosscountry world champion wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best. That Hartmann is the best is undisputed among his clients, but just what it is that makes him so special seems difficult to articulate. Is it a particular technique in his treatment, perhaps? Or the psychological benefits of a seemingly unshakeable confidence in his own ability? Or is it simply just that he is the fashionable ‘go-to guy’ for famous people? It’s most probably a combination of all three, but the latter ingredient seems unlikely to have any value in isolation given his enduring success over 22 years. He’s no snake oil salesman.
Vital ingredients: Ger Hartmann possesses a combination of confidence and the ability to treat both mind and body
ACTION
The gold medal won by Cork’s Marcus O’Sullivan in the 1,500m in 1989 is in Hartmann’s collection
Fact File Name: Gerard Hartmann Age: 51 From: Limerick Sporting Career Irish National Triathlon Champion seven times between 1984 and 1991 Third place, Japan International Triathlon Sixth place, European Triathlon Championships 14th place, World Triathlon Championships 24th place, Hawaii Ironman Physical Therapy Gerard has treated 47 World Champions including World Record holders in 100m, 110m hurdles, 1,500m, 1 mile, 3,000m, 3,000m steeplechase, 5,000m, 10,000m, 10-mile road, half marathon and marathon Success He has treated and prepared athletes who have won the following marathons: World Championships IAAF World Cup Marathon New York City Marathon Boston Marathon Rotterdam Marathon Paris Marathon Dublin Marathon Chicago Marathon
50
E
xactly what constitutes the alchemy that has made him so successful is yet to be fully defined. For her part Cheruiyot contents herself with a smile and an oft-repeated phrase: “He has blessed hands,” as she works her way through the chicken salad prepared by Hartmann after their session. “Vivian Cheruiyot says I have ‘blessed hands’ and that’s her view. If they feel that, and she’s willing to come here. I just sometimes have to ask myself, ‘Jeez, what have I got?’ What is it? So it’s an enigma. And when someone is an enigma, you can’t really understand [what they’re about]. “Look, the perception is, the person on the table, if they believe in Ger Hartmann, they’re going to get better, ’cause they already have the belief.” If Cheruiyot seems a passive victim, Hartmann doesn’t hesitate when asked who his most demanding client has been to date. “If I have any grey hairs, it’s because of Paula Radcliffe. As a clinician, it was very hard work,” he says. “Paula can spend five hours on the table. And I can finish a treatment and feel I’ve done a 10 out of 10 job – and just as I’m wrapping up, she’ll ask me to work her neck, which I had intended to do tomorrow, but she’ll want it done today. And you’re just, ‘Oh my god, I’m drained.’ And, I mean, in a good way, she has sucked more out of herself than the ability. “Paula and I share one thing in common,” he continues. “We are both perfectionists, we need to tick off all the boxes to ensure no stone is left unturned in our quest for success.”
Hartmann admits that he’s a bit of a risk taker, which has also fed his reputation and helped make him a patron saint of hopeless cases. “I go where other people don’t go. I would say the manual therapy is far more aggressive and far more invasive. I get in deep.” But Hartmann’s gold-plated client list didn’t come about solely through his manual graft. The confidence to delve further, for longer, into the physical structure of his clients also manifests itself in the unrelenting positivity he brings to all aspects of his relationship with athletes. In endorsing his memoir Born to Perform, Sonia O’Sullivan described him as “the most positive, energising person I know”. It comes as a shock, then, to hear him admit that he has moments of uncertainty: “Of course small doubts always creep in,” he says. “Most of these are insecurities, sometimes to do with myself and not with the athletes. Will I serve her well? Have I enough tools in my box to ensure she goes to the start healthy in body, mind and spirit?” It’s a shuddering thought to imagine Hartmann with doubt because he’s the therapist who will take the jobs others will baulk at. One such was chronic injury victim Kelly Holmes, perceived as a lost cause by UK Athletics, which refused to
Grateful clients: Hartmann has treated many top athletes including Kelly Holmes (above)
ACTION
pay her medical expenses just a few months before she proved them wrong by winning bronze in the 800m in Sydney, thanks in part to her work with Hartmann. In the ensuing four years she spent almost more time in Limerick than Britain as she honed her body for double gold medal success in Athens. It’s not just track and field athletes who can thank Hartmann for their physical redemption. Munster and Ireland rugby outhalf Ronan O’Gara was about to undergo season-ending surgery on a medial and cruciate ligament injury when he changed his mind and headed to Hartmann for a last-ditch attempt to make the 2005 Lions Tour. He was man of the match in the Celtic League final for Munster before taking the plane to New Zealand. Cork’s famous dual GAA star Seán Óg Ó’Hailpín was almost forced to draw a line under his sporting career after a horrific car crash, but recovered enough strength and movement in his shattered right leg to taste All Ireland hurling success in 2004. Perhaps the best known of Hartmann’s ‘local’ clients is ‘King’ Henry Shefflin who seemed set to miss Kilkenny’s bid for a historic five-in-a-row hurling crowns in 2010 with his second cruciate injury. Defying the odds he took to the field only to damage cartilage in the affected knee after just 11 minutes. Was it a risk too far?
H
artmann’s life has been played out in two parts: the first as a talented athlete-turned-champion-triathlete; the second as a physical therapist who brought all the obsessive need for perfection that had fuelled his own sporting endeavours to bear on his physical therapy work. A somewhat restless tearaway who was expelled from his first school, Hartmann discovered running almost by accident and
“I go where other people don’t go.
I get in deep”
found it was the perfect tap for his sky-high energy levels. He followed the well-worn path to a US University Sports scholarship before inevitably his abused body cried ‘enough’, by which time he had already dabbled in the nascent world of triathlon. Here was a sport that required three times the effort, a concept that Hartmann grasped with unnatural enthusiasm. He would become a pioneering star of the sport in Ireland, winning national title after title in the ’80s. But after a total of seven Irish titles and an impressive 14th place finish in the 1986 world triathlon championships in Nice, his world turned upside down one day in 1991 when he hit an unyielding armadillo during a flat-out bike training interval on a North Florida road. It sounds like a joke, but the punch line was a heavy impact with the asphalt from which he was lucky to survive and even more fortunate to keep his right leg. His wasted limb was filled with metal and abruptly, at age 30, his professional sporting career was at an end. By then he had already started to develop an exit strategy, having somehow found time to train as a physical therapist. As a sports injury specialist he blossomed immediately. His own injury history, which was extensive, lent the weight of personal experience to his qualifications and, within a year, he was an integral part of the US Athletics set-up and could count stars like Calvin Smith, Carl Lewis, Mark McCoy and Scotland’s Liz McColgan among his early clients. A shy young student from Cork called Sonia O’Sullivan struck up a conversation with him one day in 1991 and thus began a 20-year association for Hartmann with Ireland’s greatest-ever athlete – a competitor with a complex blend of mental frailty and steely determination that made the
Former world marathon record holder Khalid Khannouchi has benefited from Hartmann’s touch
Limerick man such a vital camp member. He was part of the US backroom team at Barcelona in 1992, with the Irish team at Atlanta four years later and an integral part of the Great Britain physical therapy support in 2000, 2004 and 2008. This year he returns to the Irish fold in London, but one senses that, financially secure and with two toddler children to rear with wife Diane, he is ready to slow the relentless pace of his career. His partner in Hartmann International Sports Injury Clinic, Ger Keane, looks set to take on more of the day-to-day work as he focuses on fewer clients. “I look and I say, hold on, I’m looking at the next 10 years and getting much more specific and working with key individuals and giving them much more of myself. People ringing up looking for appointments… I’m not there for those anymore. I’m there to work with a select group of people and to have the energy and the vitality to enjoy it. “It’s like an ageing athlete: an athlete who is getting older can still win the city marathons, but they have to be careful that they don’t over-race.” www.hartmann-international.com
51
Nick Hook (left), his bandmate in Cubic Zirconia, Tiombe Lockhart, and electro-soul singer Jesse Boykins
ACTION
B IG
C I T Y OF DR EAM S birthed and dashed New York, that fickle mistress, has can make it thousands of music careers. But if you es from the concrete there... well, you know the rest. Tal Nick Hook, singer jungle with Azealia Banks producer ger Jesse Boykins Tiombe Lockhart and electro-soul sin aphy: Miko Lim Words: Cortney Harding Photogr
53
ACTION
R
olling up to a sandwich joint in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Greenpoint, Nick Hook jumps off his bike and starts talking a mile a minute. Powered by coffee from Ninth Street Espresso in the East Village, and a session at Sixth Street Pilates, as well as his daily threemile run, the red-haired Hook bubbles over with energy and enthusiasm. He has every reason to be: Azealia Banks, with whom he worked when she was just a young unknown from Harlem, is one of the hottest indie rappers around, and Hook is in the process of extending his studio so he can create more hits. He’s also doing production work on a number of other people’s tracks and working on his solo album – later in the afternoon, he’ll take to Twitter to ask for title suggestions. After grabbing a salad and sparkling water, Hook heads to his studio, which he warns is “still a work in progress”. A large, light-filled room on the fifth floor of a converted industrial building, the studio is filled with synthesisers, mixing boards and computers – ground zero for what could be the next indie sensation. Hook settles in, first playing a handful of tracks he’s heard about from various sources, then getting down to work on the production for a track by Villa, an upbeat indie dance number that sounds like it could be a cut from the latest Passion Pit album. A few hours later, Hook takes a break and heads up to the studio’s roof, settling 54
in under the scorching-hot sun and gazing out of over a panoramic view of Manhattan. “I don’t think I could be anywhere else,” he says. “I was just in LA and I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done. Part of it was that I was with Azealia and she was hanging out and having fun, and part of it was that it takes so long to get anywhere. I can just jump on my bike or the train and be almost anywhere in New York in 20 minutes.” A city of superlatives in many respects, New York happens to be one of the best cities in the world for music at the moment, sending forth an army of DJs, rappers, singer-songwriters, and indie rockers to the wider world and the sales charts. There are hundreds of live-music venues, from the iconic Hammerstein Ballroom and Madison Square Garden to 285 Kent Ave, a ramshackle space that hosts indie rock and noise bands and makes up in charm what it lacks in air conditioning. If you need a drummer, or a singer, or a collaborator, New York is full of them, and if you want a record label, all four major labels and hundreds of indies are here waiting. An artist doing press can swing by Rolling Stone’s office in midtown, or Billboard’s in the East Village, and still have time to grab a drink with some bloggers in Bushwick before making it home for dinner. But there’s a lot of competition here. When you live in a city where investment bankers complain about feeling poor, it can be tough for a working musician to pay the bills. “I love the weight of New York,” says Tiombe Lockhart, Hook’s
Hook (left) has been plugging away in NYC for years, working at a sake bar while producing beats and music, including Azealia Banks’s breakout track, 212. Lockhart (centre) says the struggle is part of the allure
“I LOVE the weight of New York. I like that everything is so dense. It propels me to work harder and dig deeper”
partner in the band Cubic Zirconia, who also performs as a solo artist. “I like the idea of hustling and the fact that everything is so dense. It propels me to work harder and dig deeper. And it’s not just New York; the internet also makes it possible for anyone to create and upload music or videos. But I don’t think I could make the type of music I make anywhere else. I get so much just living in the city. I live in a Dominican neighborhood and I hear things just walking around that I wouldn’t hear if I lived in another place.” Lockhart started singing after her mother noticed her talents, performing
in churches as a kid and eventually attending a performing arts high school after moving, from Atlanta, to Los Angeles as a teenager. She then studied jazz at the New School in NYC, and was signed to Elektra Records shortly after graduation – only to be dropped from the label a few months later. “I was ready to give up, but my mom kept pushing me,” she says. “I met a producer who asked me to do some vocals and sent me a track and a cheque – I didn’t want to be unethical so I did the work, and wound up working with a group 55
ACTION
called Platinum Pied Pipers. Then I went back to doing the solo thing, and was even on the cover of [music magazine] XLR8R, but nothing felt right.” One night, she went to a sake bar with a mutual friend of Hook’s. She met Hook, who was working as a waiter there and was eager to have her join his band. The two bonded over booze and DJ Quik, and Lockhart credits her work with Cubic Zirconia for revitalising her interest in music, though she came close to going down another path. “I worked for two years as a secretary at an investment firm,” she says. “At one point, someone told me I would make a great banker.”
N
ew York, like the stock market, is fantastic but fickle – bands fall from the scene just as quickly as they rise through it. Hook’s New York experience has had its fair share of ups and downs – starting with his journey to the city. As a high school student in St Louis, Missouri, he played guitar but found himself in “shitty” bands; a chance encounter with a friend of a friend led him to learn early digital music production programmes like Fruityloops. Yet he never thought of music as an actual career, and took a job at an ad agency after college, working with funeral homes, among other uplifting clients. Eventually he got a call from Todd Weinstock, leader of the post-punk band Glassjaw, and headed to New York to spend 10 days recording with him. Together they formed a band, Men,
56
“YOU CAN’T BE LAZY IN NEW YORK. You always have to be on your toes, always creating” Women & Children, and inked a deal with Warner Bros. They scored opening slots for groups like Panic At The Disco and Metric, but things never quite gelled; album sales were slow, and after a few years, he found himself in debt and without a label. He took the job at the sake bar to pay the bills. “I’ve been living a meager existence for sure,” he says. “For a long time my focus was just surviving.” Still, he kept at it, working with Lockhart and on his production career. His output was good enough to secure a spot in the Red Bull Music Academy last year. “I describe it to people and they think it sounds like Burning Man,” says Hook of the month-long schedule of workshops and nightly gigs. “It’s like summer camp with music and alcohol. But you meet all these amazing people from all over the world and work with legends. I got to write a song with Bootsy Collins.” Applicants to the Red Bull Music Academy span the globe, and upon completion of the programme,
Boykins first moved to the city to study jazz, but altered his sound to a more moody R&B vibe
ACTION
Nick Hook’s forthcoming solo project will be released in September. It sounds like “my ADD little brain”, he says
participants become mentors to the next. Hook has secured DJ gigs in Tokyo and New Zealand from the contacts he made at Red Bull Music Academy. One of his classmates, Andrea Balency, guests on his forthcoming album.
M
usic, art, and culture chops aside, New York can also lay claim to another title – the city with the most visually intriguing people. The version of New York from TV’s Law And Order, where the bartender recalls what time the guy in the red shirt left, and what he had to drink? Fantasy. Everyone stands out here. So it says something about Jesse Boykins that his look stands out, especially in the hipster-saturated neighbourhood of Williamsburg. His hair makes Angela Davis’s legendary Afro look like a military crew cut. He wears bright shirts and platform shoes, and long sleeves in sweltering weather. Boykins (who has released an album and two EPs and is planning on releasing another album in October) moved from his hometown of Miami, Florida, to New York to attend college at the New School and never looked back. “I was always working when I was there. I sang back-up in a couple of groups and taught music to elementary school students, and worked as the night clerk at a hostel on the Lower East Side.” Luckily for Boykins, he’s been able to support himself with music since finishing college, although he’s had to rely on the kindness of others to make it happen. “I slept on my friend’s couch for a year,” he says. “He’s my best friend and totally believed in me; he designed my logo before I even started performing solo.” The Boykins sound is best described as moody electro-soul, part of a new indie R&B movement spawning stars like Frank Ocean and bringing life to a genre that before seemed like it was in terminal decline. He’s a crooner and a charmer, with an almost academic approach to figuring out how to seduce ladies. As well as a new album, he’s also working on a documentary about women, asking questions like “Short-term lust or
58
“I SWEAR half of my job is being a shrink. You have to learn how to get good stuff out of people without being critical”
long-term love?” and “What is your favourite thing about being a woman?” Hook tells the story of the first time he and Boykins hung out, at the Red Bull Music Academy last year in Madrid. “Jesse and I were at a sushi bar, and he got up on the table and sang Happy Birthday,” he explains. “By the end of the song, all the women in the bar were making it rain for him.” When he’s not working out how to probe the female mind, Boykins spends his days working out of his home studio in Secaucus, New Jersey. Living in a gritty industrial town isn’t the New York rock ’n’ roll dream, but Boykins doesn’t seem to mind. After all, he’s only in town one week a month. (He toured Europe in July, and there are dates scheduled for Tokyo and South Africa.) “It’s impossible for me to budget here,” he says. “I like to experience things;
ACTION
not anything fancy, but I like to go to museums and shows, and it all adds up.” Still, he wouldn’t live anywhere else. “You can’t be lazy in New York,” he says. “You always have to be on your toes, always creating, always moving.”
B
ack in his studio, Hook is hard at work creating, or at least altering someone else’s creation. Although he has no formal training in production (he picked it up while playing in bands and helping out around studios), he’s become particularly accomplished, including in the more emotional areas of the job. “I swear, half my job is being a shrink,” he says. “You have to learn how to get good stuff out of people while not being critical. People get really attached to their tracks and freak out when you change things.” While production pays the bills, one of Hook’s biggest gigs thus far started out as a favour to a friend. “A buddy hooked me up with Azealia and I really liked her, so I helped her out,” he says. One of the tracks they worked on, Jumanji, became a viral sensation, and Banks ended up signing with Interscope. Hook says he spends most of his afternoons in his studio; at night, he’ll spin at clubs throughout the city, including Le Bain at the Standard Hotel. His own musical projects have been varied. Cubic Zirconia, which was signed to A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold label, was described by Lockhart as “ethnic disco”, an experiment they undertook because they both felt boxed in by the genres they usually record in. He also performs with the DJ collective Drop The Lime and this month releases a solo project that he describes as “sounding like my ADD little brain”, featuring guest appearances from El-P, Daryl Palumbo, and Zebrakatz. After leaving the studio, he heads home for a nap and a bite before hitting the club to play music into the wee hours. His night is eventful; one of the promoters has a seizure at the club before Hook goes on (luckily, he makes it through OK), and Hook doesn’t get to bed until the sun is coming up. The next day, he’s right back at work in the studio.
www.redbullmusicacademy.com
Red Bull Music Academy graduates Hook, Boykins and Lockhart say their time with the programme was invaluable
59
ACTION
home made for speed In his pursuit for the world speed record for human-powered vehicles, ‘Flying Scotsman’ Graeme Obree may finally have found an endeavour that combines his athletic and engineering gifts Words: Declan Quigley Photography: Paul Calver 60
ACTION
S
altcoats has its best suit on the day The Red Bulletin visits Graeme Obree, but it’s a little threadbare and is clearly hanging on old bones. Glorious morning sunshine adorns the seaside town that was a popular tourist destination for Glaswegians in the 20th century before cheap air travel diverted the holidaymakers elsewhere. Nowadays, Saltcoats is better known as a recession-hit centre of unemployment and social unrest. It’s against this slightly grim backdrop that Obree, the twice world track pursuit champion and former holder of the blue riband hour record, a man once dubbed “Mad, Brilliant and Human” by l’Equipe newspaper, is planning another world record assault. Except this time, and for the first time in his sporting career, he doesn’t care if he gets the record. As far as Graeme Obree is concerned, success in his bid for the world land speed record aboard his self-designed and built HPV (human-powered vehicle) in Nevada this September is about enjoying the journey and making sure he retains his carefully nurtured health along the way. “You get to a certain point where you can’t put yourself right, clinically you’re actually depressed. And a lot of people are. But I’m not, at the moment, so I don’t want to lay the groundwork, the path that will allow me to get to
that. And one of the pathways to that would be‚ ‘I would rather die than not break that record’. If I said that, I should be instantly stopped from doing it.” A quick Google search reveals plenty who view Saltcoats as somewhere to escape from, but for Obree, who has lived in various parts of surrounding Ayrshire for most of his life, the town has been a refuge from the torment that has stalked him in the years since he stopped competing. “I haven’t exactly been mister reliable in the last 12 years,” he admits at one point, delivering the line with a sheepish grin as if apology was somehow necessary for the hermit-like existence that followed when his glittering track racing career came to an end. The crippling depression which has afflicted him throughout a life punctuated by at least three suicide attempts and countless stultifying lows had only been staved off intermittently by the highs of competition and those two world hour records and double world championship successes of the ’90s. “At that time, my actual survival as a human being, emotionally, depended on my next result. Seriously depended on it. I was as good as my next result.” Without the distraction of racing, which had brought with it added pressures to go with occasional, fleeting euphoria, the demons had to be finally faced head on, and a long personal voyage of therapy and examination has only recently resulted in a return to the public eye. Now, at 46, it looks as if Obree has finally found a way to express his twin talents for engineering innovation and world-class athleticism in a package that won’t put undue pressure on his health. Canadian Sam Whittingham has held the world land speed record for HPVs on and off since 1998 and, after a series of improvements in vehicles designed by Bulgarian-born Georgi Georgiev, left the current mark at 82.819mph over a measured 200yd at Battle Mountain, Nevada in 2009. Early this year Obree announced that he would pitch for the world record at the IHPVA World Championships in Battle Kitchen design: arm rests are made from an old saucepan (above left); the table acts as a work bench (left)
62
“In the 1990s, my survival depended on my next result”
ACTION
Mountain this September and, perhaps a little impulsively, declared that his design should theoretically be capable of 100mph. For Obree, a man whose developments in riding position and bicycle design pitched him into a series of unwanted battles with UCI officials in the more conventional and hidebound cycling arena back in the 1990s, it’s like coming home. “I was in this in the ’90s,” he announces in his thick, rapid-fire brogue. “I became a bit cynical about the sport with the drug taking and all that and the rule changes and the restrictions. You couldn’t innovate any more, and it’s all tied down. “I thought about getting into this HPV business, because there are no rules apart from the laws of physics. There’s no real man-made rules apart from, you’ve got to have a flat road and the conditions of it. So, I thought, that is my thing.”
Frontal assault: by lying on his front Obree has improved the bike’s aerodynamics
A
t the time he became involved in a project led by Formula One engineers to create a record-setting HPV, but made his excuses early when he became convinced the vehicle wasn’t up to it. That vehicle, like Whittingham’s Varna Diablo and most HPVs, was a reclining recumbent where the rider lies with his feet pedalling out front. Obree’s approach is typically subversive. “I thought, I would actually go and lie on my front and minimise the frontal area.” The idea was born from fleeting experience of a ‘prone’ commuter bike he rode in the 1990s which was more stable and offered the potential for a reduced frontal area, the holy grail of aerodynamics. Indeed Obree has calculated that his machine, affectionately dubbed ‘The Beastie’, has a frontal area only two-thirds of that of Whittingham’s. By his logic, with at least the same athletic ability propelling the machine, which he surely has, then the sky is the limit for his record bid. As well as a prone riding position, which has been tried by a handful of IHPVA record challengers in the past but has long since fallen out of favour, Obree has opted for a ‘push-pull’ drive system where long steel rods are driven back and forth by his legs to turn the cranks on a giant single freewheel gear of 320in. “I’m pushing back and forth like an old-fashioned steam train! See! The Flying Scotsman!” If he can get his legs to pump the pistons enough so that the cranks turn at 100rpm, then the vehicle will be going 100mph. It’s a big if, but one that intrigues and challenges him, without compromising his current inner peace. 64
Obree’s creations are almost always born of a Heath Robinson adaptation of available resources in the most unusual of applications. “I’m useless in almost everything, but what I’m really, really, really good at is the concept. Designing bikes, building bikes, riding bikes. So this encapsulates all three of those things.” His ‘Old Faithful’ bike that carried him to glory when he beat Francesco Moser’s Hour Record in Norway in 1993 featured revolutionary geometry to support his intuitions, since proven, about cycling ergonomics. It also featured bearings culled from an old washing machine, a fact without which it appears no article about Obree is complete and which he has regretted revealing ever since. This time around, his vehicle, built with only the laws of physics and the depth of his pockets to constrain him, is a radical approach utilising various cycling bric-abrac he had lying around and, for quick referencing by the popular media, arm rests fashioned from an old saucepan. It’s not surprising that so many household utensils are donors for his bikes given much of the construction is done in the kitchen, where a bench vice is bolted to
“The thing is, I don’t know how fast I’m going to go on this bike” a table on which place settings vie for space with a clutter of old bike parts. The blueprint for the design, which has rattled around in his fertile mind for at least 15 years, was sketched out 1:1 scale on sheets of wallpaper in his living room. Choosing steel as his frame material was a no-brainer and he’s confident he can effect repairs “on the hoof” in Nevada if necessary, something that would be much less practical with carbon fibre. It also helped that he had a small quantity of unused Reynolds 653 chrome molybdenum steel tubing lying around from his days as a frame builder and bike shop owner that could be fashioned into a functional chassis. Throughout the build he has had just one assistant, his 18-year-old son, Jamie,
ACTION
increasing obsession for a man whose autobiography Flying Scotsman received rave reviews and spawned a feature film, produced a training manual for cyclists that has been hailed as a commonsense approach to a sport increasingly swamped with advice and information on the science of physiology.
T
who will also be his back-up rider in Nevada. The carbon-fibre and Kevlar fairing or ‘skin’, as he likes to call it, is the one element of the project that has been outsourced, being produced to his requirements by students at Glasgow School of Art. In Battle Mountain he will face opposition not just from Whittingham, but also, among others, a team from Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam that has recruited a former speed-skating champion, Jan Bos, to conduct their more conventionally conceived but expensively engineered recumbent machine. It’s a delicious contest, an echo of the “A-Team-style innovation versus corporate resources” contest that developed between Obree and fellow Briton Chris Boardman for world hour records and world championship pursuit titles in 1990s. “This is a lot different from the hour record. Because this isn’t life or death, this is a challenge. This is the whole process of it. I mean, people can’t be driven by the fear of failure, because you’d never start. The thing about this, I don’t know how fast I’m going to go on this bike. I might go out and, with the
first go, and say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got this so wrong, it’s useless.’ That could happen. I don’t think it’ll happen. Theoretically, and thinking about it, it should work great. But I could be wrong. There’s no surety. I’m OK about that. I’ll go, ‘Guys I’ve got it all wrong.’” The curse of Obree’s twin talents is that one tends to overshadow the other. In all the chat about how unique and interesting his new vehicle is, it’s easy to overlook the fact that he is one of Britain’s greatest-ever cyclists. At 46, the assumption might be that his prodigious engine is starting to lose power, but Obree is confident that he still retains enough strength to do justice to his machine. And when Obree is confident, only a fool would bet against him. For a man who spent his childhood almost consumed by fear and crippling shyness, who was bullied incessantly because of his father’s occupation as the local policeman, Obree is not easily swayed when he fixes on an idea, however unconventional. Or perhaps it was the loneliness of his childhood that has helped reinforce his own self belief. His most recent foray into writing, an
he paradox of Obree is that for a man so excited by technology and innovation, he regularly opts for instinct over scientific method and his training regimen is no exception. “I like to go out [cycling] every day. Not hammering it every day, because I generally go back and forth and visit my boys and stuff like that on my bike because I don’t own a car. “If my body thinks, well I feel quite fresh let’s give it a lash, then I go give it a lash on the hills. But if I go, oh God, I feel a bit jaded and stuff like that, then I go and just tap along. The whole thing is seat of the pants. It’s like my intuition says, this is how you need to do this. My intuition says, that push-pull arrangement is going to be so powerful.” Through all the turmoil he has emerged with a fragile balance in his existence and a renewed vigour to conduct life beyond the boundaries of Saltcoats. At the same time he’s quick to offer this latest in a long line of convention-challenging projects as an inspiration to the youth of Saltcoats. “There’s a lot of deprivation and alcohol and drug problems and stuff like that. I go to speak to kids at schools and tell them whatever you want to do in life, you can do it, because there’s no other positivity around about. So, part of this remit is a vehicle that’s going to deliver a message to young people, saying you know what, if you get an idea of what you want to do just go for it. Doesn’t matter if you get it or not, just go for it.” Graeme Obree has travelled too far in his life to get excited about how fast he can travel 200yd, but the trip to that dash to the line is proving to be increasingly enjoyable. “Let me put it this way, build a bogie in the kitchen, ramble up the road in America, and have a gas with your friends and family. If you break the record, you can go and have a party, if you don’t you go, ‘Oh well, I gave it my best shot and I still went bloody fast.’ I don’t know how fast I’m going to go, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to go bloody fast.” www.obree.com
65
ACTION
Rock and a hard place: the divers wait on the cliffs for their turn to take the plunge
66
Carved Out by God Nine storeys above a swirling Atlantic Ocean, on a remote island shrouded in ancient myth, the men of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series prepare to plunge. Was it destiny that brought them here? And can someone please do something about the weather? Words: Declan Quigley
Photography: Greg Funnell
J
orge Ferzuli doesn’t really need to do this. Not in a financial sense, anyhow. He has a good job in a diving show on a cruise liner out of Miami that pays the bills, but it’s nothing like as challenging as this. Twice already the 31-year-old from Mexico City has tiptoed tentatively to the end of the Red Bull Cliff Diving platform lashed to the side of the limestone cliff facing into the Atlantic Ocean and twice the wind has whipped up, shattering his bone-china confidence. Below him, the salty swirl fills Poll na Peist or the ‘Serpent’s Lair’, the extraordinary rectangular pool carved out with geometric precision by God’s civil engineers on the remote Aran Island Inis Mór in Galway Bay, but from up here on the diving platform 28m above the water it might as well be a strip of Tarmac. The 14 competitors in stop four on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, which visits the world’s most epic open-water dive locations, have been presented with a mix of weather conditions to really focus the mind. Blazing sunshine alternates, on an all-too-frequent basis, with driving wind and rain across the two days of competition. Ferzuli is afraid, and he’s not afraid to admit it, but he somehow has to find a way to plunge safely into that sea pool at 90kph. A pancake from that height is the equivalent of landing on concrete from a height of 13m, so the angle of entry to the water has to be spot on, toes-first, arms tight down by the sides, to avoid significant suffering. Diving is a matter of personal pride and there’s no way to throttle back and do it slowly. Speed of entry is guaranteed from the moment the competitor steps
68
Myths and legends: Inis Mór (above) with the ruins of the fort of Dún Aonghus on the hill; Kent de Mond (USA), Orlando Duque (Colombia) and Jorge Ferluzi (Mexico) keep warm between dives (below); Britain’s Blake Aldridge dives into the ‘Serpent’s Lair’ (opposite)
off the platform. Below him, an exclusive audience of 700 – the remote location meant the organisers had to cap the number ��� waits expectantly between their own dives for cover from the frequent showers. The ghosts of the Fir Bolg, the ancient inhabitants of Inis Mór, looking down from the ruins of the fort of Dún Aonghus on the hill above the diving area, will surely have approved of the fortitude shown by Ferzuli and co. The mythological, pre-Christian race faced their own demons in their battles with their foes, the Tuatha Dé Dannan, before decamping to the Aran Islands to lick their wounds, where the screeching winds will have slowed somewhat the creation of the stone forts that dot the island. It’s an extraordinary location for a cliff diving event, but from the moment Colombian great
ACTION
Diving is a matter of personal pride and there’s no way to throttle back and do it slowly
“These are not typical conditions – you have to start working in your head”
Orlando Duque was introduced to it in 2009 at a demonstration event, it was inevitable it would eventually appear as part of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. The evergreen Colombian described his dive back then as a highlight of his career. He shrugged off a serious ankle injury, sustained in a skydiving accident in Hawaii last year, to retake his place in the series this year. Coming to Inis Mór remains an inspiration for a man whose enthusiasm for competition in one of the world’s most perilous sports remains undimmed. “I like it here,” says the 37-year-old, after hobbling across the broken limestone slate with his bare feet, his damaged ankle heavily strapped, but seemingly unconcerned by the latest of the heavy showers that seem to roll in a couple of times an hour. “I was here
70
Prep school: the weather might be cold, but warming up is still important (above). Briton Gary Hunt and Artem Silchenko of Russia stretch their muscles (below)
the first time in 2009 and it’s one of my favourite places to dive. I know the weather can be a bit of a challenge, and I think that was everybody’s worry, but it turned out really good. All the people showed up. “We had a little bit of rain and it was a little bit windy, but overall it was great. Great atmosphere. I like it every time I come here. Everybody’s in a good mood, so, I think everybody had a good day.” If it was a tough event to organise, the challenge presented to the divers at least equals it, and Duque admits that there is nothing like it in world cliff diving. “It is just very challenging. The shape of the pool, the edge is about 5m above the water level, you know? We’re used to diving at level water. First you see that level, then you have to wait for the water 5m below. So that’s a new element that we’re not used to! “It actually makes it that much more exciting for us. These are not your typical conditions, that you walk into and you know already what to do without seeing the site. When everybody arrives, you have to start working in your head. That kind of a challenge is what keeps us motivated and pushing hard. I think that makes the sport that much more interesting.” Staging the event on a craggy little island 14km long, one with narrow roads that’s linked to the mainland only by small ferryboats and light aircraft, presented innumerable challenges. Three weeks of hawking supplies and equipment to the jump zone, through fields and across broken limestone, was exhausting enough for the crew, but the storms which lashed the cliff face on the day before competition threatened to cancel the event and left all concerned looking a little haggard. Thankfully, the wind and rain only make cameo appearances for the divers, so that they can present
unt aliqui doluptur aut estiur, velenec
Thankfully, the wind and the rain only made cameo appearances for the divers
their art to the judges in full. With a bewildering array of twists and turns, an average dive from this height is executed in about three seconds. In contrast to most of his adversaries, Jorge Ferluzi has little experience of competitive diving. He learned the ancient craft in the kitsch surroundings of an amusement park in Monterrey in northern Mexico, dividing his attention between that and mechanical engineering studies as he waited for life to present its agenda to him. Somehow the humdrum didn’t appeal, and by a circuitous route he finds himself balancing on a platform clinging grimly to a craggy limestone cliff ready to race with gravity. While nine-time world champion Duque and eventual Inis Mór winner Artem Silchenko of Russia battle for overall honours, Ferluzi’s fight is more
Youth and experience: Sean McCormack, 16 (above), from the Shamrock diving club, shows off his skills. Winner Artem Silchenko celebrates with the crowd (below)
fundamental. The serpent, it seems, is a seductive temptress whose invitation is finally accepted at the third time of asking. Balancing for a moment, he and the expectant crowd hold their breath in unison as Ferluzi leaps gracefully into his routine. The fairytale version of this story would relate that Ferluzi nailed it, and missile-launched back to the surface to rapturous applause, but the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series is a different kind of reality show. Whether it was the wind or simply the idea of it, Ferluzi’s timing is a little off, and although he manges to control his landing, he’s delivered back to the edge of the pool the rescue crew of scuba divers bobbing nearby, where he is greeted like a long-lost cousin by his competitors and friends. “Before the jump, it made me nervous, you know,” he admits, with a smile. “I tried to do my best. I rushed my dive, so I got a big crash. But I’m professional, I find a way. You must do, or you’re going to crash good, you know? I’m a little bit sore for sure, but I’m OK. We want to survive for sure, we want to walk away safely. I like the place for sure, it’s just the weather was hard, man...” He would ultimately finish last of the divers who completed the event, but that was of little importance to his friends, who are relieved he is safe, and to Ferluzi himself, whose soul has answered a searching question and whose outlook is as bright as the weather at the end of the contest. “It was super-nice with the people that came. The support everywhere is the best, it’s really good. Right now it’s super-sunny, you can enjoy more. But when it’s raining, you’re running away from it… and the rocks... But it’s a really cool place, I really love it.” Take the plunge: www.redbullcliffdiving.com
72
THE RED BULLETIN Beyond the ordinary – everywhere on our planet
WO R L D WIDE
Subscribe today to the monthly magazine from the world of Red Bull. Available in your country now. Simply go to www.getredbulletin.com TERMS AND CONDITIONS: The Red Bulletin is published 12 times a year. You can subscribe to the International Edition (English version) from any country in the world via www.getredbulletin.com. If your country is not highlighted on the map please choose the button ‘INTERNATIONAL’. The subscription price is £25.99 for 12 issues and you will be charged in Pounds Sterling. Please be aware that your bank may charge additional fees.
BEYOND THE ORDINARY THE RED BULLETIN
ACTION
BERNARD PURDIE
“Ladies love a drummer” Aged 73 and with sticks work on 4,000 albums, Bernard Purdie is the world’s most recorded drummer. Fifty years of laying down the beat for Aretha Franklin, James Brown and many other legends has taught him all there is to know about making music Words: Andreas Rottenschlager Photography: Philipp Horak
My mother’s pots and pans were my bass player or the saxophonist who mad at you, you’re out. The worst thing first drum kit. I was three years old, took the ladies home. All they had you can do is hang out with your boss. the 11th of 15 children, and I was always to do was put their instrument in a That’s the quickest way to get fired. drumming like crazy. When I was six bag. The singer had it even better: The discipline of James Brown I got my first toy drum kit. When I was all he had to do was walk off stage. is something to have experienced. seven, a music teacher let me sit in on Louis Armstrong was a gentleman. You were never allowed to call him his lessons. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I jammed with him at his birthday. James Brown. You had to say Mister I didn’t have any money. First Miles Davis was the opposite, you had to learn to listen. a real workaholic. He How did I get work as a sometimes came late to studio musician in the ’60s? rehearsals. We’d already The same way you do today: learned the songs, he just through ads. I made signs and played over the top, but that hung them on the drums: was cool, too. That’s music. “Call me, I’m the hitmaker.” At the Red Bull Music Good marketing is everything. Academy, I teach musicians I can read sheet music who are young enough to be forward and backwards. my grandchildren. I hate to I interpret the music while say it, but 90 per cent of young I’m playing it. I read notes, people hardly know anything rhythm and feel. I always about music theory or how put a bit of myself into it, you interpret a piece. The no matter what song I’m techno generation can operate playing or with whom. their computers: great! But That’s how I enrich the songs. no one talks about how you I make them a little bit Purdie. create feeling. You have to Record-breaking drummer Bernard Purdie is still keeping the beat For the Grateful Dead make the computer work at 73 years of age. “Pension? That word doesn’t exist for me!” I played on 30-40 tracks. for you, and in a way that And I can’t remember which makes it sound human. songs they were. I drove to I tell every pupil: learn your thing! Brown. Full stop. Whatever you did, San Francisco for the weekend, It doesn’t matter what direction you want you could never use his first name. recorded the songs and they to go. If you’re good, it will work for you. We all started in music because we paid me the amount I’d asked for. Pension? Hey, are we talking the same wanted to get the women. That was Everyone likes to party. But when language? That word doesn’t exist for our motivation. The only problem with you’re working for a superstar, you me. I’ll keep at it as long as people want that is that at the end of the show the can’t afford to slack off. I learned that me to. I’ve never thought about stopping. drummer has to pack up his kit. Ladies Human metronome: www.bernardpurdie.com early on in life. If Aretha Franklin’s love a drummer, but it was always the 74
The Rolling Stones Quincy Jones, James Brown, Steely Dan, Aretha Franklin (the list goes on) – Purdie has worked with them all
Austrian architect Thomas Herzig builds castles in the air, continuing a tradition that brings together Gothic master builders and high-tech wizards Words: Alexander Macheck  Photography: Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek
ACTION
Maximum
Airplay T Solid air: architect Thomas Herzig with one of his unique pneumatic structures, a pavilion made almost entirely of air
here might be a UFO sitting in a remote glade west of the Austrian capital: a seethrough bubble the size of a small cottage. A cuckoo shrieks and an electric pump whirrs into action, blowing air into this strange form. “It’s a pneumocell dome,” explains Thomas Herzig, owner of this hidden patch of land and inventor of the structure: an air-filled, honeycomb-shaped plastic cell that can be put together with others to make structures of any shape or size. Transparent or opaque, as required, but heat-insulated and stable, even though they’re made mostly from a whole lot of nothing – just air. A pupil of Austrian architect Gustav Peichl, Herzig’s work mainly focuses on making special exhibition pavilions for motor industry events. He has also been heavily involved with Vienna’s Life Ball, Europe’s biggest charity event raising money for people with HIV and AIDS. Herzig has designed a series of futuristic roof structures for Life Ball, with artists like Hans Kupelwieser, Wolfgang Semmelrock and Peter Sandbichler enlisting his skills for special inflatable commissions, making him an expert in a new domain: pneumatic design. Or, as he puts it, pneumatic formfinding: “I can cut a piece of wood 77
ACTION
Another bubble in the wall: Herzig calls his design process “pneumatic form-finding”. Cells can be put together with other materials to make anything from furniture to walls and windows
be-finished ‘Skybase’ project – a house that will be positioned high up among rocks and trees – Herzig will study the design and shape of birds’ nests. This observational approach makes him party to a glorious tradition. When Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí was designing Barcelona’s Sagrada Família cathedral, for example, he hung weights with ropes on a board to imitate gravity and create tension, so arches, vaults and columns could form with no critical compressive force acting on them. This upside-down model helped him envisage how his intricate creation would turn out. “The amazing thing about design solutions based on the laws of nature is that nature uses minimum materials to maximum effect,” explains Herzig. “So in our case that means ideal structural engineering using minimum resources.”
B
“The amazing thing about design solutions based on the laws of nature is that they use minimum materials to maximum effect” 78
however I like and make crazy, completely useless things out of it. But air always seeks out its own form.” Herzig has to think about exactly how the air is going to interact with the membrane depending on how he shapes it. “You need a lot more background knowledge at the designing stage,” he explains. “And humility.” That means he doesn’t try to force the form he imagines on nature, but instead racks his brains to work out what the right form will be for the function that the object is supposed to fulfil. The first thing Herzig does is open his eyes and look around. He examines organic cells, bunches of grapes and drops of water. For things like the yet-to-
ut as Herzig is keen to point out, no part of this design process is down to chance. It is a principle and ideal which all solutions strive towards in their development. Even man hasn’t been able to elude it. On the contrary. “When we started building, we laid one stone on top of another,” says Herzig. “Gothic-era architects began to think about how they could cut down on materials. That’s how we ended up with fourcentred arches and cross-shaped vaults.” Back then it was to save money. Now, on top of that, we have environmental considerations such as reducing raw material use and decreasing transport weight and emissions. But in keeping with the tradition of the old master builders, what counts for any developer is the allure of the universal trend towards dematerialisation which is particularly radical in the high-tech world and, therefore, particularly visible. Herzig explains: “The first computers were the size of our living rooms, but now we can stick our iPhones in our pockets even though they have much greater capacity. We’re replacing material with information. The idea remains, but the material disappears.” Learn more at: www.pneumocell.com
THE NEBW IN RED ULLET ! E G A P N A F Send message:
ook: n goes Faceb njoy all the advantages ti e ll u B d e R e • f our page and ecome a fan o •
B d of Red Bull. from the worl el! sport and trav , n o ti c a to se clo “Like it”: To be
e: lletin fan pag even sooner. u B d e R , r te s s • Fast, fa lifestyle trend music, art and The newest
• Exclus
: Videos, image ively for fans inary.
beyond the ord
T N A W O S L A DO YOU R Y? A N I D R O A R LLETIN U T B X D E E R / E M B O TO CEBOOK.C A .F W W W O JUST GO T ! N A F A E M O AND BEC
Contents 82 TRAVEL Lost in music in New Orleans 84 GET THE GEAR A top chef and his kitchen equipment 86 TRAINING Tips from US skater Torey Pudwill
90 NIGHTLIFE Everything you need to get you through ’til dawn 94 WORLD IN ACTION 96 SAVE THE DATE 97 KAINRATH 98 MIND’S EYE
CREDITS: PHOTOGRAPHY: KIRSTEN SCHOLTZ/GETTY IMAGES
88 BAND WATCH Dublin electronica quartet Le Galaxie
CREDITS:
US surfer Kelly Slater is aiming for a third victory in a row at the Hurley Pro off the coast of California. Success would cement his place as one of the sport’s all-time greats. Find his date with destiny, and other events of the month, on page 94
GET INTO THE GROOVE THIS MONTH’S TRAVEL TIPS
All that jazz… And everything else New Orleans’ world-famous jazz scene is rightly celebrated, but the city’s vibrant musical offerings go far beyond what can be found in tourist guidebooks. Local DJ Brice Nice gives the low-down on where to go to for hip-hop, cabaret, drag bingo and naked karaoke VOODOO MUSIC FESTIVAL
82
Lurking on the outskirts of the French Quarter are enough music venues to serve the wide-ranging interests of Voodoo Music Festival attendees
“It goes without saying that New Orleans is a town where people like to party, usually hitting up several spots in a night,” says Brice Nice, a DJ at local radio station WWOZ (www.wwoz.org). “No closing time means that most folks don’t go out until 11pm, peak hour is somewhere around 2am and it’s not uncommon to walk out of a club into
daylight. Voodoo – headlined by Green Day, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Jack White and Skrillex – ups the ante with night shows and special events in unique spaces.” Here, then, is Nice work: his dozen of the Crescent City’s best bets for the most vibrant rock, dance, electronic and hip-hop events. Voodoo Music Festival October 26-28, www.thevoodooexperience.com
WORDS: DJ BRICE NICE. PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREW GOETZ, GETTY IMAGES (4), CORBIS, SIBERIA, AMPERSAND
MORE BODY & MIND
St Peter St
s St Religio u
hosted by Slangston Hughes, happens on the last Friday of the month and Truth Universal’s Grassroots on the first Saturday of each month keeps Dragon’s Den on the cutting edge. www.facebook.com/thedragonsden 10 Republic Known for weekly college dance parties on Friday and Saturday; monthly electronic events from Winter Circle Productions’ Bassik party with guests like Datsik and Doctor P; and its bounce monthly events featuring New Orleans’ own ass-shaking club music with regular guests Big Freedia, Sissy Nobby and Katey Red. www.republicnola.com Republic
8 Ampersand Ampersand is notable for the best sound system in the city and an unfailing dedication to electronic dance music. Open only on Fridays and Saturdays unless there is a special event – and more Euro-flavoured than you’ll usually find in the city – it has featured afterparty sets by Diplo, MSTRKRFT, Skrillex, and massive regular parties by the young lions of the New Orleans EDM scene, Electronic Takeover. www.clubampersand.com
Ampersand
Treme Brass Band play dba regularly
N Ro
Ave
Ho wa rd
6 Maison Positioning itself as the go-to spot on Frenchmen Street, Maison moves through jazz, jam funk, hip-hop, brass bands, swing dance classes and club DJs every week over multiple stages. A monthly party by bounce pioneer DJ Jubilee, semi-regular events with super producer Mannie Fresh and touring acts like Dan Deacon and Hood Internet will take place in October. Entry is free most nights, and a full dinner menu is on offer before 10pm. www.maisonfrenchmen.com
Frenchmen St
8
ry
Three bars on the corner of Marigny Street and St Claude Avenue, each with a distinct flavour. The Stooges Brass Band recently took over the Hi-Ho and their Thursday night residency is one of the best brass band gigs in the city. Wandering Buddha serves vegan Korean food in the back. All-Ways Lounge is, true to its name, a cabaret amalgamation
LOUIS ARMSTRONG PARK
Ma
3 4 5 Hi-Ho Lounge, All-Ways Lounge, Siberia
of burlesque, theatre, live music, dance nights and naked karaoke in a former gay cowboy bar. Siberia features metal and punk and has hosted OFF!, Eyehategod, and a Gibby Haynes DJ set this year. Kukhnya serves Slavic soul food in the back. www.hiholounge.net, www.theallways lounge.net, www.siberianola.com
lan
St
2 The Saint The Saint has gone from rocker dive bar to a sweaty, twisted mess of a dancefloor where regular folks, hipsters, metal heads and the occasional celebrity mix without drama or paparazzi. Saturday night’s Obsession dance party is the baby of DJ Musa Alves where you’ll hear the freshest new music mixed with a little Magnolia Shorty, Lil Boosie and the occasional ’90s house tune. DJs and live music fill the rest of the week, including country night with Pasta on Sundays, tiki-themed karaoke on Tuesdays and occasionally drag bingo – which is exactly what you hope it is. www.thesaintneworleans.com
Es p
Elysian Fields Ave
ern
Frenchmen Street is the hub of traditional New Orleans music, but other genres can be found further afield 1 Mimi’s in the Marigny Anchored musically by DJ Soul Sister’s Hustle party every Saturday night, where a diverse group keeps the dancefloor sweaty and jumping to strictly funky disco jams from the mid-’70s to the early-’80s. Dance party Alligator Chomp Chomp holds down every other Friday with south Louisiana sounds, and there’s a variety of live music during the week, usually jazz or roots acts. The kitchen serves Spanish-style tapas until 2am daily and 4am on Fridays and Saturdays. www.mimisinthemarigny.net
N Claiborne Ave
Aven ue
MORE BODY & MIND
9 Dragon’s Den Jungle and drum ’n’ bass have their New Orleans home at the Den with Bassbin Safari on Thursdays and occasional parties by Below C Level crew. Other draws include dancehall classics with T-Roy on Wednesdays and Sunday’s weekly dubstep show Church with Unicorn Fukr. Monthly underground hip-hop event Uniquity,
11 Hookah The only real music venue in the city with a hookah selection, Hookah also features a beautiful dancefloor and is the only venue for underground dance music in the heart of the French Quarter. Popular hip-hop weeklies on Friday and Saturday have long lines and a dress code, so plan accordingly. EDM music by Head Set on Thursdays start the weekend off, and Tipping Point with DJ RQAway and the Room Service Band on Sundays are a soulful way to finish up. www.hookah-club.com 12 One-Eyed Jacks The go-to rock ’n’ roll venue in the French Quarter, OEJ’s features a hugely popular ’80s night on Thursdays packed to the gills with 20-somethings enjoying the velvetpainting ambience. The rest of the week you might find bands like Black Lips, Guided By Voices, Wild Flag, Quintron and Miss Pussycat. www.oneeyedjacks.net
83
8
3
If you can’t stand the heat… Ikarus’s head chef Roland Trettl with his trusty blowtorch
MORE BODY & MIND
GET THE GEAR ESSENTIAL PRO KIT
Stir-crazy cooking
Is it a laboratory? A doctor’s surgery? A spaceship? No, it’s a kitchen. Roland Trettl, executive chef at Salzburg’s high-end Ikarus restaurant, talks us through his workspace 1. Vitamix TNC 5200 The blender’s blade can be set to spin at anything from 1,000 to 24,000rpm, which means purées, mayonnaise and mousses all come out perfectly. At high speeds, it’s also perfect for chopping herbs without affecting colour or taste. 2. Bunsen burner This butane blowtorch can reach a top temperature of 1,750ºC, which I need to glaze things like crème brûlée. 3. Liquid nitrogen An important part of molecular cooking. In its liquid state, nitrogen has a boiling point of -196ºC and is used to freeze foods and liquids.
7
6
WORDS: ULRICH CORAZZA. PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIPP FORSTNER
4. Syringes The contents of the syringes (which can be filled with any flavour of juice or jelly) drip into oil or nitrogen to make aromatic jelly-like frozen gems. You can squeeze several syringes at once by turning the handle. 5. Julabo heating thermostat With the thermostat you can set temperatures of up to 90ºC exactly and maintain them. I like using it most for lowtemperature cooking to get a nice texture in fish and meat. 6. Big Green Egg XL Air comes into this ceramic glazed charcoal grill from below. The heated gas then escapes out the top. The thermometer, which allows for precise temperatures up to 400ºC, gives you perfect results when you’re barbecuing, frying, smoking or heating.
7. Green Star juicer This will extract the juice from anything: fruit, vegetables and even herbs like basil or parsley. It works using two adjacent stainless steel press rolls, rotating at just 110rpm, so there’s no damage to the food from the speed. Even the delicate vitamins and enzymes in the pips – of strawberries or kiwis, for example – survive. 8. Plaster I use plaster of Paris – with a strength of at least 6N/mm2 – to shape active moulds. They set in 20 minutes. Here we have a truffle mould for a new take on the Délice de ris de veau Rumohr recipe. 9. Shera Duosil H silicone Negative forms from the plaster moulds can be made out of this soft elastic duplicating silicone. 10. Turning Slicer Practical help for slicing fruit and vegetables. Simply put in an apple, turn the handle and the whole thing comes out the other end finely sliced.
10
Chop chop: Japanese turning slicer www.hangar-7.com/ikarus
85
WORK OUT TRAINING WITH THE PROS
Tough Breaks TOREY PUDWILL The Californian street skater is rehabbing two broken bones
Before Torey Pudwill broke his ankle at the end of 2011 – and his hand in early 2012 – he would train like any other skater: get up, head to the park and skate. But when the Torey Pudwill 22-year-old started rehab for his injury, he learned a jarring fact: to reach the top of his sport, skating alone wasn’t enough. “Taking supplements, eating right… this is all stuff I’ve learned since I’ve gotten hurt,” Pudwill says. “It’s like taking a class on how to be an athlete and even how to benefit myself to live longer.” Pudwill’s trainer, Dr David Sales of the South Coast Spine Center in Capistrano Beach, California, says that his dedication to being healthy is what sets him apart. “Torey’s got that desire and that drive – and you don’t see that in a lot of [skate] athletes,” Sales says. “Most of them wake up in the morning and have a cigarette and a coffee and that’s their idea of a warm-up.”
Keep on truckin' For Pudwill, just getting to Sales’ office requires a two-hour drive from his home in the San Fernando Valley down the coast to Orange County. And then the fun begins. Monday-Friday: He lies on an intersegmental traction table, which vibrates and has a roller that goes up and down the spine to increase range of motion. At the same time, Pudwill is hooked up to muscle stimulation on any part of his body that’s feeling any tightness. In addition, injured body parts receive cold laser treatment to increase metabolic activity, speed up healing and reduce inflammation – as well as cryotherapy: good old ice. Next, Pudwill gets ultrasound treatment to warm and loosen up the tissue before
Sales gives him a chiropractic adjustment. He does active release therapy to make sure that all his tendons, ligaments and muscles are in the right position. “It’s painful, but it’s really important,” Pudwill says. “But if all those are working together – the results are pretty much instant.” After some mild stretching, Pudwill will then go on the power plate to work on flexibility and strength conditioning. Once that’s over, then Pudwill uses a wobble board or BOSU ball and Sales throws weighted balls at him, which he has to catch with one hand. To end the session, Pudwill practises his balance by standing on the wobble board with his eyes closed. Saturday and Sunday: Skate. Skate. Skate some more.
Follow Pudwill on Twitter: @ToreyPudwill1 www.redbull.com/toreypudwill
86
WORDS: ANN DONAHUE. PHOTOGRAPHY: ATIBA JEFFERSON/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
Everything from chiropractic adjustments to cold lasers is used to get Pudwill back on the board
ACTS TO WATCH IN 2012 #5
Le Galaxie: four people with diverse tastes, but a combined love of the ’80s synth sound
Stars in their eyes
LE GALAXIE Dublin four-piece hell-bent on bringing analogue key-sounds back to the future
Le Galaxie’s Fade 2 Forever EP is out now
88
Le Galaxie’s 2011 debut album, Laserdisc Nights 2, was both a breath of fresh air and reassuringly nostalgic at the same time. It combined the wonderful warmth of 1980s synthesisers, thumping rhythms, techno beats and pop melodies to create a joyous record, jam-packed with danceable bangers. Drawing on a collective love of old-skool electronica and influences from their youth (including TV and cinema), Le Galaxie honed a sound like no other. Their growing reputation has been bolstered by a stream of exhilarating live shows, which merge acid house’s irrepressible spirit with the band’s tight and passionate groove. Mick Le Galaxie (Michael Pope) tells it like it is. “We met during our post-rock phase, but I don’t think all that
sombreness and seriousness really suited us. When a singer left an old band we were in, we continued to jam intermittently as an instrumental group. Gradually, we began to evolve into something approaching the band of today. I suppose it wasn’t until we stepped on stage, in front of a room of strangers, that we thought it really felt right. Connecting with people live gave us the confidence to push on.” Unsurprisingly, Le Galaxie’s members have more than a fleeting interest in electronic music’s finer moments. Their rich sound combines elements of multiple era-defining styles and also draws inspiration from small and silver screens of their youth. “Our approach is certainly not contrived,” says Pope. “This is four
people with diverse tastes in music, cinema and just about everything else. About two years ago we began to develop a sound that felt right for all of us and we kicked on from there. Electronic music is obviously important, especially the late ’70s stuff like Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk. Then there are influences like those ’80s movie soundtracks that we grew up with. However, the real constant throughout it all was those synths. They really resonated with us. I had a Blur phase, really got into Godspeed and all that post-rock for a time, but always came back.” After the relative success of their debut album and recently released EP, Le Galaxie have reached a pivotal point in their development. Do they continue
MORE BODY & MIND
WORDS: EAMONN SEOIGE. PHOTOGRAPHY: ALESSIO MICHELINI (1)
“We’ve come a long way from playing to seven people – and four of them were the support band” to mine those rich combinations of electro-pop, guitar licks, techno and soulful synths or embark on a fresh direction? “Where we go next is anyone’s guess. I don’t think we’re even sure. The releases have been well received, but we don’t want to repeat ourselves. But when you play ’80s analogue synths, you’ll always sound a certain way, irrespective of the style. It’s an oxymoron really, but we want to keep pushing forward, while maintaining our sound. We want to make creative, worthwhile dance music within a band dynamic. I don’t think a band needs to be defined by its surroundings. If that was the case we’d be writing songs about the dole and happy meals. When we plug in, we’re not looking to reflect social realities. Your environment doesn’t mean a thing when you play synths.” The recent EP Fade 2 Forever showcased another, more soulful side of Le Galaxie. The disco frenzy was toned down in favour of slower, emotionally charged tracks that perhaps gave a first impression of a new direction. “It’s certainly a more sparse work. In the album, every spare second is filled with stuff, the EP breathes a little more. It’s a little more atmospheric and emotional. Fade 2 Forever has an ambient quality, but we also wanted it to sound gorgeous. There’s still a big dance number Heat City, but overall we wanted it to have a big heart, something I think is often lacking, even in the sound of bands I really love. We brought in guest vocalists to shake it up a little. There were specific issues with those tracks and we decided to try something different. I remember the buzz we got when Elaine Mai and Laura Smyth
worked with us in the studio. We were saying, ‘Can these girls join our band?’ They really added something very special.” The release format of Fade 2 Forever also harked back to the glory days of electronic music. “Releasing it on white 10-inch vinyl was a real thrill,” Pope enthuses. “Vinyl is simply untouchable. I remember listening back to it and thinking how great it sounded. Aesthetically, there’s also the packaging of a record. It’s the way music was meant to be heard and we’re really proud of it. Up until now we’ve only released music digitally. It’s been great to get this far without a CD in sight.” The current Irish music scene is brimming with fascinating electro acts, but Le Galaxie is certainly a little different from the rest. “I’m a huge fan of Toby Kaar, but we’re separated from that whole scene, which is really a compliment to those acts. It’s a brilliant, creative movement that we’re not part of. We’re older, noisier and have a bass, guitar and drums banging away. We’re the weirdos in the corner. We have no place, but we’re not some ‘analogue only’ purists either.” Despite the country’s recent economic difficulties and the challenges of the music industry, Le Galaxie is a full-time outfit. With the writing process for a new album already under way, things are certainly looking up. They’re also one of the most jaw-dropping live propositions you’re ever likely to encounter. “It’s a great privilege to be able to live the life of a musician. It’s been a lot of hard work to get where we are and we’ve certainly come a long way from playing a gig in Limerick four years ago to seven people – and four of them were in the support band. We really enjoy gigging and festivals seem to suit us. We went down a storm at Electric Picnic last year and Forbidden Fruit a few months ago. The big one this summer will be playing the Little Big Tent at Electric Picnic. We’re playing after a Four Tet/Caribou gig and we’re already planning the show. It’ll be ‘Le Galaxie’s Crystal Maze’! We’ll have the jumpsuits, the lot!”
Full of energy: Le Galaxie play Electric Picnic this year
Need to know THE LINE-UP Michael Pope - vocals, synths, guitar, drums Alastair Higgins - drums Anthony Hylans - guitar, synths David McGloughlin - bass, synths DISCOGRAPHY Laserdisc Nights 2 (2011) Fade 2 Forever EP (2012)
The story so far Le Galaxie launched their unique fusion of electronica onto an unsuspecting Irish music fraternity in 2008 and they haven’t looked back since. Originally called 66e, the remaining members of that band decided to stick around when a singer departed due to musical differences. A change of direction meant a new band name as they began to draw inspiration from their collective love of dance and electronic music. This fresh and exciting ‘grids vs guitars’ sound made an immediate impact on a scene top heavy with overly pious singersongwriters. The time had come to have fun again! An obsession with ’80s sci-fi (Dark Star, V ) came
to the fore on the ‘We Bleed The Blood Of Androids’ tour, with the band appearing on-stage complete with pulsing lights attached to their instruments and backed by projected clips from classic movies. A quick fast-forward to 2011 and the arrival of wonderful debut album Laserdisc Nights 2 . Their love of retro chic was still very much in evidence on this long-player, especially on the hilarious Mark Duggan video for single Powers of Miami, complete with such ’80s flashbacks as badly tracked VHS recordings, aerobics and fetching perms! With Ireland in the bag, it’s high-time Le Galaxie conquered the world… www.legalaxie.net
89
Nightlife Whatever gets you through the night
ACTION
Night safari SO YOU WANT TO VISIT THE ZOO AFTER DARK?
Opened in 1994, the award-winning Singapore Night Safari is the world’s first nocturnal zoo. HOW BIG IS IT? You can explore the 35-hectare area with its seven themed sections from 7.30pm to midnight on foot or by mini-train. WHAT ANIMALS CAN YOU MEET? You can get up close to 137 different species and more than 2,500 different nocturnal animals such as large cats, flying squirrels, birds and monkeys. WHERE ELSE? Chiang Mai Night Safari (Thailand), China Night Safari (Guangzhou, China), Greater Noida Night Safari (Uttar Pradesh, India) and Taiping Zoo (Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia).
OUT NOW
Get out of New York Grizzly Bear frontman Ed Droste on the benefits of recording rurally and gaining a couple of famous fans Grizzly Bear are an indie-rock quartet from New York. Three years ago there was a lot of hype around the band’s third album Veckatimest. It was a washed-out, brittle album full of scratchy raw pop diamonds – an experimental piece of work that usually wouldn’t have got beyond the critics. Yet Veckatimest shot into the top 10 of the US charts in its first week. RB: Three years have passed since your last album came out. What was it like when you got together to write again? Ed Droste: It was like being back at school when you see everyone for the first time after the holidays. You withdrew to a house north of New York to write the songs. Why was that? In New York you get distracted easily. There are birthdays, pets, concerts. I have to clear my head in order to get the right mindset of writing.
90
What’s it like working up there? There are no neighbours for miles around. Most of the sunlight hours we spent outside. In the mornings we would go out into the forest to get some firewood, and in the afternoon we’d start working. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are fans of yours. How did that come about? Beyoncé’s younger sister, Solange Knowles, played them our music and they’ve been supporting us ever since. It’s cool that mainstream artists today like Rihanna and Beyoncé are into smaller bands like The xx or even us.
Grizzly Bear’s new album, Shields, is out on September 18. grizzly-bear.net
WISE WORDS
“ Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut ” Ernest Hemingway, writer (1899-1961)
CLUB
Hoxton TORONTO
“The Del Rio is a classic his and hers cocktail,” says Josh Harris, an award-winning barman and head of San Francisco cocktail and spirit consulting company, The Bon Vivants. “If you want a drink that everyone in the place is going to like, mix up this cocktail.” Harris’s theory is that men like the tequila and women like the elderflower liqueur. “And then there’s sherry as the wild-card ingredient.” Meaning? “Sherry has depth of taste and gives the cocktail its subtle flavour.”
WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: BARBARA ANASTACIO, DDP, THE HOXTON (4), FOTOSTUDIO EISENHUT & MAYER
INGREDIENTS 40ml Ocho Plata tequila 20ml St. Germain elderflower liqueur 20ml Fino sherry 4 dashes Angostura Orange Bitters Glass: Coupe Trimmings: grapefruit peel
METHOD Put ingredients in shaker. Add ice and stir until the drink has become much more diluted. Pour into a cooled Coupe glass and decorate with grapefruit peel.
THE HOXTON 69 Bathurst Street Toronto, ON M5V 1M5, Canada www.thehoxton.ca
CLUB
“You gotta have swag” The trendsetters of Toronto can be found partying at The Hoxton, an arty old printers that plays cracking dance sounds from DJs like Skrillex and Diplo We opened the club because… There was a need for a better music venue in Toronto, which could cater to a crowd of around 700 that was diverse enough to provide a great space for DJ sets as well as live music and corporate events. Our basic idea was… To convert an old factory into a
multifunctional gallery space with a state-of-the-art sound system. We went for the King West district… Because it is the heart of what is now deemed the nightclub and entertainment area for Toronto. From outside the club looks like… An old warehouse. It was a printing factory that dates back to 1890. The interior is reminiscent of… Banksy's 2010 movie Exit Through The Gift Shop. It all gets going… At about midnight. Our regular customers are… Hipsters and trendsetters. To get past the bouncer you… Gotta have swag. Your craziest night was when… Skrillex and Diplo had a DJ battle. The place goes mad when… The DJ plays Levels by Avicii. The best late-night spot nearby to soak up all that alcohol is... The Counter at Thompson Hotel. Interview with club owners Jesse Girrard and Richard Lambert
91
MORE BODY & MIND
PERSONA I discovered this movie two years ago. It was randomly recommended on Netflix. But I found the premise very exciting. There are only four actors in the whole film. One of them is deaf and only says 14 words. It's just this incredible minimal film, but it’s just so captivating and otherworldly. And the idea of being able to make something like that with so little, I find it very inspiring.
TAKE 3
“On a Bergman bender” Vampire Weekend They make a unique brand of unbridled indie rock with a hint of Africa, but the band’s bassist Chris Baio says the inspiration for his solo EP came from a few Swedish movies Vampire Weekend turned the music world on its head four years ago when they released their eponymous debut album. It didn’t sound like any other indie-rock music before. Ghanaian highlife with indie-rock guitar; east African rhythms infused with punk drums. A bit like Paul Simon’s Graceland but much fresher and wilder. The band took some time off in 2010 after years of extensive touring, and bass player Chris Baio used it to indulge his second passion: electronic music. His solo record, Sunburn Modern, was released this year, which sees the 27-year-old blending steel drums with slowed down house beats, sweet synths and exotic drums. The tracks bring sunshine to the dancefloor. “I’m constantly listening to music for inspiration and I can get jaded,” he says. “But I can’t get enough of Ingmar Bergman’s movies. They inspire me – even as a musician I can learn a lot from his work. To find out more about his life I’ve just gone on a complete Bergman bender.” www.vampireweekend.com; www.baiobaio.com
92
AUTUMN SONATA A late Bergman masterpiece. A famous concert pianist visits her daughter and realises that although she’d led a glamorous life, she wasn’t the best mother. The film’s subject matter really harshed me out because I’m on tour all the time and would like to have children myself one day. It’s also remarkable and clever the way he subtly uses the autumnal red as a motif throughout the story, as the movie’s title suggests.
NIGHT SNACK
Amsterdam Bitterballen
WINTER LIGHT A great movie. But what’s almost better is the making-of documentary that comes with the DVD. It’s fascinating how he’s thought of everything in advance. He was already thinking of the next movie during the one he was working on. You can’t do that when you’re in a band because you have to go on tour when an album comes out. It’s easier with electronic music, which is why I’m inspired by his multi-tasking.
These deep-fried meatballs rule the night in the Netherlands WHERE ARE THE BALLS? Bitterballen are sold at street stalls in Amsterdam and old wood-panelled pubs, known as 'brown cafés' (because of the décor) across the Netherlands.
Words: Florian Obkircher, klaus kamolz. Photography: Rex Features (2), Kobal Collection (2), fotostudio Eisenhut & Mayer (1)
Hardcore Bitterballen Beer and schnapps is one combination northern European revellers like to enjoy. In Amsterdam you’ll get a Jenever, the national juniperbased schnapps, either poured straight into your beer or served with your beer and balls. The all-too-appropriate name for this double whammy is a kopstoot: a head-butt.
WHAT’S IN THEM? The basic ingredients are cold cooked beef or veal and some mature Gouda. It all gets kneaded together with egg, flour, nutmeg, salt and pepper, shaped into balls, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried. They’re usually served with a little mustard.
How many? About 3cm across, bitterballen are served in portions of six, but you can never eat too many. What's in the name? These snacks are not bitter. The name comes from bittertje, an alcoholic drink they used to be served with. A bittergarnituur is a selection of savoury bar snacks.
what drink? Eating bitterballen without an alcoholic beverage is a crime in these parts – they are so fatty that you'll want to wash them down with something. So that nobody forgets to order a beer to go with their balls, many places offer a special meal consisting of six bitterballen and a glass of pilsner. Perfect.
The golden ball Every year, a specialist Dutch drinks brochure awards the Golden Ball for services to preserving the traditional atmosphere in pubs and all that that entails. Café Hoppe (www.cafehoppe.com) are the reigning champs. They're open till 2am and serve eight bitterballen for €5.
93
16-22.09.2012, TRESTLES, CALIFORNIA, USA
4
ASP World Championship Tour As everyone knows, surfing’s soul can be found off the coast of San Clemente. The high breaks at Trestles offer one of the greatest rides in California, making this the ideal location for the Hurley Pro. And it holds a special place in Kelly Slater’s heart: in 2007, the US surfer secured the 34th victory of his career, taking him to the top of the all-time greats list and last year, the home win paved the way for his 11th World Championship title, which also made Slater the oldest ASP Champion at the age of 39.
3
3 Mark Cavendish aims for glory in The Netherlands
Can Vettel dominate in Singapore once again?
15-23.09.2012, LIMBURG, THE NETHERLANDS
23.09.2012, MARINA BAY STREET CIRCUIT
UCI Road World Championships
This year there will be some changes to the UCI Road Championships programme for the first time since 1994 – the team time trial is back and there’s also a new youth competition – but the elite men’s race is still the big highlight. Mark Cavendish faces a tough time defending his rainbow jersey here: the narrow, undulating 265km course through the province of Limburg includes the 1,200m Cauberg ascent, the opposite of what the British sprint specialist prefers. An exciting race awaits.
Singapore Formula One Grand Prix
2
94
The only nighttime race on the Formula One calendar has been held at the 5.073km Marina Bay Street Circuit since 2008. A grand total of 1,485 floodlights light up the course, 70 per cent of which is on public roads. The combination of high-speed straights and the highest number of turns in any Formula One course puts an enormous strain on the gearboxes. Last year Sebastian Vettel was able to celebrate his first victory in the south-east Asian city state, after leading from start to finish.
4
Kelly Slater is out for a third win at the Hurley Pro
MORE BODY & MIND
Sculptures will appear on Australia’s Gold Coast 22.09.2012, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
EarthDance 14-16.09.2012, CHICAGO, USA
Riot Fest
It’s a sad day for any music fan when his or her favourite band splits up. Riot Fest attempts to heal these wounds by convincing our heroes of old to reform for at least one last hurrah. The Chicago leg of the festival sees The Offspring and The Jesus and Mary Chain give us a trip down memory lane, while more modern bands like AW0LNATI0N and The Gaslight Anthem will be on hand to lap up some new fans.
7
7 27.09.2012, WADI SHAB, OMAN
28-29.09.2012 DUBAI, UAE
Red Bull Flying Bach This fast and furious dance show premiered two years ago in Berlin, and the performances have been sold out and greeted with standing ovations all over Europe ever since. Red Bull Flying Bach sees breakdancing World Champions Flying Steps bring the baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach into the 21st century. They do head-spins to preludes and fugues and show daredevil moves to piano and harpsichord accompaniments. This autumn, the show goes on a huge world tour, taking the team from Dubai to as far as Tokyo. You can find details of the tour at www.redbullflyingbach.com.
10
Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series In 2010 it was Gary Hunt, then 2011 Gary Hunt again… Will the Briton make it three World Championship titles in a row this year? We’ll find out at the seventh and final stop on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series tour, when the Sultanate of Oman becomes the first Arabic country to host the cliff divers. Hunt and co will dive from a 27m-high platform into one of seven emerald-green pools at the Wadi Shab river valley near the village of Tiwi.
5
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (4), DANIEL MICHAUD, REZI KENIA/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
More than 300 locations, 60 countries, and one message. EarthDance is a network of event organisers around the world putting on the largest global dance music festival in support of humanitarian causes. The high point comes with the ‘Prayer for Peace’ when people all over the world simultaneously devote a moment’s thought to peace. One of the biggest and best EarthDance parties is traditionally held in Cape Town where the city’s Red Bull Studio lavishes the stage with DJs and local talent.
9
The Gaslight Anthem are set to rock Chicago 14-23.09.2012, CURRUMBIN, AUSTRALIA
Bestival
Swell Sculpture Festival
When Rob Da Bank hosted the first edition of Bestival back in 2004 around 10,000 revellers turned up to catch acts like Basement Jaxx and Fatboy Slim. This time around he will be expecting more than six times as many people to descend on the Isle of Wight’s Robin Hill Country Park to party to the likes of Friendly Fires, The xx, Azealia Banks and Frank Ocean. On the Sunday there’ll be another massive fancy dress party, with Da Bank and co hoping this year’s theme of ‘wild beasts’ helps the festival set another world record.
You won’t find the best sculptures on Australia’s Gold Coast in a museum. Fittingly for the land of golden sands, they’re on the beach. Fifty international artists set about turning the Pacific Parade in the small town of Currumbin into a fantasy world. There are illuminated bronze sculptures, pipe-work tentacles, stranded glass sharks and huge conches that let you ‘hear the sea’. The beach show draws in around 180,000 art-lovers each year, making it a bit of a squeeze for those who just want to swim.
06-09.09.2012, ISLE OF WIGHT, UK
6
Breakdancers elegantly take on JS Bach in Dubai
95
Save the Date September & October SEPTEMBER 17, 5PM
House band
FROM OCTOBER 12
Oval off
European rugby’s premier club competition, the Heineken Cup, returns next month, with 24 teams from the six leading rugby nations beginning the long road to possible glory. Leinster will be looking to secure an unprecedented hat-trick of wins, especially since the final will be held at their home ground, the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, on May 18 next year. Toulouse, the champions of France, will be hoping for a fifth win since their first was in 1996. www.ercrugby.com UNTIL SEPTEMBER 30
Get on track Would-be motorsports stars have one final chance to take a step closer to that pro career with Red Bull Kart Fight. UK Karting centres are inviting racers to record their fastest lap times, with the two quickest from each centre qualifying for a 60-strong final on October 27 at Buckmore Park in Kent. Two runnersup from the final will win a drive in Red Bull Racing’s F1 simulator; the winner will represent the UK at the international final on December 9 (location TBC). www.redbullkartfight.co.uk
The race to kart glory is on
96
St Michael’s Mount: world’s loveliest new sporting venue SEPTEMBER 14-16
Beside the sea For one weekend this month, a tidal island off the south coast of Cornwall will host the inaugural Festival of Sport. Competitors gunning for the picturesque St Michael’s Mount will take part in core sports, including triathlon, cycling and open water swimming, and beach sports, including volleyball, kayaking, touch rugby and gig rowing (a gig is a six-oared boat particular to Cornwall). The blue ribbon event will be the Triple Challenge, set by the Wings for Life spinal cord injury research foundation, which asks only the strongest to complete three core sports over the two days. But it’s not all hard work. Refreshment comes courtesy of the St Austell Brewery and adopted Cornishman Jamie Oliver, with an athlete-friendly menu. There’ll also be live music on hand to soundtrack the eats and sporting feats. www.festivalofsport.net UNTIL SEPTEMBER 28
Welcome return Beth Jeans Houghton is a Geordie lass who has made her granny’s mantra, “You can’t please everybody, so please yourself,” work in her favour. The 22-year-old singer/songwriter’s freakfolk sound and memorable style – body paint, animal print, eye liner – have taken her from the North East to the West Coast and Los Angeles, where she now lives and has been seen on the arm of Red Hot Chilli Pepper Anthony Kiedis. Now armed with a debut album, Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, she and her band, The Hooves Of Destiny, are returning to tour the UK and Ireland, bringing with them great songs that touch on everything from pregnancy to perspiration. www.myspace.com/bethjeanshoughton
Beth Jeans: certainly not blue
PHOTOGRAPHY: FESTIVAL OF SPORT, HIROYUKI ORIHARA/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GETTY IMAGES
More than 800 unsigned bands entered Red Bull Bedroom Jam UK, uploading a video online to be judged by the masses, and now the competition has been whittled down to just three. Dead Harts from Mansfield, Golden Tanks from Reading and I Divide from Exeter will now do battle for public votes one last time during a final to be streamed live from Red Bull Studios in London. Among the prizes: a return to the studios to make a record. www.redbullstudio.co.uk
ILLUSTRATION: DIETMAR KAINRATH
K A I N R AT H
97
P
eople seem demented by excess. Never mind less is more, too much seems not quite enough for a lot of folk. I have just seen a blinding white Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with white leather upholstery, probably sourced from virgin unicorns. You could drop a kilo of cocaine on the wintry landscape of its rear chairs and not notice. I dare say it is fuelled by Napoleon XO brandy. I am certain I would not want one. “Luxury” has become a term of condemnation. In fact, it always was. Read Gibbon’s Decline And Fall (which comes highly recommended), and you’ll see that the Roman Empire imploded because too many of its fat and mad CEOs were besotted with gross material pleasures bringing about a fatal lethargy. In this reading, a love of luxury was a moral failing. In fact, it still is. There is nothing wrong with seeking out privileged experiences and superior merchandise, but a taste for ostentatious luxury nowadays betrays both too much money as well as severe psychological problems. This thought came to me as I sat in my Jacuzzi J-LXL with its lounge seating and platinum/rare Canadian chestnut cabin. I have sensitive skin so do not use mains water in my hot tub. Instead, I insist on filtered mineral liquids from a spring in Siberia which is tended by novitiates from an Orthodox monastery and ferried to my Mayfair apartment in lead crystal flagons. Here I like to sit and contemplate the tragic arc of great wealth, flopping like an exhausted meteor across the vault of heaven. Or hell. Oh, wait a moment. Someone has just brought me a snack of swan poached in Sauternes with a foam of Locmariaquer oysters served on a bed of Provencal hay dusted with lavenderinfused larks’ tongues. Afterwards I will need to work out with my Brazilian personal trainer who consumes only yoji berries and pure oxygen. Of course, that paragraph is just an obscene fantasy, but for many consumers it is going that way. And it is going wrong.
Mind’s Eye
The Thing About Bling The pursuit of luxury has triggered a descent into vulgarity, argues Stephen Bayley At the end of July, Louis Vuitton, which dominates the global ‘luxury’ market, opened a huge four-storey shop in Shanghai’s Plaza 66 mall, a spectacle of cringe-inducing horror to the fastidious aesthete. Because Europe and America are both sated with luxury goods and are financially bust, business growth in ‘luxury’ depends on consumers in China, avid for status. But there is evidence that the Chinese luxury market is slowing down. The New York Times said Louis Vuitton has been ruined by its success: it is now ‘common’, even in Shenzhen. In response, Louis Vuitton now offers made-to-order products as the ultimate in the longed-for exclusivity its massproduced label used to offer. New stores in obscure Chinese cities you have never heard of are also being built. New territories of the newly rich, wide-eyed with an appetite for masterpiece luggage now need to be discovered. This is a process whose end is all too obvious. A news item of 2015 will announce that
the world’s largest Louis Vuitton store has been built on an uninhabited artificial island 150km offshore in The Yellow Sea. Do not, dear reader, misunderstand. I have been a deliriously happy guest on the Louis Vuitton corporate jet, a fabulous Bombardier Global Express famed for its “excellent loiter time capabilities”. Alas, it does not for me loiter long enough as there is no end to my interest in fine champagne drunk at high altitude. No objections here, whatsoever. But something is amiss. The concept of luxury has become fatally separated from any test of true quality. If you ask me, the problem began about 2002 when the word ‘bling’ won its way into The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Lexicological approval of hiphop jive talk was synchronous with the rapid descent of luxury from the rarefied level of privilege to its crash-landing in crass materialism. Coco Chanel said that true luxury is not the opposite of poverty, but the opposite of vulgarity. No more. But I do have a solution. Any debate about luxury should be a debate about design. I asked Terence Conran, Britain’s elder statesman of aesthetics and my own mentor, for his views. Any wine that comes in a magnum, Sir Terence says, becomes a luxurious experience. That’s a definition that places true luxury in the realms of pleasure and generosity. Conran enjoys the sight of a single daffodil in an old-fashioned French milk bottle. He adds that the functional chicken egg is plain and beautiful, while a Fabergé egg, on the other hand, is suitable only for oligarchs. He added that bling announces “vulgarity, insensitivity and stupidity”. That seems fair enough. Design, after all, is intelligence made visible. Luxury is the shrieking visibility of things far less attractive. Just look at that annoying white Roller. Stephen Bayley is an award-winning writer and a former director of the Design Museum in London
THE RED BULLETIN United Kingdom: The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bull Media House GmbH Editor-in-Chief Robert Sperl Deputy Editor-in-Chief Alexander Macheck General Management Print Alexander Koppel Publisher Franz Renkin Executive Editor AnthonyRowlinson Associate Editor Paul Wilson Contributing Editors Andreas Tzortzis, Stefan Wagner Chief Sub-editor Nancy James Deputy Chief Sub-editor Joe Curran Production Editor Marion Wildmann Chief Photo Editor Fritz Schuster Deputy Photo Editors Ellen Haas, Catherine Shaw, Rudolf Übelhör Creative Director Erik Turek Art Director Kasimir Reimann Design Martina de Carvalho-Hutter, Silvia Druml, Miles English, Kevin Goll, Carita Najewitz Staff Writers Ulrich Corazza, Werner Jessner, Ruth Morgan, Florian Obkircher, Arkadiusz Piatek, Andreas Rottenschlager Corporate Publishing Boro Petric (head), Christoph Rietner, Nadja Zele (chief-editors); Dominik Uhl (art director); Markus Kucera (photo director); Lisa Blazek (editor); Christian Graf-Simpson, Daniel Kudernatsch (iPad) Head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (mgr), Walter Sádaba Repro Managers Clemens Ragotzky (head), Karsten Lehmann, Josef Mühlbacher Finance Siegmar Hofstetter, Simone Mihalits Marketing & Country Management Barbara Kaiser (head), Stefan Ebner, Elisabeth Salcher, Lukas Scharmbacher, Peter Schiffer, Julia Schweikhardt, Sara Varming Advertising enquiries Deirdre Hughes +35 (0) 3 86 2488504. The Red Bulletin is published in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, A product of the Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. Website www.redbulletin.com. Head office: Red Bull Media House GmbH, Oberst-Lepperdinger-Strasse 11-15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700. UK office: 155-171 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JP, +44 (0) 20 3117 2100. Austrian office: Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800.The Red Bulletin (Ireland): Susie Dardis, Richmond Marketing, 1st Floor Harmony Court, Harmony Row, Dublin 2, Ireland +35 386 8277993. Printed by Prinovis Liverpool Ltd, www.prinovis.com Write to us: email [email protected]
THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE RED BULLETIN IS OUT ON OCTOBER 2, 7 & 19 98
ILLUSTRATION: VON
|
Cycling
|
In which county is the Isle of Sheppey?
|
Dear Diary
The regular cast of characters on the Tuesday/Thursday rides includes
Kevin the first regular on our ride, and the most regular regular. Has too much time to ride!
Karl (aka "Fast Karl"), super-nice-guy road racer who can really charge on the flats
Chris, one of the younger guys who thinks he can climb and sprint. He can.
(Karl now with is own page here, Karl's Korner )(but not updated in ages...)
Eric, who likes to torture me up Kings by riding just a bit ahead or behind me, waiting for me to blow up.
John, relative newcomer, another 50ish youngster who can climb way too fast.
Millo, who complains that he's old & slow but somehow always there in the sprints.
George, always out on Tuesdays, nice guy, too fast on the climbs
CURRENT ALMOST-DAILY DIARY ENTRIES BELOW-
Don't have OLN, er, I mean VS, but want to watch the Tour de France? If you have a reasonably-fast internet connection, here's how, with information found on Steephill.TV , a great cycling website-
Eurosport audio for audio in English and Unrestricted video streaming in German (the "unrestricted" part is important; there are many video streams of the TdF, but the rest won't work outside of a specific country. This one works anywhere). Just turn off the sound for the video and listen to the Eurosport audio, and you're all set!
Check out our new photo album on Picasa! Lots of high-res photos from various rides and the Tour de France.
06/29/30- OK, MAYBE I DO TAKE A LOT OF PHOTOS. Came across an odd problem with one of my cameras (Fuji F30) today. Actually, it started a few days ago. Put in a freshly-formatted card, starts taking photos just fine, but as the card fills up, the number of photos it says are left doesn't change, regardless of the resolution you're shooting. Normally, hi-res photos take up more space on the card, so it will show you have fewer left than when you're shooting lower-res. But now it was showing "x" number of shots left, regardless. But wait, there's more. When it got down to zero? Even a reformat didn't change anything. Put in an empty card, and it still said you had zero shots left. Apparently, the camera has issues when you get to picture #9999. Everything basically locks up, until you go into an obscure setup menu and choose "renew." Since it took one heck of a search to find that, it seems that not too many people take more than 10,000 photos.
I guess now I don't feel so bad that I generally get a new camera every couple of years?
06/28/07- FULL WRECKING CREW TODAY, with Todd, Chris, Karl, Kevin, Eric... seems like there might have been one more, but can't figure out who it might have been. I took it just a little bit easier up the hill this morning, since my right knee's giving me a bit of trouble off the bike, but it's just barely perceptible while riding, primarily when sitting down and applying power. Still frustrating that I was 27:02 up the hill. Where did those 3 seconds go???
06/26/07- IT FINALLY FELT GOOD TO HURT AGAIN! This morning's ride up Kings Mtn was the first time in ages that everything was working, and everything was hurting. My legs, my lungs, they were both being taxed to the max. Of course, my "max" isn't what it used to be. My times up Kings are the most-reliable point of reference for that, and today's 26:51 (my first 26-something time since... well, sometime last year) was about a minute faster than I've been doing lately. Like I said, hurting felt good. My lungs, sure, they sounded, as usual, like a steam engine. But they managed to deliver enough oxygen to keep the legs fed, and that's what counts. I was a bit worried that the past couple days of heavy allergies (warm weather and wind does that to me) would do some damage, but fortunately not the case.
Of course, while I'm feeling so good about hurting, Todd, Karl & George are just cruising along, yakking away, in a zero-effort sort of way. There was a time that bothered me. Well, strike that. It still bothers me. But I've gotten used to it, and it doesn't keep me from wanting to ride with them. Very good guys, all. Well, mostly. This morning was something of a take-no-prisoners descent on 84, and with new tires on my bike (that gave a bit of a "pushing in the corners" feeling), I dropped off the pace a bit, along with SteveL, whom we met up with at Skyline. Did they slow up and regroup at the bottom? Heck no. We didn't see them until we got back to Canada. The last thing I wanted to do was go chasing after them; I felt like I'd earned a wheel to draft. Evidently, they didn't feel similarly. That's OK though; gave me a chance to hurt some more.
06/24/07- 37:20 UP OLD LaHONDA MIGHT NOT SEEM SO FAST, but if you consider that it wasn't all that long ago it was taking Kevin an hour (and requiring several stops), he's making good progress. We didn't have a whole lot of time, as he was being dropped off at Summer Camp (Mission Springs near Felton) later in the day, so it was more-or-less an out & back to the town of LaHonda. Kevin's getting much better at managing things (both his strength and emotions) while climbing, and, to put it simply, no longer fears hills. And, of course, he still really enjoys descending, much more, in fact, than I do. And, of course, he still really gives me a scare now & then with the goofy wide lines he takes in the corners. I still ride behind him on all but the quietest descents, thinking it best to keep the cars off his tail. Unfortunately, he loses the benefit of watching the lines I take through the corners. But, as I mentioned before, maybe I've just gotten too conservative, and maybe he's much better than I at understanding what a bike can do when going downhill fast. Or maybe ignorance is bliss, and his first crash while descending will change all that.
For the next week he'll be in camp, taking the week off from cycling. It will be interesting to see if he'll say he actually missed riding when he gets back. The day after camp he'll be attending another session at the bicycle racing track, so we'll see what a week off the bike does.
06/22/07- IF HE'D REALLY BEEN A GOOD DOG, he would have gone into a corner and died during the night. But no, that's not the way it usually works, and no, that's not the way it worked this time. Only 12 years old (relatively young for a Corgi), Spencer started having problems a week or so ago. Constant fast, labored breathing, little strength to walk. Sounds like me climbing. Took him to the 'vet, did a bunch of blood tests, but nothing showed up. So today, after seeing him holed up in the kitchen, relatively unresponsive to us, and literally moving himself into corners where he would just stare at a wall... it was time to put him down.
The last dog we had to put to sleep, I stayed with at the 'vet, to the very end. I was reassured that the dog would go quietly, and feel no pain. It was one of the worst 10 minutes of my life, as the dog didn't realize she wasn't supposed to feel any pain, she didn't know that it was supposed to be peaceful. She fought it to her last dying breath. I felt, at the time, that I had to be there for her. This time I wasn't going to go through that again. But thinking about what happened before, with Scooter, I'm pretty close to being as bad off now as I was then. Dogs really should go quietly in their sleep.
Spencer's better off now. I think I'm saying that because it's really the case, and not because it makes me feel better about having to do something that I'd otherwise question. Spencer didn't look at me with sad eyes that said "Please, put me out of this pain." He didn't really look at me at all, but just stared straight ahead, panting furiously. He never whimpered either. Wish that he had, to tell you the truth. I know he was just a dog, but he trusted us implicitly for everything about his life. He trusted that we would be there to feed him, to open the door to the kids' bedrooms so he could sleep next to them, to make sure there was always water. It's not as if he could have survived in the wild, and it's not as if he ever had any reason to doubt we'd be there for him. But in the end we said our tearful goodbyes and handed him over to the 'vet, who'd been through this sort of thing so many times before that, to her (the 'vet), it must have been as routine as us making sure he had water and food. And now, for the next few minutes, I'm going to have to stay holed up in the office at the shop, because my bloodshot, tearing eyes are probably not what the rest of the store should be seeing. And I'm thinking that maybe I should have been there, at the end, after all. It couldn't have been any worse than what I'm going through now.
06/21/07- MAYBE IT MEANS THAT I'M ALIVE AND THEY'RE... not that I'd ever be accused of rationalizing something, but I'm thinking, as I'm trying desperately to keep up with Todd & Karl on the west side of Old LaHonda... and the quiet of the upper forest is rudely disturbed by my heavy breathing... and I'm noting that I can't hear Todd or Karl breathe whatsoever... I'm thinking that maybe it's a sign that I'm alive and they're... what... ghosts? There's just got to be some positive side to the steamtrain-like sound of my breathing!
Aside from that, another nice day to be out on the bike. Spotted the re-emergence of tiny little rabbits (out on west-side Old LaHonda), and, while climbing Kings earlier, scared off a large (aren't they all?) Raven that was munching on road kill of some sort. I watched as he carried it away in his talons (why don't they just call them toes?), and wondered how he'd be able to land without dropping it. Answer? He did drop it, right when he landed on the tree branch. Given that Ravens are supposed to be one of, if the not smartest of birds, seemed a bit strange that he couldn't figure out that was going to happen and go for a landing on the ground somewhere.
Oops, almost forgot the roll call. Karl, Todd, Millo & Eric. I don't think I've left anybody out, aside from the rabbits, one tiny lizard and a very large Raven.
Trying out some new tires on my bike (finally time to take off my larger "winter" tire on the rear, and my front tire was beginning to get a bit chewed up). You know how sometimes you wonder if you ride at a level where you can notice small, subtle differences? Well, changing tires seems to transcend subtle. I found myself a little bit sketchy on the descents and a bit less stable in crosswinds (an odd thing, that). Probably something I'll get used to in a few days though. But, in general, don't overlook the possibility that a new pair of tires can make quite a difference in how your bike rides. For what it's worth, I'm having a really difficult time finding a tire I like as much as the Bontrager Race X-Lite. Just wish they would fare better when it's wet; the slightest hint of moisture seems to cause them to get severely sliced & diced. Whatever it is that makes them handle so nicely, and feel so comfortable, seems at odds with durability in the wet.
06/19/07- A COUPLE OF DAYS MAKES A HUGE DIFFERENCE sometimes, and this was one of those times. While last Thursday I put up a rather distressing entry about the effects of stress on my riding, some of which may have been an excuse for my lack of fitness relative to this time last year, and generally getting ground up on the regular Tuesday/Thursday rides, this morning was entirely different. Maybe it was because I finally got a full 6.75 hours of sleep instead of the six and a half (and sometimes less) I'd been getting lately, or maybe I've just come to terms with all the things going on and am now actively doing something about them rather than stressing out. Whatever it was, I felt like I was having some fun climbing Kings this morning, doing intervals for the first time in a good many months, and generally feeling like I could almost hang with the big guys.
Karl, Kevin, Chris, Eric, Millo... George was the only Tuesday regular who didn't show. The main excitement was in the run down west 84 to Old LaHonda, when we had a truck pulling a horse trailer pass us close to a blind corner, with a car coming in the opposite direction to demonstrate why you don't pass in such a situation. To say that those two came close to running into each other is an understatement, while I'm watching the show, and more-casually-than-I-ought-to thinking about the physics involved in the event of their collision, in terms of where the bits & pieces might fly and if I might be in a dangerous place. No fear, just kind of a casual, detached feeling about the event which, fortunately, didn't take place.
06/17/07- OH DEAR, IT'S A DEER! For Father's Day I went riding with my son (Kevin) and showed him a few of our local "secret" roads. We started out by climbing Kings (seems like I do a lot of that), but then, instead of heading south on Skyline, we continued down the other side (Tunitas Creek) and headed back up Starr Hill. Yes, up that nasty little section that's steeper than steep, and he did just fine. But the most exciting part of the ride was the descent into Sky L'Onda, as a tiny (and I mean tiny!) little deer walked out into the road in front of Kevin. I actually had my camera out at the time, but couldn't set up very well due to my speed (I generally make it a rule not to be taking pictures above 35mph and we were doing about 37 at the time).
Tiny little deer, by the way, aren't much different from squirrels. They're quite unpredictable, and this little guy first started heading out directly into Kevin's line before suddenly turning away. Meanwhile I'm yelling at Kevin to "slow down" while at the same time trying to take pictures. Yeah, Dad's real smart... someday he's going to get a great shot of exactly what caused his own crash.
After heading down into Woodside, it was time for just a little more fun. Summit Springs Road. I've mentioned it in passing, while passing, several times before. Kevin never seemed too interested in trying it, which I figured was evidence of having a small amount of common sense. But this time was different. So we headed up as far as the turn off to Patrol Road (I think that's it), all the while explaining to Kevin how it's possible to climb impossibly-steep grades with relatively-little effort (not too quickly, of course!). Zero-effort hill climbing, I call it. And he actually seemed to grasp the concept! And once you've tricked your mind into believing that such a thing is possible, you can ride that wave of deception pretty much anywhere.
06/15/07- IT'S NOT ALL THAT BAD. Yesterday's diary entry sounds rather depressing, and that's not the way it ought to read. Stress and depression are two very different things, with stress being something that I can work through myself, something that I can see a beginning, middle and an end to. I might be rationalizing, but I don't think that's depression. If I didn't have a great staff, if I didn't have the tools I need to deal with the daily demands of being in business, if I didn't have a family that I love unconditionally (but don't sometimes show it as well as I should) and loves me unconditionally back (and doesn't always show it as well as they should), then maybe I'd be depressed!
Tomorrow's Kevin's big day at the velodrome (bicycle racing track)- the district championships! He's come a lot further than I thought possible just a few months ago and, while he's going to be pretty severely out-gunned due to his age, I think he's going to have a lot of fun and people will know that he's "real" and going to turn some heads a year or two down the road. (The way the age groups work, your "racing" age is your age on December 31st of the prior year, so if you turn 15 at the end of this-coming November, like Kevin does, you're racing against 15 & 16 year olds... yikes!).
And my daughter Becky, who you might have had help you at the shop? I'm trying to get her more into riding via social consciousness, by trying to get her to attend the annual Washington DC bicycle lobbying event. She knows her stuff; anyone who's come in for a bike knows that. She just hasn't yet realized that bikes are the answer to life, the universe, & everything. Or maybe she knows that, but is in denial. Hopefully a couple more quarters at UC Santa Cruz and she'll realize that all the cool guys ride bikes. Or maybe I just want to rationalize that, since I went to UC Santa Cruz, and rode a bike, I was a cool guy. Hmm. OK, I see the issue here. Darn.
06/14/07- STRESS. And lots of it. And today, for the first time in quite a number of years, it really affected my riding. Usually, riding is a great way for me to feel better, to relieve the stress, to realize that whatever's bothering me, riding is the cure. But not today. I started (and ended) the ride feeling not just tired, but worn out. The cause of the stress? Primarily TREKs introduction of the new '08 Madone line, which has caused us to drastically re-price our existing inventory (meaning that you can get some very good buys right now!). Lots and lots and lots of $$$ lost. It could be worse; at least I'm getting in hot new bikes that everybody's going to want. A dealer without access to the new Madone design is simply going to find their inventory less desirable to customers, with nothing to offer. So yes, it could be worse. And I'm working (very hard) on ways to move out lots of inventory that's no longer "current" but still great product. That takes time to figure out, and is the source of most of my stress. Daughter in college? 14-year-old boy that I'm working on getting into shape? Wife going through chemotherapy? Most would probably see those as more-significant sources of stress, but they're works in progress. Plans already in place and things being done to deal with them. Faith that, in every case, things are going to work out fine... it just takes a bit of time. My family is, of course, more important than the business... but it's all so closely tied together that distinctions are often blurred. So yes, once in a while, the business does get to me. There's nothing better I can think of doing than getting people on bikes for a living though.
I rode Kings a bit differently today, deciding to try and stay in the saddle (not stand up) as much as possible. And I made it as far as the half-way hairpin before having to stand in the steep middle section the preceded the wide-open area. Boy did I feel sore in different places than normal! Wherever the muscles from your leg connect up under your tail end? That was sore!
Kevin, Karl, Eric, Millo & Todd to keep me honest about things. A really good bunch of guys who either know exactly how far they can turn the screws before I come unglued, or, worse, have me thinking they do! No wild sprints today as Millo discovered cracks in his handlebar stem... er, no, I can't really use that as an excuse for Todd nailing the sprint into Sky L'Onda. I was going for it, Todd was going for it. Todd got it by quite a distance. Next time I'll try using a lower gear; I crested the small hill we sprint for at about 32mph and found myself almost pushing & shoving on the handlebars. Sounds like too high a gear at 50x12. 50x13 might be just the ticket.
06/13/07- HOW COULD I POSSIBLY BE LUSTING AFTER ANOTHER BIKE? After all, my TREK Madone 5.9SSL represents pretty much the pinnacle of bicycle technology and function. Until today. Read all about the new Madones on our website. I have the benefit of having ridden one last week in Wisconsin (at the TREK 100 benefit ride), as well as a couple months earlier during product testing & verification trials near San Diego. Truth be told, my present bike remains an incredible machine, but people are going to be drawn like moths to a light to the new machines, which have turned inside-out certain basic ideas about how a bike should interface with the headset & cranks & seat. The new bikes are going to trickle in slowly, but meantime there are some screaming deals on what's left of our '05 & '06 inventory, as well as some of the current '07s.
06/12/07- WHY BOTHER BRINGING THE CAMERA if I'm not going to be able to use it? Not many opportunities this morning as I was first being chased by Eric, then Eric passes me about halfway up Kings and I'm... well, I'm definitely not chasing him, just trying to keep him in sight! Meanwhile Karl, George, Millo & Kevin are having a good old time a couple minutes behind. Best thing about the ride was not having to wear leg warmers or tights. No, that's not true. Best thing about the ride is simply being on a bike. It takes me places, both physically and in the mind. It challenges me to keep up as long as I can, with the knowledge that I'll get a chance to recover whenever it flattens out and there's a wheel I can draft behind. And the sprints... that's probably when I feel most alive.
06/11/07- DIDN'T GET TO RIDE THIS PAST WEEKEND, and I feel... like I didn't get to ride this past weekend. Hate that feeling! But did get Kevin to the track on Sunday, for the final tune-up session prior to the state championships this-coming Saturday. Also put up a piece on the new '08 Madone bicycles that everyone's been talking about, and I was fortunate to ride a week ago in Wisconsin (at the TREK 100 benefit event).
06/08/07- THIN
GS ANYONE CAN RELATE TO- An insidious plot to embarrass us and make us seem clumsy and hopeless was discovered the other day when, upon taking a drink from my cup of Starbucks coffee, I dribbled some down my chin and shirt. So I'm thinking gee, what a klutz, I'll be more careful. Drink again, SAME THING HAPPENS!!! Double-klutz? Yeah, probably. Only this time I did a bit more research into the issue and I discover, to my amazement, that it isn't me! Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that I'm not a klutz. But close inspection of the lid of the coffee cup reveals a split that occurs just down from the drinking hole. A slit that allows the coffee a secondary path out of the cup, right where your chin is. Starbucks may be saving a penny or so a cap by using ultra-thin el-cheapo versions that are prone to splitting, and, in doing so, heavily damaging the American psyche!
06/07/07- KARL'S VERSION OF SLOW is just a bit different than mine, which is defined as Kevin (the guy I ride with in the mornings, not my son) on a bike day. That would be about 35 minutes up Kings, a slow-enough time that allows many more people to be able to relate to what goes on on our Tuesday/Thursday-morning rides. Karl insisted that he had to take it very easy because the Pescadero Road Race was coming up this weekend, but it appears Karl's version of very
slow is my version of a fast ride when I'm feeling not-quite-right, which would be just under 30 minutes. And so it was this morning, as I'm struggling to keep ahead of Karl & Todd who were quite amiably chatting away, while trying to chase down Millo, who'd left a bit ahead of us.
Todd showing up for our rides is a good thing, as it reminds me that there's a lot more to sprinting that pure power. Todd, aka THH (The Human Hummingbird), spins his way past everyone, and just keeps going. For me, it takes a bit of time to get the power going, but once I do, I can generally run down most others. But not when Todd's around. It throws off my game in general; for the Sky L'Onda sprint, Todd took off a bit early, and I'm thinking great, he's gone. But he faded, a strange and rare thing to see, so I'm pulling up ahead, paying attention to Todd and not Millo, who's come up the other side and gets to the line first. Yeah, I felt pretty dumb.
06/05/07- SOME DAYS THERE'S NOTHING BETTER THAN THAT FEELING WHEN YOU GET ON THE BIKE AND SPIN THOSE CRANKS. You're instantly transformed from the drudgeries of everyday life to something magical. Today was not one of those days. Got on the bike to head out to the start of the Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride, and couldn't believe how slowly I turned the pedals. Heading up Jefferson at 10mph instead of 13 and just never being able to get the engine out of low gear. Actually, it felt more like an engine that was having trouble pushing too high a gear... that kind of lurching/near-stalling feeling. Eventually I got to the start, where Karl & Eric & Chris were ready to slice & dice me. Funny thing though; bad as I felt, a climb is a climb, and after the first part you just start making your way up on memory, and somehow get to the top a bit faster than you expect. For me, a day I'm feeling sick (which is fortunately rare) I might take 30 minutes to get to the top, and if I'm totally dead, maybe just a bit faster. Kevin, if he's totally dead, might take 35 minutes (however, one must consider that if he's "on" he'll be up there in 24!). The morning was around 27:45 or so, maybe a minute faster than expected. Milo was already at the top, having left a bit earlier.
Of course, that didn't leave anything left for Skyline! Fortunately, the coolness (46 degrees) and fog seemed to have a moderating effect, so when Karl & Chris & Eric sprinted away from me on the first & second climbs/sprints, I was still able to at least keep them in sight.
Chris turned off to head back to work (down 84 into Woodside) while the rest of us dutifully rode the west-side Old LaHonda loop, with me bringing up the rear for the first part, finally managing to get a small bit of steam going towards the end. Not the last we'd see of Chris though; as we descended into Woodside, there he was, behind the barrier on the final hairpin (near the bottom), finishing up a tube replacement. He'd blown a tire but fortunately managed to control the results without crashing. That'll teach him for not doing the entire ride with us! Not that our ride has been entirely without incident, of course, but truthfully flat tires are a very rare thing for us. And now that I've jinxed things...
But if there was a story to today's ride, it was something I'd forgotten about- that you can feel not-so-great at the start of the ride, but given a bit of time & patience, things get better. Almost every time. This was one of those times, although I recognized it more in retrospect than I did while I was riding. I began feeling pretty strong once at the top of Skyline, and when Karl took off on Manuella, I actually lifted my front wheel off the ground accelerating to catch him. And even though he had a pretty big lead going into the final sprint, instead of giving up, I was thinking great, lots of space here to get up to speed and try to catch him. Not the way you think when you're totally wasted, and a far cry from how I felt when I first got on the bike. Now, I can't wait to ride again. The world is back in order.
06/03/07- ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CENTURY well, metric anyway. Flying back from Wisconsin last night I got home around 11:30pm, just in time to get my bike ready for the Sequoia Century this morning. The original plan was to ride it with my son, but that didn't work out as he'd come down with quite a nasty cold. Normally that would give me an excuse to ride the 100 miler, but that would have required that I get up a bit earlier and sleep has been running in very short supply the last 4 days. So instead I rode to & from the Sequoia, adding another 17 miles or so to make it 78 miles total, and about 7200 ft of climbing. Not exactly up to last-year's standards, when I rode the 100 mile version of the TREK 100 the previous day, and 112 miles on the Sequoia the next!
06/02/07- THIS DON'T LOOK LIKE KANSAS... OR DOES IT? I've always thought clouds were cool to check out; one of my great, unanswered questions (so far) is this- what causes some clouds to have sharply-defined edges, while others just kind of taper off? But the cloud I was looking at today was dark & exceptionally-nasty-looking, and heading right towards me (or maybe I was heading right towards it) about halfway through the 100k version of the TREK 100 in Wisconsin. Within about 5 minutes you couldn't even hear yourself think, the rain was coming down so hard. So hard that my group sought shelter in a building housing a flea market. But most of it was gone within maybe 10 minutes, and the rest of the ride (and indeed everything up to that point) was very nice indeed. Last year I rode the 100 mile version, and I had some intent to do so this year, but was concerned about a pretty tight time schedule for my flight out of town... and then, when I got stuck on the wrong side of a very major accident (a bunch of bicyclists that didn't make the corner on a descent and rode into a bunch of trees, requiring that the road be shut down while they brought in ambulances), which lost me about half an hour... that was the clincher.
But at the end of the ride I felt pretty lame about not having down the 100 mile, as a friend of mine, Steve Howard (who owns Livermore Cyclery across the bay), was in the front group and finished in 4 hrs 23 minutes, including rest stops. That's flying! And he finished just about the same time I did.
My guess, though, is that I had a bit more time to spend with various people along the way, including friends at Trek who I don't get to see very often.
05/31/07- WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO HAVE RIDDEN THIS MORNING, but instead I found myself on a plane flying to Wisconsin, where this Saturday I ride the a benefit century for the Midwest Children's Cancer fund. Well, that's not the only reason I'm out here; it's also a dog & pony show for whatever new product's coming down the line (basically what the team will be riding at the Tour de France). I'll post a ride report when/if I get one from Karl or Kevin; I'd already been told that Millo was going to miss it again today.
05/29/07- THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW. Ouch. And then some. Just 10.5 hours after finishing last-night's Felton-Redwood City speed run I'm back on the bike again, struggling to turn the pedals en route to this morning's umpteeth-zillion Tuesday-Thursday-morning ride. It didn't actually hurt, it just didn't feel particularly good. Ancient memories of the Central Coast Stage Race came back, and just how dreadful I felt for the first few miles of the second-day's stage. This was just like that.
Kevin, Karl & George this morning, with George feeling pretty darned good about having won the Mt. Hamilton Road Race on Sunday. Chris, I'm told, took 2nd in his class. That's the type of animal I'm riding with these days. Kevin, at least, was feeling somewhat mortal, having just gotten back from a multi-day ride down the coast.
05/28/07- I HAVE NEVER FELT MORE ALIVE than I did riding back from Felton on Memorial Day. We did our traditional Memorial Day gig, driving to Felton and taking the train from there to the Boardwalk (Santa Cruz), spending 5 hours at the beach and then returning to Felton. Which, because I hadn't ridden Sunday (due to Kevin's track session, mentioned below), normally would mean that I wouldn't get to ride at all over the weekend. So I come up with a plan. Instead of driving back with the family, I pack my bike in the car and ride the 45 miles back, literally racing the sun.
And race it was, because the train pulled in almost an hour late, so by the time I got on my bike it was 6:28pm. I had figured about three hours to make it over the hill (up 9 through the San Lorenzo Valley to Skyline, then north on Skyline to Sky L'Onda, down 84 into Woodside and then Redwood City (home).
I made two bottles of Cytomax, which I made a point of drinking at regular intervals, and not once did I feel like I'd hit the wall and my legs needed a rest. I could stand, I could sit, I could simply ride. The longest stretch was from Felton to Saratoga Gap (Skyline), where I arrived at 7:50pm. Most surprising was that I covered the 7+ miles from Saratoga Gap to Page Mill by 8:11pm, and the remaining 6+ miles to Sky L'Onda by 8:30. At that point I was thankful I had some decent lights, strong enough that I was able to ride at a speed such that a car pulled over for me as I sped downhill. By 9pm I was home, just 2.5 hours after I'd started.
Back in the day (way back in the day), we used to do the out-and-back Redwood City to Santa Cruz run at about 2.5 hours out, and a bit over 3 hours back. Of course, that included another 6 miles (from Santa Cruz to Felton) and legs that had already put in 50 miles getting there. Still, I was pretty happy with how things went. I just felt good. And finally got a half-way decent night's sleep for a change.
05/27/07- DON'T KNOW IF HE'S THE DUMBEST KID AT THE TRACK, OR THE SMARTEST. It was quite a day for Kevin (my 14-year-old) at the track, open for only the second weekend after having been closed for several months while the infield is being reconstructed. Only about 10 kids out there this time, probably because people got out of the habit while the track was shut down (normally, they run the program for 10-15 year old kids on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of each month).
After grouping the kids according to their speed (determined by running 500 meter time trials), Kevin found himself in a group of 5... 4 boys and one... girl. One of those 14 or 15-year-old girls that Kevin complains there aren't enough of riding bikes. They ran a 12-lap (4 kilometer) scratch race, with a sprint halfway through, and another at the end. So what does Kevin do? He rides at the front, pushing the pace, and quickly gets rid of the other 3 boys. That leaves... just the girl, sitting in Kevin's draft, enjoying the ride. From the infield, it was almost laughable. There's Kevin, pulling this other rider around the track (who happened to be a girl), with everyone, including Dad, knowing exactly how this plays out. How it should play out is for the two of them to work together, making sure the other three riders don't have a chance to catch up, and then going for it shortly before the sprint.
But how it does play out is determined by a 14-year-old boy publicly demonstrating a combination of pride, ignorance and a desire to show off in front of a girl. I yell at Kevin, even other people were yelling at Kevin to pull off the front and let her do a bit of work. Didn't matter. Kevin just stayed at the front. And then, with just three laps to go, she decides (for reasons unfathomable) to take a turn at the front. And, just as surprisingly (or maybe not by now), Kevin won't let her come around.
And, of course, it plays out as expected at the end. with just under half a lap to go, she pulls around Kevin for the win. Technically, Kevin still won the race, because the officials claim she "chopped" him in the sprint, coming down across him, but it looked pretty clean to me, and Kevin didn't think she did anything wrong. No surprise there.
05/24/07- WHERE DID THE TIME GO??? I usually don't get this far behind on the almost-daily diary; right now it looks like it's the almost-weekly version. Yikes. But I'll start with this-morning's ride and work backward from there. Millo, Karl, Kevin, Eric... I don't think I'm leaving anyone out. We worked to get Millo up the hill as expeditiously as possible, but I'm beginning to think he sand-bags on the climb a bit so he has something in reserve for other parts of the ride. You'd think he'd be dead up on Skyline, but sometimes the guy's an absolute motor. Still nice weather; great to not have to search for leg warmers or jackets as you get ready to ride. And as it gets warmer, I find myself more-tolerant of the Wild Berry Cytomax, which tastes more like an antacid medication than something you look forward to drinking. Tangy Orange and Cranberry-Grapefruit are my flavors of choice.
As we were pulling a more-moderate pace up Kings I had a bit left for the west-side of Old LaHonda... for the first couple miles. As soon as we got to the steeper part past the open section with the views of the ocean, I watched Karl & Kevin ride off into the trees and limped the remaining distance up to Skyline. It would have been fun to ride strong the whole way, but that's not in the cards quite yet. I do want to get there though!
05/17/07- IF YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT SHOWING UP FOR OUR FRIENDLY RIDE... well, it really should be a no-brainer. Of course you're welcome to come. But would you want to? That's the question that I had to answer earlier today, when somebody at the shop was asking about our ride and thinking about showing up. 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been an issue. If you could get up the hill (Kings Mtn) in under 40 minutes, we'd wait for you, and maybe provide encouragement along the way. That was then. Now? Somewhere along the way the Tuesday/Thursday ride has become something more akin to a formal training ride, complete with sprints, timings on the climb, and an ever-increasing pace. I used to make it back home around 9:50am or so; this morning, it was 9:28.
The good news is that it's kept me in reasonable shape, and helped to keep at bay the normal stuff that's supposed to come with getting older- putting on weight, getting slower, more fatigue. I have to admit I'm better off in those areas than I expected to be. But off-setting that is the fact that it's rare that I can catch a breath on our ride. Most of the other guys, no problem. Partly because they have more opportunities to ride than I do, and partly because their lungs are better at scavenging oxygen when the temp's below 60 than mine are. And fewer opportunities to take photos when you're trying desperately to keep up with a fast crowd!
This morning's ride? It was actually me setting the schedule, as I had to be back
as early as possible... so no hanging out at the top of Kings Mtn. Kevin, Karl, Millo, Eric & Chris, although Millo had left a bit early so he could do a more-leisurely pace up the hill. Still a bit on the cool side, and even slightly damp up on Skyline, with the sun & fog creating patterns in the air, as you can see in the photo. But while it was me setting the schedule, it was Kevin, Karl & Chris pushing the pace (with Eric gamely hanging on). If I was able to get in some killer Sunday rides, I could hang with them more easily. But since I've been riding with my son when the opportunity arises, I've instead gotten to experience an entirely different type of riding- casual cruising? A type of riding where you've got plenty of time for photos, and you're never out of breath for conversation. Your heart rate might average 100 (vs 140 or so for a killer ride), and the average speed around 11mph instead of 16. No sprints either.
It's actually rather nice riding like that now & then. I'd probably enjoy doing it even more, except that, with the limited time I have to ride, I'd quickly lose the strength needed for the gnarly hills I like to ride in the Sierras. That and the fact that you don't get that same feeling that you're turning back the clock with you can outsprint someone 15 years younger!
05/17/07- NO COMMENT, FOR NOW, ON THE GREG LeMOND/FLOYD LANDIS ISSUE. You can read all about it on Cyclingnews.com if you wish, but you might want to keep a barf bag handy. Great to know that the media now has something to replace Anna Nicole Smith stories with.
05/15/07- LOST MY NERVE TODAY descending 84 into Woodside. We'd had a nice ride up to that point; no Millo, but we had Kevin, Karl, Chris, Eric, George and... John? Darn, I forget his name; he showed up a few weeks ago, nice guy, but can't do the entire ride with us due to having to get to work.
Moderate pace for most going up Kings today, but killer pace for me. And yet the same speed. How does that work? A bit cooler today, lots of fog, but none of the cool sunlight-through-the-trees effects we saw last ride, although I did remember to bring the camera this time, just in case.
We're now seeing a number of other people regularly on "the hill", and you can tell something about the nature of our group by the fact that it doesn't seem to matter that many of them are women. No change in routine; everyone simply rides past in the same nonchalant manner that you pass other cars on the freeway. I have an excuse for my own lack of social skills that goes beyond the fact that I don't have social skills- my breathing is so ragged when I'm trying to keep up with everyone that I couldn't exchange much in the way of pleasantries even if I wanted to. That's one advantage when I'm riding with the "other" Kevin (my son). Big difference in my ability to converse when my heart rate is at 100 vs 164!
Also noteworthy this morning was the return of "3-dog Lady", who used to be a regular on our ride; we'd always see her just after the start of the ride. For a couple years she'd appear to scowl at us, making us feel rather unwelcome on her roads. We took it upon ourselves to change that, no matter how long it took. I believe it was about 3 year before she would return our always-cheery "Good mornings", and after awhile, you could see her smile as we came by. We'd grown concerned that she'd been missing for several months, but she was back this morning, with all 3 dogs in tow.
Regarding losing my nerve on 84, that happened just past the straight stretch with the retaining wall on the right-hand side of the road, where you have the big view of everything from Stanford up to Oakland. The length right-hand turn that follows can be taken at a fair amount of speed and, as I was out in front, feeling a bit of pressure from behind, I was pushing fairly hard. In the middle of the corner things just didn't feel quite right though, as if I was pushing a bit too hard on the front tire. I never slid, but got a bit rattled, and from then on, took it very easy the rest of the way down the hill. One of those times where you start imagining that you've got a flat tire, but you don't. If I wasn't riding with a group I would have stopped and collected my wits before continuing.
05/13/07- ONE MORE HILL CLIM
BED as Kevin (the 14 year old) rode up Page Mill for the first time. He considered it a fair amount tougher than Tunitas Creek, mostly due to that middle section that goes... up! We stopped a couple times, first at the entrance to Foothill Park, and then again a couple miles up after one of the steeper sections. Climbing time from Arastradero was 1hr 36 minutes, including stops, which isn't going to set any records but heck, for me, it's kinda nice once in a while to do a ride where I'm not the one pushed to the limit! Having said that, I should point out that I go to quite a bit of trouble making sure Kevin's not in too much distress, including making sure he's getting enough to drink, stopping before he asks to stop, and not letting his heart rate get too high.
The original plan was to continue down West Alpine on the other side and then back up 84, but Mother's Day commitments conflicted with that, so we rode north on Skyline and then back down 84.
Will he be ready for the 100k Sequoia in a couple weeks? Tough to say, but I didn't want him to even try that until we saw if he could handle Page Mill first (which the 100k Sequoia heads up right near the start).
05/12/07- CAT'S HILL RECAP- Somehow I neglected to tell the story of my son's first criterium last Saturday. He's been participating in the jr track series at the Velodrome (although that's been on hold for a while due to construction) as well as a time trial on Canada Road. But this was going to be his first real live USCF bicycle race. We'd done a recon of the course the prior Sunday, and were pretty confident he'd be able to manage the nastily-steep but mercifully-short hill. Confident enough that I decided, just before the race, to set his front derailleur so it couldn't go to the smallest chainring
on his triple crank, since making that shift sometimes causes the chain to derail.
His race was just 3 laps, and as we'd done 4 without incident in our recon, I wasn't worried. At least I wasn't worried until lap 2, when I watched him stall out about halfway up the hill and have to run to the top! At that moment I was thinking I must be the worst Dad in the world, having locked out his lower gears, but then, as he got close to me, I looked at his bike and saw he still had two larger rear gears to go. He'd forgotten to shift! Doh! No problem on the final lap, but he got passed by quite a few others during his run up the hill. Don't think he'll make that mistake again.
Don't think he'd ever been pushed quite so hard for 15 minutes either; at the end of the race, he was pretty wiped out. Not exactly a walk in the park, and I think he was quite impressed with how strong some of the other kids were.
05/10/07- A FEW DAYS BEHIND in getting this entry in! Thursday's ride was quite different from Tuesday. For one thing, it was back to leg warmers & base layers again, with the temp getting as low as 43. Not winter temps to be sure, but Tuesday's ride saw 62-66 degrees and the first time this year I've been able to ride in the morning without leg warmers. We were also a much smaller group... in fact, it was just Chris & Kevin, and Kevin didn't even come along for the full ride, choosing instead to head back down 84 when we got to Sky L'Onda (he was trying to save something for the Central Coast Double Century on Saturday).
What was really unfortunate was that this was one of the rare rides when I chose not to bring my camera, and the light shining through the fog & trees on Skyline was spectacular! The sort of thing that you'd see in famous photos, where the photographer figures out exactly the right time for the light to come through at exactly the right angle, and just hope to get just the right amount of fog for the right effect. It was all there!!! Dang.
05/08/07- DID YOU NOTICE HOW VIBRANT SHE LOOKED? But we'll get to that shortly. George, Eric, Karl, Chris, Kevin... and Joe! Joe who we usually see riding with Ted about the time we get going, but never heading up the hill. But today Joe was with us as well, taking the place of Millo. Joe kicks up our average age only slightly, being on the far side of 60, but he's proof that getting older doesn't mean getting slower. Actually, I used to race with Joe back in the day; we were both members of the local Pedali Alpini club. Of course, I use was a young punk junior at the time, while Joe was technically an adult. If I recall correctly, he pretended to be an adult fairly well. With some encouragement, I got Joe up the hill in 29:25 which, he said, was about three minutes faster than his best times lately.
Kevin had warned me that he was going to be dog slow, which, as usual, was an absolute lie. I'm getting used to that, but still, after all these years of riding with him, give him the benefit of the doubt. But lately it's Chris that's been riding consistently strong, too strong actually!
Noteworthy events included having to come to a screeching halt from full speed on the descent towards Sky L'Onda as a huge truck was blocking the road, and the young woman we saw who'd just arrived at the top of east-side Old LaHonda just as we had come up from the west. That's the person whom Karl remarked "Did you see how vibrant she looked?" Meaning that she radiated a healthy glow or something like that. Me, I was noticing mostly that she was riding a Trek 5000 that our shop had sold. Being married, it's probably better that that's what I notice.
05/06/09- 38 MILE WARM-UP BEFORE 22 MILES OF PAIN, ER, I MEAN, FUN! Since this was the first Sunday of the month, the original plan was to do a morning ride and then take Kevin down to the Jr track session at the Velodrom (bike racing track). But the construction at the track still isn't finished , so we had an "off" day with no special events planned. Had I known earlier, I might have signed up for the Grizzly Peak century, one of my favorites. Instead, we left pretty late on a fairly-ambitious (for Kevin) ride out to the coast, via Pescadero, and back 84.
As it was pretty darned warm, and Kevin had ridden the Cat's Hill race yesterday, it was predictable that we'd be cutting the ride a bit short and bailing at San Gregorio. And that's pretty much how far Kevin got; we called for the broom wagon from Pescadero, then headed out over Stage Road to San Gregorio, and got about 2 miles up the road before the broom wagon arrived. Up to that point it had been a pretty easy ride for me, despite the heat I wasn't used to. Average heart rate of about 100, and whatever calories I might have burned off equalized by a stop at the Pescadero Bakery.
So Kevin off in the broom wagon (driven by his sister), and I rode the rest of the way home by myself. But at a bit different pace. I tested my legs on the 6 mile run to LaHonda, found that they held up, and put down the hammer at Apple Jacks (the infamous biker bar in LaHonda). The graph below, from my Garmin 305, shows what 28 minutes of pain looks like-
I'm sure I've climbed that stretch a whole lot faster in the past, but this was my first really tough workout in quite some time. I managed to keep my heart rate well up there (peaked at 176, averaged 166 with quite a bit of time above 170). It was really nice to have legs, lungs & heart all working together at last!
05/04/07- THE FLYING SCOTSMAN opens today at a theater near you! Well, maybe not too near, but today's the day. What's it about? Greame Obree, a guy who, in 1993, fashioned a bike for the hour record that included parts from his wife's washing machine. To say that he improvised is an understatement, as m
uch an understatement as it is to say the odds were heavily against his success. Even the officials battled him every step of the way, insisting that his unorthodox machine wasn't legal, requiring creative modification just before the race.
I met Graeme at last year's Tour de France. My group of 5 were heading towards the finish area after the final stage when I came across a guy who, in casual conversation, was talking about the race and name-dropping in a manner that implied he was something other than the typical race fan. He then said he was Graeme Obree, which at that point I wasn't quite so sure of (perhaps because he'd had a bit too much to drink, although in retrospect, knowing that should have been something of a confirmation)... so I asked more question and, once convinced, introduced him to our group. Even they were mildly skeptical, at which point he pulls out his passport to show that he was, indeed, Graeme Obree. That's Graeme in the middle of the photo.
To find the nearest theater and showtimes, try Fandango . Lots of good reviews, including 3-stars from both the San Jose Mercury News and Ebert & Roeper .
05/03/07- "IT DOESN'T GET EASIER, YOU JUST GO FASTER." You know how you rationalize that something someone says doesn't apply to you, because you're different? Well, it's true. Greg LeMond is famous for the quote given; the context was someone asking the question if he found that bike racing got easier as he trained more.
I can vouch for the first part of the equation... the part about it not getting easier. But the second part? I'm still looking for that "go faster" bit! Actually that's not entirely true; I was there last year, and the year before, when I was able to get 25-something times up Kings. But that was then, this is now. I haven't even ridden a mile-based century yet this year; normally I would have ridden three by now. Different priorities, as I work to get my 14-year-old with the program. And it's paying off, with him riding better all the time, and beginning to look more like a cyclist and less like a video-game player. An excellent trade-off, I'm thinking. Still, it's a bit different than the norm. Typically, Dads spend their time working with their kids, but there isn't such a direct connection between Dad getting out of shape so the kid gets better. The pay-off should come in a couple years though, as he gets increasingly stronger and eventually discovers, to my combined dismay and joy, that he can ride Dad into the ground. I live for that day!
Meanwhile, a smaller group than normal on Thursday's ride... just myself, Karl & Millo at the start, picking up Kevin about halfway up Kings. A bit cooler than expected too, hitting 43 degrees up on Skyline. Hard to believe they're talking 90 for Sunday!
05/01/07- NO RIDE FOR MIKE TODAY as it was time to play the lobbyist game again, in Sacramento. Things are a bit different in Sacramento vs DC. A bit more laid-back, and a bit more likely to have questions asked of you, as if they actually care. Not that the folk in DC don't care, but in Sacramento, they'll sometimes see you as helping them to get something done.
BUT WE DID GET A RIDE REPORT FROM MILLO-Some days we get traffic, at exactly the wrong time and place - bad karma - and some days seems like we are the only ones out there - good karma. Today was a bad karma day. Gorgeous blue sky sunny day. Full crowd - Karl, Kevin, George, Chris, Eric, and your humble narrator. None of us knew/remembered that you were in Sacto achieving great things for cyclists so we milled around aimlessly for 5 minutes waiting for you, our fearless leader, before heading up the hill. Chris breaking in his new bike - speeding up hills at ridiculous speed. Even heard him say that maybe, just maybe he might challenge Todd for a sprint!
Karl and Chris off quickly, George eventually drifted off after them, I held Kevin and Eric in sight until the wide part of Kings. Karl and Chris jumped off for the first sprint. Kevin riding his TT bike and swooping past everybody to lead out the Skeggs sprint - Karl and Chris over first. Kevin down on the aerobars and pulling us along 84 and the descent to Sky Londa - going amazingly quickly thru the corners in a full aero tuck. I jumped past Kevin to lead out the Sky Londa sprint to watch Karl/Chris/George pull a 1/2/3 right in front of me, all decked out in matching AV gear. Kevin continued to pull us down 84 to the barn. Just as we were turning up West OLH we scrambled to
avoid an oncoming car.
Slogged back up to Skyline - Kevin and Eric fading, Karl/Chris/George off the front, yours truly stuck in no man's land. Large and smelly diesel dump truck headed down 84 just as we arrived; Kevin going straight to get home, the rest of us sucking in poorly combusted hydrocarbons. A pickup coming up tried to side-swipe George - per Chris a perilous near mess. Often happens when following a big vehicle as it completely blocks the oncoming cars view of the trailing cyclists. Dump truck eventually pulled over to let us all go by - big "Thank You" and off we go lead by Karl.
For the second time in two weeks the left onto Tripp was compromised by oncoming traffic - already committed to the turn before seeing the oncoming car and pretty much have to stick with it - not sure how close on your tail the next rider is and if any sudden braking of change of line is going to embed them into your rear tire so yell out "car" and go for it. Karl and I made it, Chris and George did not. Sprint to Olive Hill shut down by a car. We gotta offer some old Campy parts to the Madonna del Ghisallo to improve carma for Thursday's ride........ --M (Millo)
04/29/07- CATS HILL RECON MISSION today, but not for me. This was for Kevin (the 14-year-old) who plans to race it next Saturday. There's that one brief nasty hill, but he's got it down pretty good. Had a nice ride back home afterward, although Kevin wasn't much of a fan of Pierce or Mt Eden roads. Not that many are! Just one potential glitch in the plans, and that's the category he'll be allowed to race in. If they use the official USCF definition of "racing age" then he'd be considered 15, since it's his age as of Jan 1st 2007 that matters (his birthday is in late November). Racing with 15 year olds wouldn't be so bad, but it's a combined class going all the way up to 18, and there's a world of difference between the two.
04/28/07- AWESOME, MUST-WATCH YOU-TUBE VIDEO for anyone who wants to get a feel for what the racers go through. This is the sort of thing that, if it doesn't hit you hard, well, there's just something wrong with you. I came across it while working out my plans for July, and found the link on the always-excellent steephill.tv website. Follow this link for the video. I just don't know how to explain it... what it is about it that I can relate to so well. Why it's one of those rare things that makes me think, if I could live part of my life over again, if I could have taken racing more seriously, maybe if I'd made the trip to Belgium with some of my peers...
For the most part, I don't spend much time thinking about how things might have been. Rather, I tend to think I dodged a bullet (or two) and that things turned out a lot better than they might have. That somehow I managed to channel my compulsion about cycling and sometimes pushing myself to the limit... somehow I turned that into something more productive than being one of those guys in the peloton whose purpose you can't quite figure out, but might somehow get lucky and take 3rd place in some obscure race in a part of France or Germany nobody knows exists.
Watch the video . It's worth it just for the Johnny Cash song/narration (his rendition of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt").
04/26/07- THE RITUAL STARTS the night before, as I try to get to bed by Midnight, typically an hour earlier than normal. Well, truth be told, I no longer have the inclination to stay up as late as I used to. But for Monday & Wednesday nights, the plan is to be in bed by Midnight, since I'm getting up at 7:05am the next morning, not my usual 8:15. Then it's out to the kitchen to make a bottle of Cytomax, then pop a couple of Advils (don't even know why I still do that, as I haven't had stiff joints for some time), then get dressed, check email, put together my ride bag (a plastic baggie with my license, a credit card, a bit of cash and my cell phone), inflate the tires and, at 7:34am, head out on the road. 29 minutes to get going. I've wondered if I can cut that down a bit and get more sleep, but I should probably put off any big surge in adrenalin until close to the base of Kings Mtn!
Between 8 minutes 15 seconds and 9 minutes 30 seconds I'm at the starting point for the ride. Some mornings you step on the pedals and the bike just goes... others, it feels like those extra 6 pounds I'm carrying have at least doubled, maybe tripled, as I struggle to see something much above 11mph heading up over Jefferson.
This morning was one of those "struggling" times. I felt OK, but only OK, as I joined up with Millo, Kevin, Chris, Karl, Eric and new-guy old-guy Joe (whom I raced with way, way, way back in the day!) at the start. George had planned to be there, but word has it that he was on the early-morning ride and broke his frame in a crash. Ouch! We rode up through the park this time, which, to me, is a whole lot tougher than the regular route... so why did I direct us that way? It's that "ugly ride" thing. If you're not feeling great, sometimes you have to force yourself to do something you don't want to, to shake yourself out of the mood. Bad-tasting medicine as it were.
Skyline was nice; a bit warmer than past weeks, and no fog or dampness. Karl and somebody else... maybe Chris?... took off up Swett Road, which, when I was in better shape, used to be an all-out sprint. Now I just watch as the stronger riders power on past, while I try to conserve enough energy to ride their coat tails into the Skeggs no-designated-finishing-line sprint.
The high point of the ride was the scariest, as Kevin & Karl tried to gap me on the descent into the final Skyline sprint. Normally we'd be hitting 37, 38mph, but today it was 42.9, and it's an interesting experience hitting botts dots in a corner at that speed. Actually, it's not much of an experience physically at all... your bike just keeps tracking where it's supposed to. But mentally, you're thinking it's just not a good idea to be riding the edge of a botts dot in a corner!
04/24/07- WATCH OUT FOR CHRIS! He's an entry-level Cat-5 racer right now, but that won't last. 2nd place in a race last weekend, and mad at me because I'd told somebody who'd come into the shop that, if I were him, I'd watch for Chris and see if there was an opportunity to go off the front with him. But as Chris tells it, the guy announced to others in the pack that someone at Chain Reaction had said Chris was the guy to watch out for, essentially making him a marked man. Well, maybe, but I'll bet that helped intimidate a bunch of them and might have actually made it easier for Chris. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
Karl, Kevin, Eric, Millo, Chris, George... pretty much a full house. Anytime it's 5 or more there's a bit of "book-keeping" involved, as you need to make sure everyone's back together at various points. "Are we all here?" is oft heard, just prior to a head count. Millo headed out a few minutes ahead, while the heavy artillery (actually, with the exception of me, it would be more accurate to say "lightweight" artillery) toyed with his efforts. We (the chase group) re-grouped at the park entrance, sort of. I didn't wait around but kept going, thinking maybe it was possible to get under 28 minutes, spurred on by knowing I had a rabbit to chase in front of me (Millo) and a bunch of mad dogs behind (Karl, Kevin, Eric, Chris & George). I caught up with Millo about halfway up the hill, and the rest of the guys passed me up just past the wide-open section. I was dying. But I did manage to do an honest 27:59.
Sprints? The most interesting one was Skeggs, which was won first by Chris, then Karl, then me. ??? It all depends upon where you draw the line, literally. There's no clearly-defined spot for the finish on that sprint, but I think Karl got past a fading Chris at just about the right place. I was still moving up on the outside and past Karl just after that, but not soon enough. Guess we'll have to go mark some pavement!
04/23/07- REMINDED OF FRANCE TODAY when a young woman came in with a bike that needed to have the saddle lowered. She spoke English a bit awkwardly, but communicated rather well. Only she didn't see it that way; she was quite embarrassed and apologized for her "very bad English" or something like that. Someone else had been helping her, and I couldn't quite make out the accent, so before she left I asked her where she was from and what her native language was. Turns out she's visiting from Brazil, where she speaks Portuguese. I explained to her that she spoke English very nicely (far better than any attempts I'd have at speaking French!).
Funny thing how that goes. People actually learn a foreign language quite well, but are often embarrassed when they don't speak it near-perfectly. I encountered this in France fairly often; one time in particular at the Gare du Nord (one of Paris' main train stations) where I spoke a bit of very poor French to the station agent, asked if he spoke English, to which he replied "A little, but not very well." After a short conversation I told him he spoke English very well indeed, and I would be very happy if I could ever speak French as he spoke English. It never occurred to me before then that people might have a very good grasp of a language, but because they couldn't speak it as well as a native, felt badly about it. The station agent truly seemed to appreciate that I complimented him on his excellent English skills, as did the young woman at the shop today.
So next time you come across someone who's visiting the US and having a bit of diffulty with English, but cleary has made some effort to try and learn the language, try not to focus on the difficulties they're having, but rather their successes. Let them know how great it is that they've learned a different language, especially if you're like me, and have a very difficult time with anything but English.
04/22/07- DAD, THEY'RE CIRCLING. Fortunately not for us, as my son (the 14-year-old Kevin) and I were riding along Calaveras Road on the Primavera Century this morning. It was a ride that nearly wasn't, as the weather
forecast had been questionable, at best. Logging onto several different sites, the most-hopeful of which had rain until 6am, then showers until 9, followed by scattered showers until 1pm. Not the best conditions for his first 100k bike ride.
Nor the best to encourage others as well, given that this very popular ride probably had only 1/4 of the normal number of riders. Too bad, as they missed out on a great event! Yes, the roads were a bit wet for the first hour, but not a single drop came from the sky, and temps ran from upper 50s to about 70. But I do confess that I almost didn't bother setting the alarm to 6:15am (a dreadful hour for a guy like me), and when I did wake up, to dark & threatening skies (but no rain), the first thing I did, before waking up Kevin, was to log on and look at the latest radar. Fortunately, that looked promising, and I also had an email from Burt, one of our guys in Redwood City (who just happened to be the person who talked Kevin into doing the ride), saying that he was getting ready to leave. And if Burt, who doesn't like to trash his bike in the rain, was going to do the ride... how could we not?
The ride wasn't without a small amount of drama, as Kevin got two flats (there were a lot of flats during that first hour) and even crashed. Even blamed me for the crash! Why? Because, on that dreadful climb up Crow's Canyon, always into a nasty headwind, he asked me how long that section was. I jokingly told him 22 miles, which broke his concentration, causing him to ride into my rear wheel and go down (with Burt then falling on top of him).
After the two flat tires and crash, one might think Kevin might have been in a foul mood (not to mention the vultures, very large turkeys and a whole lot of chickens at the final rest stop... oh wait, that's fowl), but that wasn't the case. In fact, he was telling me he had to see Bobby Julich and tell him he was right, cycling is a great way to see the world! This because he's got an autographed photo of the American racer, with a note that says "Kevin- Bike riding's a great way to see the world!"
Burt wasn't the only Chain Reaction employee (besides me) on the ride; we also had Roger, our most-senior expert mechanic, along with a number of his friends. Roger generally finds anything below 80 degrees to be cold, so it was especially surprising (and welcome) to see him make it to the ride as well. Thank goodness none of us seemed to place much faith in the weather forecast!
04/19/07- I'M NOT DEAD YET! In fact, this morning's ride was the first time I've really felt alive in quite a few months. Chris, Kevin & Millo today (no Karl or Eric), with overcast skies and a chill in the air. But no rain, no fog. When I leave from my house, I'm immediately heading up a hill, and some days, ok, most days, you're just riding up the hill, one pedal at a time, and it feels like... a hill. But today was different. From the very first step, the bike almost felt as if it had an engine and I was twisting a throttle. I found that interesting, but remember quite clearly thinking at the time, "this too shall pass."
But it didn't. I was able to ride intervals up Kings and feel like I was really moving. I attacked the first part and didn't find myself looking for a convenient place to shut down (you know, making it look like that was the plan all along). Obviously I wasn't going to shake Kevin & Chris from my tail, but at the same time, I don't think I was holding them back too much either.
Kevin was on a tight schedule so he took off (as seen in the photo) once we got to the top of Old LaHonda... it being close to 9am and having a 10:20am flight out of SFO that he was piloting. And somehow he's got to fit a shower in. Or at least, for the sake of his co-pilot, I hope so; the cockpit of an MD80 isn't terribly big. Just for fun I looked up his likely flight; appears that he left SFO 2 minutes late (10:17 instead of 10:15) but arrived 15 minutes early. Looks like he was cruising at 33,000ft at a max speed of 523knts. No wonder I can't keep up with him!
For me, it is more fun when I can ride hard and feel that burn in my legs, rather than just being tired. Maybe it took that moderately-hard ride out to the coast and back Tunitas on Sunday to get my body going again. It didn't seem like that big a deal at the time, as it wasn't an all-out effort, but it wasn't a casual cruise at a near-resting heart rate either.
OR MAYBE I'M JUST REACTING TO WHAT I FOUND ON THE KITCHEN TABLE LAST NIGHT? It looked like junk mail, and the return address had been obscured. But I opened it up and found this curious little kit with a return mailer from Kaiser. And a letter telling me that their records indicate I'm 51 and haven't been screened for colon cancer yet and could I please follow the instructions included and provide a sample (that's as detailed as I'm going to get here) so they can figure that I'm OK or schedule me for a colonoscopy. Umm... yeah, right. It was bad enough getting the stuff from the AARP, but now this indignity! However, rest assured I'm taking it seriously and will promptly provide Kaiser with what they want.
04/17/07- COLD, WET & WINDY (and spoiled). Karl, Kevin, Eric & George, the usual Tuesday-morning mix, minus Chris & Millo. George was sporting his Sea Otter race-winner's jersey for his efforts in the sport-class mountain bike race on Sunday. Rumor has it that he rode his commute bike and didn't even bother to remove the rear rack before the race. That's the way he rolls, as they say.
Eric took up the rear position on Kings after having suffered a bit on the Mulhullond Challenge (12k of climbing in 100 miles) a couple days prior, but nobody else seems to show their human side on these rides. Well, that's not quite true; when Kevin cracks, it's pretty spectacular. Me? I've learned to live with the fact that I cracked maybe 34 years ago.
The top of Kings was shrouded in fog & low clouds, although by the time we finished the west-side OLH loop the fog had been replaced by strong winds, strong enough that my, er, "sturdy" frame was getting blown around pretty nastily on the descent into Woodside.
I should remember how bad the rains were last year before feeling sorry for myself for what I'm riding in now. I know that. I know how bad the weather is elsewhere. I know I should be more appreciative for how good I've got it. But instead I'm annoyed that it's likely to be wet this Sunday, when my son's planning to do his first metric century (Primavera). I'm thinking of those nice warmer months where you don't have to wear leg warmers & base layers & long-finger gloves. I'm thinking how we only have from May-October when the weather's really nice here, which means... what exactly? It means I'm a typical, spoiled Californian, that's what. At least I can ride year-'round, it's a rare ride that you have to worry about ice, and we've got spectacular roads that, once you get into the hills, don't get all that much traffic.
04/15/07- QUICK RIDE TO THE COAST THIS MORNING, trying to get in a few quality miles while my son was out on a fishing trip in the bay (caught another leopard shark, but had a good time anyway). The idea was to get back in time to take him to the afternoon junior track session at the Velodrome, but that turned out to be cancelled again due to continuing construction. No matter, still made a productive day of things afterward, finally getting a much-needed haircut (did I really have shoulder-length hair in high school? And why?).
But the ride was the gem of the day. I skipped out on the Alto Velo "A" ride, believing it might not get me back in time, and set out on my own. Not until after watching the end of the Paris Roubaix classic road race on cycling.tv though! The plan was a quick out-and-back to the coast, via Old LaHonda and Tunitas. I wasn't looking forward to fighting the headwinds on the way out to the coast, but that turned out not to be a major issue as I hooked up with a nice group of 4 toward the top of Old LaHonda, and rode the rest of the way with them. Susan, Mitchell, Tommy and another guy whose name I don't recall (4/16- Susan just emailed to let me know his name is Joe). That's one of the great things about cycling; you can set out on your own and pretty much have whatever experience you want. If you desire peace & solitude, no problem, just put your head down, don't talk much and go (not normally my style, although I'll admit to not being terribly talkative when I'm gasping or air climbing!). But if you don't mind or would like a bit of company and enjoy the shared experiences of cycling, the opportunities are there nearly every time you ride.
Not much to draft off when behind Susan, but the guys provided much more substantial cover! I tried to do my share, but have to admit that the champ was, I think, Mitchell (or it could have been the guy whose name I forgot). Nice to have people who actually want to fight the wind on the way to the coast! Aside from the wind, very nice weather, mostly in the mid-60s.
We made the mandatory stop at San Gregorio for fuel & water (please note that while the San Gregorio General Store has a lot of character, the quality of food & pricing is much better at the Pescadero bakery), where we came across a whole lot of Ducatis & BMWs, as well as other cyclists. Then it was up Stage Road and over the hill to Tunitas Creek, where, right when we reached the Lobitos Creek cut-off... maybe 50 yards ahead is the AltoVelo A ride (as seen in the photo). Looks like I would have made it back in time either way, but the train I caught was probably a bit more social.
Saw lots of bikes that we've sold out on the road today, which is always a good thing. Nice that our bikes are finding time on the road instead of just sitting in a garage.
04/12/07- YOU MISSED A DIFFERENT RIDE BY NOT SHOWING UP TODAY as it was just Karl riding with me, everyone else having obligations or races (Sea Otter). In fact, since Karl was riding Sea Otter on Friday, the deal was this- a very easy ride up the hill, or he was going to ride the flats instead. So it was... and it was a full 35 minutes from bottom to top. We did have company for the first part, as we met up with a pair that cruise through Woodside about the same time we do each morning, and this time we managed to coax them into riding as far as the park entrance with us. And also Greg Drake, one of Webcor's strongest racers, a very pleasant guy.
04/10/07 HOW DID THEY CATCH BACK UP TO ME? Nice morning, with the temp only getting as low as 46 degrees, but staying above 50 for the most part. Kevin & George & Eric at the start, with Karl & Millo having left a couple minutes earlier. Rather odd that Karl headed up early, but he'd said ahead of time he was looking forward to a pretty easy ride today. For the most part, I should trust Karl. If he says something, he's typically neither bluffing nor sand-bagging.
I set off in chase of Karl & Millo, and had them within sight about halfway up the climb. Eventually I caught up and slowly passed them, getting maybe a one-corner lead until they started to catch up again. Geez, I'm thinking, I must really be dying on the last part of the hill! But somehow I manage to finish Kings just behind them, a good 28 minutes after I started. Did I really ride a 25-something last year?
04/08/07- IF MY "NICE" BIKE LOOKS LIKE THIS, WHAT DOES MY RAIN BIKE LOOK LIKE??? One can only w
onder. Truth be told, my rain bike actually looked better, since heavy rain tends to clean things up a bit. But my Madone SSL? Yikes. It's almost comical how bad the drivetrain had gotten. The amazing thing is that it just kept on going. The secret is RockNRoll Gold lube. You just keep dumping it on, wiping off the old crude, or I mean, crud. Pretty bad when you can't even see the pins on the chain anymore though! If you want to see it in detail, along with a few more equally-gross photos, they're up on our Picasa site .
Even though Saturday was pretty busy at the shop, and I really wanted go get home quickly, I did finally spend about an hour of quality time with my "nice" bike and clean things up a bit. New chain (the old one had gone too long; anything over 2k miles for someone who rides in a hilly area is very questionable), remove & clean rear cogs, and cleaned chainrings in-place. Also removed & cleaned jockey wheels, which looked not much different than what you see in the photo. About to take it out for a ride in a few minutes; I'll let you know how it goes. Hopefully replaced the chain before the wear was bad enough to cause drivetrain skipping with the new one! Hate it when that happens.
04/05/07- KEVIN'S RIDE REPORT FOR THURSDAY'S RIDE is scintillating, concise, and guaranteed not to bore. "We rode. Kevin won. Karl lost." Polar opposites, Kevin & I. I'll take one tiny aspect, maybe 15 seconds, out of one of our rides and turn it into a 3-paragraph epic event. Kevin sums up a 2-hour ride in 6 words!
04/04/07- I WON'T BE RIDING THURSDAY MORNING because I'll be on a plane coming back from San Diego, where, of course, I was riding a bike. I tried to do a google maps things to show where, but it won't zoom in close enough. Basically rode in an area around "Valley Center" west of Vista, which is west of Carlsbad, which is north of San Diego. Quite a bit hillier than I'd expected, and got fairly well thrashed! With no computer or GPS on the bike I was riding, I can't even tell you how far or how much climbing. And if I can't define it, how do I know I even rode? Guess that's what my tired legs are for. Definitely looking forward to coming back and riding with my home boys.
04/03/07- IT'S FOR THE BIRDS we ride. It's pretty amazing to watch them up there, the different birds, the large ones that soar high above, seeming to float without any effort whatsoever. And then there are the smaller guys, closer to the ground, who seem to have to actually work to get somewhere. At home, you don't see the birds so much as hear them, typically in the morning as you're trying to get those last few minutes of sleep and they're making a racket outside. But it's different out on the west side of Old LaHonda.
This morning it was George, Kevin, Karl, Eric, Millo... and, of course, the birds. It's beginning to get warmer, although George still saw 39.7 degrees on his computer in Woodside. Maybe next week we'll be above 45 for the low. Maybe. But for now, it's not raining, so I shouldn't be complaining!
04/01/07- KEVIN'S READY FOR... not quite sure what, but he's getting there, whatever it is. Today was his first round-trip to the coast, heading through Woodside over Old LaHonda, down to San Gregorio and up Tunitas Creek. Most would think Tunitas Creek would be the toughest part, but the run out to the coast, complete with headwind, probably took the honors.
This was his first time up Old LaHonda without stopping, giving him his best time yet at 39:47. Towards the top we came across Jun (shown in the photo, giving Kevin a thumbs-up at the top), a friendly guy I'd ridden with before, who helped encourage Kevin on the final sections. If anything, Kevin was stronger as he climbed this time out.
If you haven't ridden out to the coast, it's not nearly as far as most think. From Olive Hill & Canada Road (about a mile north of Woodside Road/84), it's only 40 miles, not the 50+ people seem to believe. It might feel a lot longer, mostly due to the lengthy run from LaHonda to San Gregorio, followed by the longer-that-it-should-be climb up Stage Road to Highway 1.
Obviously, there's no point to Kevin riding the 35-mile 100%-flat option of the Delta Century! 100km might be a bit much in the way of saddle time though.
03/30/07- GREAT STORY ON PEZ CYCLING about the wind-tunnel testing done for Ivan Basso, and his thoughts on his new bikes vs old. Definitely worth the read.
03/29/07- TODD CAN BE BEAT! The fine print? Just not by me! Fairly large group on the ride this morning, with Kevin, Karl, George, Millo, Eric, Todd... I think that's everyone. While the really cold weather (for California) is behind us, it still got down to 41 degrees this morning. Several of the guys are racing this weekend so they rode a moderate pace up the hill, while I did my best to try and stay just ahead of them. With Todd around, taking a sprint was out of the question; I let him casually roll on ahead on the long optional sprint past Swett Road, and then gave an effort at Skeggs, but it wasn't even close. Sky L'Onda, though, that was interesting. I went fairly early, trying to catch him off-guard, and succeeded. There's absolutely no way you can beat him if you wait for him to go, but if you go first instead, it can at least be interesting. Still, he got me just at the line.
Very pretty morning, warming up to 60 or so by the end of the ride. No fog on the coast, no dampness in the air or on the ground, so the descents were fun & fast.
Sunday might be interesting. My son's junior track program has been cancelled due to construction at the Velodrome, but the reaction when I told him wasn't what I expected. He's thinking it will be a good day for his first ride to the coast & back. Maybe. Don't know if he's quite ready for a run up Tunitas Creek though! Technically, it's not worse than West Alpine (which he did a couple weeks ago), but that middle 3 miles of Tunitas is pretty darned brutal. It would actually be easier to do an out-and-back to San Gregorio, but that's actually a longer ride than coming back via Tunitas. Read all about it in a few days.
03/27/07- WHAT'S MORE MEMORABLE? THE SNOW GENTLY FALLING ON SKYLINE THIS MORNING, OR MILLO TELLING ME TO SIT UP HIGHER SO HE CAN DRAFT BETTER? Probably Millo, but we'll get to that later. Much nicer morning than the weatherfolk said it would be, with no rain, relatively-dry roads (dry enough for the Madone SSL instead of the rain bike), and, while it felt fairly cool, it wasn't deathly cold. Not at first anyway. About 46 as I left the house, quickly joined by Todd on the way to the start. People give me a bad time for riding hard & fast straight from my front door to the start, but just to prove things relative, I was having a tough time holding Todd's wheel, and he wasn't even breathing hard. And that part of Canada where I'm pushing 26mph? Todd was doing 29-30. And making it look easy.
Todd, Kevin, George, Eric (did I mention that Eric's getting much faster lately?) & Millo on the hill. I tried to keep up with the faster guys, but it was no use... and they weren't even going all that fast. With Todd around, it was out of the question that I'd be in contention for any of the sprints, but that didn't stop me from trying, with both Todd & I discovering a distinct lack of traction on the run up to Skeggs. A bit unsettling, but not no disturbing as to disrupt Todd's near-perfect record.
Very nice shadows & clouds this morning, but not much chance for photos when wearing a windbreaker (can't get to my jersey pockets to pull the camera out!). And, at 37 degrees up on top, it was definitely windbreaker weather. The good news is that this is probably the last reasonably-cold ride of the year; from here-on, we should see things gradually warming up. The bad news is that I won't have my winter-lungs (relatively non-functional) as an excuse anymore.
The return on Canada was into a pretty stiff headwind, with Todd & I riding side-by-side (don't worry, still on or to the right of the line), blocking the wind for those behind. That's when Millo asked if I could sit up a bit more. Right. It was actually easier riding up over Jefferson than into that wind!
03/25/07- SPEED RUN TO SKYLINE? Not quite, but given that Kevin (my son, not the old geezer Kevin that I ride with on Tuesday & Thursday mornings) had wrenched his back (not riding) the day before, and didn't think he could ride a bike, he did just fine. Up Old LaHonda (just under 44 minutes, with one rest stop) and south on Skyline to someone's 50th birthday party. Not a really long ride, as he only rode one way and got a ride back with Mom & Sis, but some quality miles and a chance to talk with him about the stuff Fathers & Sons are supposed to talk about... that being which high school the various girls he knows at his middle school will be going to next year. It's interesting riding up hills while keeping the heart rate under 100. It seems like I'm discovering some new form of riding. Maybe there's something to it. Or maybe not. My legs want to push hard against pedals, my arms want to pull against the handlebars, my eyes want to search out the next opportunity to sprint. I want to feel my legs fill with lactic acid, and my lungs laboring for air, if only because it feels so good afterward. That feeling you get when your body tells you it was built to move, not rest. I live for that feeling.
The return home was a race against darkness, although I severely mid-judged the amount of daylight remaining and could have stayed at the party much longer. It took about 40 minutes to cover the 15 miles home, much of it downhill, and even on the downhill parts, usually at a higher pulse rate than what I had climbed with. I remain a slave to my heart monitor, a slave to my scale, and, unfortunately, a slave to eating more than I should. Two against one... heart monitor & scale vs food... you'd think the food would lose! I really need one hard, long ride. An Alto Velo A ride, or maybe a century. But right now, Kevin (my 14 year old) needs me more. If things work out right, he should be giving me a really tough time on a bike in two years. And from then on, it should be all downhill. For me, anyway. He's been giving me a bad time lately, half-joking that I'm expecting him to live out my dreams. What I really want to see is him setting a target, a goal, and reaching it. He's got a good chance at that with cycling, and that might actually be holding him back a bit. When things are hopeless, there's not much pressure. But he knows this is something he can do. When things are hopeless, you don't worry about the pressure to succeed. Dang, if I'm not careful, I'm going to sound like a little league dad!
03/22/07- AS BOB ROLL WOULD SAY, I DIED LIKE A DOG! This morning we had Eric, George, Karl, Kevin & Millo. Eric went charging up the hill, I went charging after Eric, passed him, then died like a dog a bit further up. A whole lot of drama for a ride that just-barely qualified as 28-something. Meanwhile, the guys behind were having a jolly good time, not just in cruise-mode but slow-motion cruise-mode at that, showing up a good 4 minutes later. Why didn't I ride with them? Probably because both Eric & I assumed they were just toying with us, and would go flying past at any moment. I remember thinking, at the half-way hairpin,
where you can look back and see other cyclists about 45 seconds behind... where are those guys?
I think it was George who took off on the long sometimes-first-sprint on Skyline (the one I haven't been able to deal with for maybe 5 months or so), with Karl & I in the middle. I ended up leading out the sprint for Skegg's (not my preference), allowing Karl to come around, which he thankfully did early enough that I could get back onto his wheel and force myself past. Which was not the place to be, as a BIG truck came up behind our group, putting us in single-file mode for the long flattish stretch up on top. Which meant I was stuck at the front the whole time, dying yet again. I watched as the speed on the computer looked semi-respectable for the briefest amount of time, and then started sadly drifting down. I was so thankful for the beginning of the descent, although my legs were so shot I just let Kevin go off the front a bit too much, and couldn't make up the distance at the final Skyline sprint.
I haven't felt so sore/tired/whatever in quite some time. My best guess is that I'm in similar shape to maybe two years ago, which is quite a drop from last year. Not too much change of that changing much either, since the goal this year is to focus on my 14 year old son's riding, and it's going to be quite some time before he's capable of an Alto Velo A ride. But hey, at least I didn't look like Millo after the non-sprint on Albion! As you can see in the photo, Kevin's actually showing some concern. Not that Kevin's a dispassionate guy, but he's not known to go easy on any of us if he's feeling good.
03/20/07- CHASING AFTER IMAGINARY RIDERS WHO WEREN'T IMAGINARY? Time to get out the rain bike again this morning, as I woke to darkening skies and a bit of a drizzle. That adds a bit of time to my morning routine, getting me out to the starting point for our Tuesday/Thursday ride almost exactly one minute late. Just one minute. But Millo had already telegraphed (ok, emailed) his intentions to start up about 5 minutes ahead of "us", and Karl, arriving exactly on time, and seeing nobody, thought he must have actually been late and headed quickly up the hill, chasing after Millo. And me? I thought I saw someone at the starting point from maybe half a mile off, but nobody there when I arrived. I waited a couple minutes, still nobody, then headed on up the hill, thinking maybe I'd find Millo at the top. Yes, this group is punctual if nothing else!
By the time I got to the top it was really wet, and shortly the rain was coming down pretty hard. I was prepared for "showers" as per the weather report, but this was borderline ugly. At Sky L'Onda I even stopped to wring the water out of my gloves, and then rode the final loop (west-side Old LaHonda) in reverse, thinking I'd come across whoever was out there riding. That didn't happen, because Karl & Millo had decided to cut it a bit short and head directly down 84, eliminating west-side Old LaHonda entirely.
Overall it was actually fun, chasing phantoms and dealing with weather that made me feel a lot better about bringing out the rain bike instead of my Madone!
03/18/07- EASY 40 MILE "SPIN" WITH MY SON down to our Los Altos store & back. He wasn't really looking forward to it; he figured he'd earned a day off from having done the time trial the prior morning, with extra
credit for crashing. And he didn't seem terribly convinced of my logic that riding the day after a crash was going to help him feel better either. But, I had a trump card. You see, a bit earlier in the day, I had to take my shaggy-haired son out for a haircut. And on the way there, he asked if he could have a Mohawk. A Mohawk? My first reaction was, you've got to be kidding. But then I'm thinkin', y'know, he's 14, there's plenty of time before his Jr. High graduation, and he might as well learn one of life's more-important lessons- be careful what you ask for, 'cuz you just might get it.
No way was he thinking I'd let him have a Mohawk, which made up my mind. I'd let him. Not sure if either one of us was prepared for seeing bald skull where hair used to be, or the amusing sight of a face that's tan, or at least shows that it's seen some sun, adjacent to bright-white skin that used to be hidden by hair. But overall it's pretty cool.
03/17/07- MADE IT HOME... JUST BARELY! After having my flight home cancelled (while on the runway) Friday evening, got a $140 midnight cab ride from BWI (Baltimore airport) to the IAD (airport closer to DC) area where I checked into a hotel and flew from there to SEA the next day. Missed my son's time trial on Canada Road. Almost missed more than that; my IAD-SEA flight had a missing pilot. Finally showed up and we were underway 90 minutes late. Too bad I had an 89 minute connection time at SEA! I've been through this before... as you taxi towards your gate, you can see your next plane getting ready to leave (easy to know because you get the gate info on your phone as you land). But a strange thing happened.
As we neared the gate, they made an announcement on the PA asking for me (even pronounced my name correctly... that's a first!), saying that they were holding my plane for me if I could get off the plane fast and run for the gate. They asked the passengers to make way for me, but that wasn't an issue since I was in row 6 (which is actually row 3 in the A319). I got off the plane and there were several gate agents literally waving me through, and the gate agent at my waiting plane ready for me, shutting the door immediately behind.
This is the first time anything like that's ever happened to me before. Maybe it's not that unusual, maybe it was just a result of the irregular ops going on and somebody looked at my severely-hacked itin and felt sorry for me. Don't know, but I sure was happy to get home. Would have been nice to get home Friday (as planned), since the extra day caused me to miss my son's first non-track bike race, the time trial on Canada Road. He did fine, although he managed to crash about a mile from the finish. Crash, in a time trial? Yeah, he was having a bit of trouble shifting, and looked down to see what was going on, when he drifted off the road. Pretty good road rash, but all in one piece, so he says the only thing on his mind was to get on the bike quick because he had some time to make up. There's hope for this kid!
03/16/07- "BUT CAN'T YOU JUST STOP THE TRAIN SO I CAN GET OFF???" More stress & drama, fortunately for others today, than need be. The Northeast is pretty much shut down due to a massive snowstorm (I'm sure JetBlue is making the headlines again), so my should-have-been painless train trip from Washington DC to the Baltimore airport was a closer call than I would have liked. I arrived a couple hours earlier at Union Station than I'd planned to, because I wasn't sure how things might be in Baltimore (due to the weather). What I hadn't considered is that, with no way to fly anywhere north from DC, everyone who had plane reservations was trying to take the train instead. No more than 15 minutes after I purchased my ticket, they announced that all northbound trains were sold out (although they were still selling some tickets to Baltimore Penn Station, from which you could take another train back to the airport, adding quite a bit of time but still doable if you weren't cutting it close).
So I'm on the train leaving DC, the sold-out train with many empty seats (?), and all of a sudden this girl near me cries out to the conductor, "You need to stop the train, I need to get off!" This after we'd already left the station, most definitely a no-can-do situation, but this seemed completely lost to this 16 or 17-ish girl. "You don't understand. I was confused, and need to get off here. My parents are waiting for me, and I'm already an hour late!" Also please note she was the only teenager west of the Mississippi without her own cell phone. As a bunch of us offered to let her use our cell phones, a nice woman who just looked the type to have a kid or two of her own, maybe just a bit older, came to her rescue. Or at least tried. This poor girl just didn't seem capable of the normal bumps & bruises of everyday life, and the communications between parent & child (on the phone) only confirmed this. The woman who had leant the phone took over and spoke to her parent, letting them know of the conductor's plan to drop her off at the first stop and give her a pass for the next train in that direction. The conductor, by the way, knew nothing about dealing with a frantic kid; indeed, he seemed to know nothing about dealing with anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Eventually he became a bit less abrupt, and at the stop, handed her over to someone at the station to make sure she would get onto the right train.
IRREGULAR OPS, they call this. A day when the airports are thoroughly messed up by weather, and the planes aren't where they're supposed to be. Did what I could to help a couple trying to get back to Germany (unfortunately, on Continental, which I'm not much help with since I don't know the location of their hubs and the alternate routings that might be available), and a young kid stranded by SouthWest (needed to get to Manchester, but that's a non-starter, as it's solidly in today's no-fly zone).
But my flights (Baltimore/Denver/San Francisco) are still running on-schedule, and as long as this steady cold rain doesn't turn into the steady cold snow just to our north, I should be fine.
ASIDE FROM THAT, A WONDERFUL FINISH to the DC Bike Summit. Normally, the Friday-morning session (the tail-end of the conference) is a non-starter; just a couple more seminars, typically the most-boring, and you're anything but energetic at that point. But this morning was totally different! It was a wrap-up & discussion session dealing with what we might do to bring the advocates & business ends of the cycling community together for the most-effective message possible. I feel quite badly now that I'd recommended to dealers that they might skip Friday entirely and head back early if that was a possibility. And a very good dealer friend of mine too my advice. Darn!
03/15/07- TODD'S REPORT ON THURSDAY'S RIDE- Another great day to be on a bike. It started out a little chilly(42�F) at the when Karl, George Kevin, Eric and I rolled from Olive Hill, but by the time we reached the park entrance it was time to remove armwarmers and vests as it was already up to 52�. As we climbed the hill, the mercury continued to climb with us reaching a high of 58� on our climb to Skyline. There were no surprises in sprints along Skyline today as it seems no one has devised a strategy to prevent me from taking the sprints. Once again we were greeted by great views on West OLH courtesy of a warm sunny day. Today, unlike Tuesday there wasn't a layer of fog sitting at the coast, only blue ocean and blue sky as far as the eye could see. So the question nowis: If we were to take our time and enjoy the view rather than rushing by to get position for the sprint at the top of the hill, could we actually observe the curvature of the earth? Todd=
03
/14/07- SOMEONE'S FOLLOWING ME AROUND. As you can see, Floyd make an appearance here in DC, and was quite the hit, the only speaker to receive a standing ovation at the keynote lunch. Actually, the Mayor of Louisville (apparently pronounced "loo-ville" by those in the know) gave an enthusiastic example of what a town can do for cycling in a relatively short period of time. Right now I'm in a seminar learning about the problems of getting good data on cycling (how many people ride, how many miles, reliable accident statistics and more). It's supposedly 2:41pm here, but feels more like... actually, I don't know anymore. Lost one hour due to Daylight Saving Time and then 3 more hours heading back east. But it's been worth it, if for nothing more than the info on Safe Routes to Schools funding. There's work to be done in Redwood City! Unfortunately, the Redwood City bicycle/pedestrian group meets Thursdays at 7pm, so it's been difficult for me to get to them. May have to change that.
03/14/07- LIVE FROM THE DC BIKE SUMMIT- but just barely alive, as the combined 3 hour time change from heading east, plus the hour last Sunday (Daylight Saving Time) conspire against me. But it's a worthwhile endeavor, as there's a feeling that we've got something of a perfect storm here in Washington DC as gas prices are on the rise again, global warming is gaining traction as something serious, and traffic congestion is getting so bad in the west that people are willing to consider bicycling as a means of reducing gridlock. Building more roads seems to be a dead end; the example of Phoenix has been brought up, where roadways per capita have increased 150% in recent history, yet congestion/gridlock has become dramatically worse in the same period of time. Contrast that to Portland, where per-capital roadways have actually decreased by 16% in the same period of time... more to come later. And hopefully a ride report from yesterday, from Kevin or Karl (which was just posted below)!
03/13/07- TODD'S REPORT ON THE TUESDAY RIDE- It was quite the ride yesterday. We had a group of seven, including five (Karl, Eric, Kevin, George and Chris) who were all dressed in their matching A/V gear, so as one could imagine Millo and I were feeling like the odd men out. Initially there was some discussion of doing a flatter ride since Mike was absent, but those who made that suggestion (and who shall remain nameless) were quickly convinced by democratic process that riding up the hill was a better idea. Once on the hill we took a fairly relaxed ride up to the park and then stopped to regroup and remove layers as it was quite warm. For the most part everyone was well behaved on the climb. Once we were along Skyline, the sprints we business as usual for me, but I should mention that Karl gave me quite the lead out for the sprint coming into Sky Londa. We had warm weather and beautiful views on the west side of OLH, but of course, not of us had a camera to capture the moment. Upon regrouping at the top of West OLH Millo pointed out his importance to the group dynamic, and I believe we ought to create a special classification for this complete with its own colored jersey. Rather than "most aggressive", "King of the Mountains" or "Points Leader" Millo deserves the Social Chair jersey for encouraging conversation among the group. Anyhow, the run into Woodside was warm and fast. It felt almost like summer yesterday, and yet it is still winter!
03/11/07- HE'LL REMEMBER THIS ONE FOR A WHILE! Took Kevin (my 14-year-old son, not Kevin the Pilot on our morning rides) on his first semi-classic Bay Area climb- west-side Alpine. Why not? We'd already done the east side, finishing up with "walking" Joaquim, a month or so ago. Time to tackle something tougher, and longer, than anything he'd done before.
What a nice day to be out! Actually got readings in the low-80s as we rode through Woodside on our way to Old LaHonda which, thankfully, was just a few degrees cooler. Just one stop for Kevin on Old LaHonda these days, and something like 43 minutes to get to the top. Just a bit faster each time. Had a nice run down the other side to LaHonda where, unfortunately, we weren't able to grab a sandwich and had to settle a cliff bar, coke, and a bag of chips. Yeah, I know, not the healthiest stuff in the world, but he was really hoping for a sandwich. Next time we make something and bring it with us.
West Alpine didn't disappoint. Very pleasant temps (low 70s the entire way up), with more water in the creek than I would have thought, given our recent lack of rain. I'd by lying if I said that Kevin really enjoyed the climb, but he passed the time by counting banana slugs (plentiful near the bottom of the climb, but increasingly rare as we gained altitude). We took quite a few breaks on the way up, roughly 400 feet of vertical gain apart. Funny thing about 14 year olds. A couple times he was thinking it was too nasty and we should call somebody to pick us up, but at no time would he allow me to push him up the hill. Too much pride for that.
Fortunately, I know Kevin well enough to wait for his 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th winds to kick in, which they dutifully did, and always just in time. Ultimately, it was the descent on 84 into Woodside that probably made the ride worthwhile for him, as another cyclist came alongside him and was talking about how they ought to ban cars from the road, because they were slowing us down. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the speed Kevin descends; he seems to be having just a bit too much fun. Scariest thing is that he's not bothered by the sound tires make when they encounter a bit of sand or gravel, as he has yet to learn what it means to exceed the limits of adhesion.
Overall we're just a bit ahead of where I figured we'd be at this point. It was about 41 miles with 4,000ft or so of climbing, so I'd say he's ready for his first half-century soon. He still doesn't get that the sore feeling you have in your legs the next day is a good thing, not bad. But we're getting there.
03/08/07- THE GOOD DOCTOR BREATHED LIFE INTO ME TODAY. Although I must admit that, upon arriving at the start of the ride this morning and recognizing, from the way I felt riding over the hill from my house, that I was definitely not having a good day, I wasn't terribly happy to see Dr. George, one of the fast climbers, who only shows up on our Tuesday ride... showing up this Thursday morning! And my fears were confirmed, as George & Kevin & Karl pushed on up the hill, leaving myself & Millo gasping for whatever oxygen might be left in their wake.
I was 100% spent by the time I got to the top of Kings and, as has been the case for the last couple months, didn't even attempt to contest (or even keep up with) Karl on the first sprint, the short-but-endless climb past Swett Road. Karl rode on ahead of us, maybe 100 meters or so, appearing to take the next sprint (Skeggs) by default, until Dr. George comes riding past me and commands that I get on his wheel, he's going to take me to Karl. Hey, who am I to refuse? I doubt Karl was too happy though, given that he & George are Webcor team mates. My legs held up long enough, just barely.
And that... was just about the end of me. I was riding on fumes the rest of the way, from the descent on west 84 to the climb back up west-side Old LaHonda. Especially the climb back up west-side Old LaHonda!
03/06/07- WARMER WEATHER, FASTER RIDERS, CROWDED ROADS. Tuesday brings out the big guns; Chris (too young, too fast), George (too fast on the hills), Karl (too fast overall), Kevin (too fast unless he's too overtrained), Millo & Eric (too sensible). And me, just too dumb to realize what I'm up against. But sure was nice this morning, with 100% dry roads (first time in several weeks) and got up to 59 degrees on west-side Old LaHonda! A good 16 degrees warmer than recent rides... winter looks to be on the way out! Which makes sense, given that winter officially ends in just a couple weeks.
I have no clue what went on in the first three sprints, 'cuz I wasn't there. The Karl/Chris/Kevin/George juggernaut blew me off the back pretty quickly up on Skyline. Actually I did hear that Karl got the big sprint into Sky L'Onda. But I wasn't about to let things go; after a pretty wicked descent on 84 (the dry pavement brings out the worst in us sometimes!) things got a bit split up. We regrouped on Tripp, only to see Karl take off, possibly with eyes on that final sprint. Thankfully Chris pulled me back within range, and it was looking like the three of us were going to be going for it on Manuela. Until... until we round the corner and see (1) rider on horseback, (3) women walking/jogging on their morning coffee run, and (1) big red jogging stroller with adult attached. Yikes!
We pretty much shut down, threaded the gauntlet, and then did a half-hearted sprint for the remainder but, under my own rules, there could be no winner (due to the traffic). Karl, I think it was Karl, suggested we post signs out there telling people to keep the road clear between 9:20-9:35am on Tuesday & Thursday mornings. I asked if we should also send a copy to the county sheriff.
03/04/07- THE JUNIOR TRACK PROGRAM AT HELLYER PARK VELODROME (San Jose) IS FANTASTIC... open to anyone 10-15 years old, and the guys running it (Rob Jensen, Glenn Kubacki, Steven Woo and Andrew Lanier) make sure everyone has a great time, regardless of their skill levels.
I've been working on my son for a while, trying to get him away from video games and into riding a bike, and was making pretty slow progress... until I got him to the track. He loves it. And now he's even got the racing bug. He's got a long way to go (TV, video games & junk food aren't good for the body), but this past Sunday, I saw real hope. Why?
Because in the win & out, a somewhat longer event that starts with 6 laps before getting to the sprints, he worked himself hard enough that he threw up about halfway through... and kept going. That, in my book, is cool. He's no longer laughing at Dad's oft-repeated remark "That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Now he believes.
My wife, of course, thinks we're both crazy.
Life is good.
03/01/07- ADDENDUM. TEAM UNIBET BUS STOPS BY CHAIN REACTION <== Follow the link to see!
03/01/07- OH DEER, AND MARCH IS ONE-FOR-ONE. Pretty much our regular group for a Thursday morning, with Karl, Kevin & Millo showing up at the start, along with Nicole, who's puttin' on the miles in preparation for RAAM (Race Across America), an insane endeavor, but somebody's got to do it. Wouldn't be me; my ultimate nightmare would be that I'm on a bike, in Kansas, it's dead-flat, the road is straight as an arrow, and I've been fighting a headwind for 200 miles with another 150 to go.
Thankfully, that's about as removed from our Tuesday/Thursday ride as you can get! We've got hills, the wind comes at you from all manner of directions (although generally there's not much wind at all), and the longest straight stretch of road is probably less than half a mile. To me, that's pretty much heaven on a bike.
But decidedly unheavenly was the fast pace at the start of the ride, as Kevin & Karl bolted up the hill towards the park entrance, where we removed excess layers of clothing while Kevin performed his usual watering-the-plants duty. He needn't bother, since the roads were quite wet and there was still a drop or two now & then. Millo & Nicole caught up shortly, and then it was back up, up, & up. A couple intervals for me, as I let Kevin & Karl drift upward ("drift" makes it sound like something they do so easily, but the truth is mostly that it's me drifting back), and then race to catch them. That worked. Once. The second time, I got to within maybe 10 meters before blowing a gasket. But, such efforts really help improve my strength.
Karl, as usual, was the strongest in the group and simply rode away from everyone on the sprint past Swett Road. I got my act in gear for the remaining sprints, but I think people were relatively sensible (and not going crazy fast) because of the wet pavement.
Did I mention that it was wet? This is March 1, 2007. Remember last March? 28 out of 31 days, it rained. Thankfully, while we're 100% rainy so far this month, the long-term forecast doesn't look too bad. And speaking of things that don't look too bad, we came across Chris, another one of our regulars, catching up to us on west-side 84. Nicole had previously headed back down Kings, but we were once again up to battalion strength and ready to take on the world! And what a world it was, and is. Sometimes, when you're doing your best just to try and keep up, you're not thinking about how nice the air smells, how beautiful the hills are, how odd it is that California Poppies are blooming again (seems they do so at least twice a year). But the interesting thing about these rides is the way you can play them back in your mind, and it not only seems real, it seems really nice.
But almost not nice at all was the scene as I crested Jefferson on my return home. Not one, not two, but five deer, very confused, just ahead of me in my lane. And traffic coming from the other direction. My only option was to stop; these deer didn't have a clue. They were boxed in, with a fence on one side and the hill on the other. Two of the younger deer even ran right into the fence, trying to get away from things. A pretty sad sight, really. Then they ran across the road to the other side, couldn't get up the hill, then back to my side, where one of the deer found an opening beneath the fence, while the others headed back down the road a bit until there was a place they could get up the hill. Amazing how long it took for things to sort themselves out. Deer are certainly not the smartest of our local wildlife!
02/27/07- AND BEHOLD, A GREAT BEAM OF LIGHT SHONE FROM THE HEAVENS, AND KEVIN K WAS TRANSFORMED INTO A SPRINTER! Well, I had to come up with something dramatic for this photo. Riding with me this morning during the calm between two storms were Kevin, Karl and Millo. Well, Millo ditched at the Huddart Park entrance, saying that we were riding too quickly for him to do the interval training he needs. Needs for what???!!! Especially this morning, which we were all taking things at a very mild pace, partly due to road conditions (a "wintry mix" as they say, with water, an icy slush, and maybe just a little bit of iced pavement here & there), partly due to it being pretty darned cold (how cold, I don't know, since I was riding my rain bike which doesn't have a computer with temp on it, but up on Skyline, it was feeling a whole lot colder than down below!), and partly because we just felt like being a bit slow this morning.
It was a beautiful morning though, with great visibility out past the coast, and lots of special-effects fog (like seen in the picture).
Meanwhile, the battle of the scale continues. The lack of a really tough Sunday ride is not doing my body any favors, and this past weekend the scale showed a number I hadn't seen in over two years. I might have to start getting up really early on Sundays so I can get in a gnarly ride before church and later riding with my son. Two years from now, could be that the most-challenging rides I'll do will be those with my son. At least I hope so! But for now, I need to feel the burn three days a week, not two, if I'm going to stay in reasonable shape.
And yes, sometimes I do wonder what it might be like to just get out and ride, always at a reasonable pace, never pushing the limits, just riding along because riding is fun. But that's a different person; I have a need to compete with myself, to push myself to do better, or at least deteriorate as little as possible. I still have dreams that there are opportunities down the road to race again, which means both climbing and sprinting better than I do now. I still enjoy that feeling after a really hard ride, not just the burn, but when you walk down steps and your calf muscles wince at each one.
Yet I also wonder what it would be like to eat as much as I'd like of things like chocolate cake and ice cream and macaroons and, yes, even doughnuts. But it's an evil dream, and an empty one, because you can't just say, hey, it's OK if I add 20 pounds. The problem is that, if you eat the stuff you want, in the quantity you want, you don't stabilize at a certain weight... you just might keep on adding those 20 pounds over and over. And once is more than enough!
KUDOS FOR KARL! 2nd place for Karl at last weekend's Snelling Road Race. We may, or may not, get an in-depth report for Karl's Corner. Definitely something worth writing about!
02/25/07- THIS COULD HAVE TURNED OUT BADLY, but, fortunately, didn't. Sunday had been rather dark & dreary, although from about noon-3pm or so, it didn't rain. Obviously, that would have been the time to ride. But obviously, that didn't work out. Don't even know why; things just got in the way. By the time I could get out with my son, it was beginning to rain. But, since it wasn't too cold, I figured this would be a good time to get him out into the elements a bit, and work on riding when the roads are wet and things are a bit less than optimal. Not too much of a ride; up through Huddart Park via Greer Road, and back down Kings. But enough to get a handle on how things work (and don't) when wet.
The first, and fortunately only surprise, was when he ended up stopping almost in the middle of an intersection. Twice. The first time, I'm thinking, OK, he's learned his lesson, that won't happen again. But when it happened a second time, it was obvious that something wasn't quite right, so we stopped and talked about it. Turned out that he thought that's just what happens when it's wet, and that there's not much he could do about it. It didn't occur to him that more pressure on the brake levers, and drying the rims out a bit ahead of time, would help him stop more quickly. To say I was caught off-guard is an understatement but, of course, that was exactly why we were out there. So he could learn, and hopefully learn without making some of the mistakes I did so many years ago. From that point on, he was able to stop just fine.
Some day, he will leave some skin on the pavement. It's inevitable. At least, it was certainly a part of my own experience as I rode more and especially after starting to race. Still, I really don't look forward to having to explain to my wife why it's OK that he's lost a bunch of skin on his thigh and might need to go to Kaiser to have things looked at & cleaned up. I did get a bit of a look into that future a few months ago, when my daughter crashed on the track (velodrome) and messed up her arm, requiring a sling for a few weeks. Very little blood though. If Kevin's like me, he'll do something a bit more spectacular. Not that it will hurt any more than what happened to his sister, but it will certainly look more impressive. And that's what will get me into trouble!
02/22/07- INSPIRED BY THE RAIN! Or not, but as I'd gotten my rain bike in order for yesterday's ride up Sierra Road (to watch the Tour of California)(where it was pretty darned cold but didn't rain), I approached it with confidence as I faced this-morning's stormy weather. Only Kevin faced it with me, and it was rather fun riding up Kings at a moderate pace, listening to the creeks and feeling more comfortable than I would have thought (in terms of neither over-heating or being too cold). Could do the west-side Old LaHonda loop due to time constraints (had to be in our Los Altos store this morning, as my brother Steve was in Big Sur photographing the Tour of California as it crossed the Bixby Bridge). But I've always found it interesting that we can go out in the rain, have a good time and even descend not all that much slower than when it's dry, and not worry about crashing. So many people assume that riding on wet roads=danger. Yes, if it's something you're not used to, it can be. But if you're confident and stay loose on the bike, don't panic, it's not all that bad. Besides, it's fun that other people think you're crazy!
Truth? If it's going to be wet out, I look forward to hearing a good, driving rain when I wake up. This morning the rain was never all that heavy, but since, after 15 minutes out there, it doesn't matter wet-wise if it's really coming down or just sprinkling, it might as well really be coming down.
But, always, given the choice, I'd rather it was dry and not-so-cold!
02/20/07- A LITTLE DIFFERENT THIS MORNING, with a smaller-than-normal group (just Karl & Erick; Millo had earlier sent his regrets, don't know where George was, and Kevin was off flying), but an opportunity to try something a bit different. I've been doing just about all my climbing while standing lately, so today I forced myself to stay in the saddle the entire way up Kings. That was hard! I can't tell you how often I wanted to pop up and stand on the pedals for a bit. To be perfectly honest, I held up at the park entrance a bit over a minute for the re-group, and, while idling, did in fact stand. But once underway, it was back in the saddle. I assumed, incorrectly, that staying seated would negatively affect my time up the hill, but that wasn't the case. I'm slow either way! Actually, it was still under 30, including the regroup, so I'm not complaining. In fact, I had that feeling that maybe my legs were beginning to work again, that maybe I could get some steam up and start gradually getting faster as we move out of winter. Hey, you can always dream!
Karl was the usual motor Karl is, pulling us along Skyline and down towards Old LaHonda. Gotta love that engine! Karl reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book where there's a "Mike" that sits on the back of a tandem, doing all the work. I can hang out in the front for a bit, but not nearly as long, nor nearly as fast, as Karl. He almost took me in the Sky L'Onda sprint too, managing to pass me at the bottom almost fast enough to convince me that there'd be no point trying to catch back up. Almost. But it's a very long sprint, so there's lots of time to get back in the game. Won't be too long before Erick's causing me trouble again; as I recall, he gets pretty fast when things warm up.
BUT DID WE HAVE A FLOYD LANDIS SIGHTING ON TRIPP ROAD? On our return Karl mentioned, as we passed three riders in the opposite direction, that one of them looked like Floyd. Really? But I didn't have my camera so chasing them down didn't seem like the thing to do, and besides, what it if wasn't? Uh... oh, I thought you were somebody else! I plan to see Floyd tomorrow night in San Jose (at a fundraising event for his legal fees), so I'll ask. (2/22/07-Turns out it wasn't Floyd)
02/18/07- READY FOR THE TOUR OF CALIFORNIA? Burt, one of our guys in the Redwood City store, sure is! We were exchanging emails last night at 1:30am. That's not too unusual for me (I'm a late-night, not morning guy), but Burt? Burt's one of those guys who gets up at 5am, especially if there's euro bike racing coverage on. Last night he was simply too excited to sleep. I just gave him a call shortly ago (about 9:45am); he was already in San Francisco, several hours before the race starts!
Of course, the other bike race today is the Pine Flat road race, where our Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride will have 4 regulars going for the finish line! Chris, George, Karl & Kevin- hope you all do great! Wish I could be there, but for two reasons. First, the Tour of California. Second, I'd lose contact with the main group on the first significant climb. Yep, those overpasses are deadly!
Who will do best? Tough to say. Karl's got the most race-savvy head on his shoulders, and can keep his cool when others might be losing their logic to adrenalin. But if Chris is there at the end... he's got a pretty decent sprint. Kevin could always end up in the right place at the right time and power up the final climb alone, and George? George could possibly get away on one of the climbs almost invisibly. He's really fast uphill, but in an almost unassuming way. He doesn't call attention to himself, but somehow gets their first. Hopefully we'll have a full report tomorrow!
02/15/07- SOARING WITH THE EAGLES well OK, so it was probably a Turkey Vulture, but it was pretty cool. I'm heading down 84 towards Woodside, with Millo behind, and I notice a shadow comes over me and heads up the road. Looking up I see a very large bird, black, just floating maybe 10 feet above me, seeming to follow the road. We shortly left it behind, but it was really quite cool to see.
Let's see... Karl, Millo, Eric and Chris this morning, a nicer, slightly-warmer morning than usual. That was a good thing, since it allowed me to use short-fingered gloves most of the ride, which makes it a lot easier to use my camera. Why did I think it a good idea to bring the camera this morning? Because there have been many ProTour Team sightings in the hills lately! Just a day or two ago, the world champion, Bettini, was seen with his team on Kings Mtn. No such luck for us though; the best(?) use of the camera was to get a photo of me fixing my flat.
But the bird really was quite cool. Oh, one more thing. As we were heading up west-side Old LaHonda, I noticed, way up on Skyline, the silhouette of a larger and smaller Oak Tree. Very pretty, all alone. Been there for ages, but this morning was the first time I noticed.
54-50-47-46-32. Chris, at 32, is kinda wrecking the age curve! We won't give everyone else's age, but Millo's our most "experienced" rider, I'm in the 50+ category, and Eric is just a year older than Karl. We're hoping Chris will be wrecking the pack (not by crashing them) on Sunday's Pine Flat road race. We'll have pretty good representation there, with Chris, Karl, Kevin & George all out for glory. Normally I wouldn't be picking Kevin as a potential winner, since he's as strong as anyone out there but doesn't have a strong sprint, but something's gotten into him lately. Let you know on Monday!
02/13/07- AN OLD GEEZER TAKES THE WIN! (Which, given the average age of our group, could be any of us...) Taking advantage of wet roads and tight clearances, Kevin (the airline pilot, not my son) may have taken two "sprints" on this-mornings ride. That would be precisely two more than he'd normally get in a month, and even if there might have been some, well, circumstances that worked in his favor, he was still first across the line.
It was the usual motley crew, with Millo, Karl (who thought he was running late so he short-cutted to Kings from Woodside, arriving at the top before us), Kevin, George and... dang, I'm thinking there were six of us, but I can only come up with five. Eric and Chris were no-shows. Millo & I left a bit before George & Kevin, as George was having a bit of a problem with a loose cleat, and I figured it might be fun to see how far we could get before they caught us. It also gave me a chance to work on intervals again, which do a lot more for my strength that simply climbing as fast(?) as I can go.
The group rolled up and neutralized the first sprint (past Swett Road) but then got a bit serious for Skeggs. I managed to gasp my way to the line first, but the slippery pavement made things a bit nervous. Kevin seemed not to care about wet pavement though, and got the idea that, if he gapped us on the way to Skyline, he could take the sprint near Sky L'Onda. He was right; we let him get about 50 meters ahead, and I'm thinking everything's casual, let it go, I don't need to find out how slippery things are. That was his first win this morning, as he took advantage of the fact that nobody else was going for it. His second (unconfirmed but probable) win was a bit more... interesting. Heading down Albion towards Olive Hill, there's a bit of traffic with three people walking dogs, and something else, might have been a car. Karl's alongside me (I didn't get blown off before the sprint this time, although if he'd tried, I'm sure I would have) as I start, but then after pulling ahead a bit I had to shut down due to the traffic. But Kevin, behind me, didn't shut down, he was going for it, and got a bit of a lead before I got moving again. Since I'm reluctant to take the sprints all the way into Olive Hill (past the stop sign), Kevin got it. Quite the opportunist at times! Maybe next time I'll just pull up alongside him and we'll go man-to-man. Or geezer-to-geezer.
But more interesting than any of that stuff is another group out there riding just in front of us. Seems we've inspired some others to do the same route on Tuesdays & Thursdays. Today there were three of them, whom we caught at the top of west-side Old LaHonda. Could be the case in a while that we'll be the ones leaving early and they'll be catching us!
02/11/07- ONE-WAY TICKET TO PARADISE. OK, so I probably oversold my son on the merits of a one-way afternoon trip from Redwood City to Pescadero, over Old LaHonda and the infamous Haskins Grade. Old LaHonda is getting a bit more routine for him, although he still needs to stop once on the way up. Seems like the slightly-less-steep Kings Mtn might be a bit easier on him.
At the top of Old LaHonda we met up with a number of people who'd never ridden down the other side, but no takers today on my offer to show them the sights and direct them back up 84. The roads were still quite wet in places, but not dangerous, as we'd left late enough (about 1:15pm) to let things dry off and settle down a bit. At LaHonda we stopped for some "comfort food" at the Pioneer Market (a bag of corn chips), and then proceeded up the longish Haskins Grade. You know how sometimes you try and find something to take your mind off the hard effort? Kevin started counting Banana Slugs. 13 of them on the way up, 14 total for the whole ride.
His descending skills continue to improve, but I'm torn between riding in front of him (to moderate his pace a bit) or behind him (to keep the cars off his back). For the time being I'm staying behind, thinking it's probably safer keeping the cars at bay.
It's definitely a "long" 30 miles to Pescadero; when I told him we'd gone 24 miles at one point, he was quite disappointed. Don't know how many he thought we'd ridden, but it was a lot more than 24! Got to point out the remnants of Flamingo House to him, although it doesn't mean much when you tell somebody that instead of 5 flamingos, there's used to be several hundred. Unless they saw it before, it's just hard to imagine.
But once we got to the Pescadero bakery, he understood why I chose that destination. Raspberry Crescent, part of a Cheese Pocket and a Blueberry Scone were devoured in very short order! From there we rode north on Stage Road to the infamous Machine Gun Man house, which had been taken over by four male Peacocks, out strutting their stuff in high fashion. Quite the sight to see! We continued on riding north, making it exactly to the top of the first climb where we met up with my daughter Becky, who'd driven the car out to pick us up. Nice ride that we'll do again sometime, maybe getting a bit further.
02/08/07- RAMBLE IN THE RAIN except that it really wasn't raining, but rather that annoying messiness from overnight drizzle (it didn't really rain then either), causing you to break out your rain bike for not-enough-reason. If it's supposed to rain, then let it rain. Really rain. It just doesn't make a whole lot of difference when you're out riding whether it's seriously dumping on you or just enough to mess up the roads, enough so that this morning, Millo flatted on a piece of glass. Just Millo with me this morning; Karl was probably hoping for (and got) better weather a bit later on. Don't recall if Chris had an excuse ahead of time or not; Kevin was off flying (working). Didn't see many others out there either, aside from one guy heading down Kings while we were going up.
Only noteworthy observation was the complete lack of activity in the creeks, until very near Skyline. Normally, you get more water lower down, as the little creeks feed into each other and become bigger creeks. Guess this rainfall is so wimpy the ground can soak it all up.
02/06/07- WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE... (Before reading this, keep in mind that it's supposed to be humorous, not serious. When I "accuse" someone of not playing fair, I'm joking. I wouldn't want things any other way than how they are. It's a great group of guys, and if in the process of riding with them I get run into the ground, all the better. So when I mention that someone wasn't sprinting "fairly", it's not to be taken literally, but in a self-deprecating manner. As in, if I lose the sprint, they must be playing unfairly! As if I'm that good!!! Guess I should have put a smiley at the end of the final paragraph, and the context would have been more clear.)Tuesday morning's are usually the larger, and more-aggressive, of our twice-weekly rides. Since there's only one person who always shows up on Tuesday and never on Thursdays, we'll say it his fault. That would be George. Besides George, we had Chris (who arrived late and flew past me 2/3rds of the way up the hill), Kevin, Karl, Millo and Eric. As soon as we hit the base of the hill, all signs of civility disappeared, with Kevin, Karl & George blasting ahead. I kept them in sight for maybe the first 10 minutes or so; by the time I got to the hairpin halfway up the climb, I was entirely alone. George & Millo having a pleasant ride behind me, and the others somewhere way up ahead. Still, I was having a better day than whoever had driven a car first into a tree on one side of the road, and then 100 feet further down the hill, into the dirt embankment. Reconstructing the incident as I was riding took my mind, however briefly, away from the pain. Pain? Did I say pain? How can I claim that cycling is fun if I'm going to use a word like pain? Maybe because pain is a choice, not a requirement. Except this morning.
Instead of formally regrouping at the top of Kings I did a very short cool-down and, very unsociably, headed south on my own, knowing that I needed the head start or I'd be blown off the back on the gentle rise towards Swett Road. Plus I'm in no shape to contest that particular sprint right now anyway. Karl catches up to me at the top and, nice guy that I am, instead of sitting on his wheel for the Skegg's sprint, I ride side-by-side, negating any tactical advantage I'd otherwise have. This favor would not be returned later on. I held on for that one, and then sucked wheels as the Kevin/Karl juggernaut blasted on towards Sky L'Onda, blowing Erick & Millo off the back. For the final Skyline sprint, Kevin was off the front for a bit, and it appeared that Karl & George might actually be trying to block for him. No matter; it's a moderately-long sprint with plenty of time to find your power. As long as Todd's not around. When Todd rides, his initial surge is so explosive it's difficult to catch his wheel. Darned near impossible even.
West-side Old LaHonda was anything but kind to me, as I watched the rest of the group ride away from me. Guess my relatively-hard ride on Sunday (West Alpine) was a bit tougher on me than I thought. But that's OK; as they say, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. But not so strong that I could hang on when Karl pushed the pace ahead the final sprint in a way he knew I was likely to come off the back, which I obligingly did. I have no idea who won "my" sprint, because I wasn't there. Note to self- don't be too concerned about trying to sprint "fairly" against Karl. With friends like these... (this is where a "smiley" should have gone)
02/04/07- ADDENDUM- WHY WE RIDE, EPISODE #231 Because you can soar like the birds. Well, that's not exactly how it feels when you're climbing up West Alpine towards Skyline. On this particular day, I was pulling a reasonably-hard pace, trying to get back in time for the SuperBowl commercials (isn't that what we watch it for?). But I'm noticing this one very large bird,
probably a red-tailed hawk.
And what I'm noticing, as I'm forcing my way up the mountain, is that this Hawk is just floating in the air. Not a single beat of the wings; this guy's working the air currents. It was such an amazing thing that I stopped in the middle of the climb and just watched him, for maybe five minutes. Five minutes in which he'd float up, swoop down, catch another updraft, circle around a bit and repeat. Without once flapping his wings.
Sometimes it's nice to be out there on your own, and if you see something like that Hawk, just stop and watch. The cool thing about riding a bike is that you'll notice things like that Hawk. Things you'd never spot from a car, things you'd spend half the day hiking to see, but on a bike, in an hour or two, you're there. You just get on your bike and go for a ride. You might not soar like that Hawk, but I can pretty much guarantee your spirits will be lifted.
02/04/07- 23 DEGREES OF SEPARATION TODAY! By that I mean my afternoon cruise out towards LaHonda and up West Alpine saw the temp get as high as 73 degrees, a good 23 higher than I've seen on one of our morning rides in a very long time. I still wore leg warmers (it was a bit cool at times), but sure was nice to dispense with the long-sleeve thermal base layer, booties, & long-fingered gloves. Also nice to dispense with the cold-weather lungs as well, although the legs gave me enough of a limitation.
One of the more humbling experiences was trying to keep up with a guy on a hybrid (yes, really!) going up Old LaHonda. I wasn't trying to kill myself, but still, this guy (Doug) had a bike probably 10 pounds heavier than mine, maybe more, and certainly didn't have the low rolling resistance of my setup. What he obviously did have, in abundance, was great shape. And no, he wasn't a young guy either; probably even had a few years on me. But I at least did teach him something; he'd never been down the west side of Old LaHonda, so I pretty much insisted on a guided personal tour. It still amazes me how many cyclists have been up on Skyline but never ridden the "back" side of Old LaHonda.
I did see a very large number of Chain Reaction bikes out on the road today, although the total number of bikes was a bit lower than expected, probably because the Super Bowl was getting people out a bit earlier than normal, so they'd get back in time.
02/01/07- I'M MOVING TO ARIZONA DURING THE WINTER. No, not really, but I'm just not weathering the cooler weather like I used to. It's not as if it's even that cold; the lowest temp we saw this morning was 39 degrees, and for most of the climb it was 41. People in the midwest would kill for a day like this right now!
Small group, just Karl & Eric, although we were joined for a short time at the start by Ted & Joe, two guys from my old, old racing days. They split off at Trip Road while we headed up the hill, a tougher-than-it-should-have-been effort just under 30 minutes. As usual lately, I've been a bit tapped out, and didn't take part in the first sprint past Swett Road, but did manage to get by Karl at the last moment at Skeggs as well as the final Skyline sprint. Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal, but there's a small matter of pride at stake after Karl's piece on 1/31!
01/30/07- WHAT CAN I POSSIBLY SAY BETTER THAN KARL'S ENTRY BELOW? Except the obvious... they really are out to get me! --Mike--
01/30/07- LOCAL ALTO VELO RIDER TAKES 3rd CONSECUTIVE FINAL OLIVE HILL SPRINT ON MIKE'S CHAIN REACTION TUE/THURS RIDE. A Karl's Korner entry follows- I (this is Karl speaking, not Mike) am compelled to dust off Karl�s Korner and proclaim to the world my heroic exploits of the unprecedented collection of wins of the final sprint of our ride. Actually, each win was quite different and here are the details.
I have been stepping up my intensity level for upcoming road racing that will start in just 2.5 weeks for me. This translates to more frequent attacks, surges and contending for the various sprint points in our ride.
The Olive Hill sprint is always the hardest for me to win for some reason. Without a doubt Mike and Todd are faster sprinters that I and nearly always beat me, but it is still worth trying for the tactical practice and training. My first win last Tuesday was how I have dreamed of doing it, from a ways out. Its my only chance against Mike. I have not had the fitness to get and hold a gap on flats or slightly uphill section leading into the sprint ...until this day. I had done some other hard efforts along the ride and was reeling from the new harder intensity level! I felt great immediately afterwards and for hours later as well, calm and satisfied and very much alive. I think that it also helped that I had drilled it on the little rise at the base of Hwy 84 decent, with only Mike shadowing me.
Win # 2 was a teamwork effort with Millo. Millo was riding the best I have seen him on both hills and flats on this day. We two got off the front on Skyline and then again at the base of 84 and traded pulls all the way through the maze. I was not sure if we two temporary teammates would contend for the sprint or just coast across as a team, well ahead of the others. But I was wrong as Millo proceeded to wind things up at 150 m out. I was fired up and think that I edged him out at the end (a stop sign!). Wow that was fun and really simulated the finishes of races of where things tend to ramp up.
Today�s final win was only at the sacrifice of Chris, who volunteered to both pull me back up to Mike and Kevin, drive the pace once we regrouped and then do a final leadout up the gradual rise about 500m out from the line. Earlier Chris was quite torturing me on the climbs with his own surges, so maybe he felt some pity for this old guy. I should have eased up and let him have video recorded victory for his hard efforts. All this was only possible for going from far out to tire Mike, Todd was not there, George was getting over a cold and Millo was filming instead of riding with his young son Chris. But , a win is a win, especially on this ride!
That�s my story and I am sticking to it. Its not about me, but the pain and fun that tends to bond us together and compel each of us to wake up in the dark, two days a week and brave the freezing cold temps, ice, sand, crazy drivers, water, fog, rocks, etc. mostly because we know that the others will be there and maybe this will be my day to win the final sprint on Olive Hill!
Ciao, kbe
01/27/07- WHAT IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME? I'm doing a bit of research on some components used in old bikes, and come across a reference to a website dealing with vintage Gitane bicycles. There was a section devoted to old catalogs, so I did a bit of looking and, sure enough, there it was. The Catalog. The one that convinced me that I had to buy a Gitane Tour de France . That's even the color of the bike I chose, in the picture. Gitane Green. The catalog that expanded my horizons of what you could do on a bike, by showing me that you couldn't just race on a bike, but use them to go places as well . I even remember telling my dad that the bike I wanted to buy, the bike that could get me started in racing was the less-expensive Interclub model, which, at $135 (back in 1971 that was a fair amount of money) was pushing things as far as I thought I could. Once I had him convinced it was a reasonable thing to do, I then skillfully moved the target bike to the Tour de France, a bike that I felt was exactly right. And, at $199 plus an extra $37 delivery due to a dock strike (so bikes had to be air-freighted in), it was all that I could possibly afford at the time.
The typical teenage boy at that time was most-certainly spending his time looking at car ads and dreaming of getting his license the day he turned 16. I was not that boy. From my first Schwinn catalog to the Gitane in the links above, I dreamed of bikes. So much so that I didn't even get a driver's license until I was 18. The kid in the movie "Breaking Away"- that was me. Except that I didn't shave my legs. Everything else was pretty darned close.
I've thought about that catalog from time to time, and when looking through old papers and magazines that I wrote for back in the day, have often hoped that I'd come across one, buried somewhere. And now I have.
01/25/07- NOT SO SURE I WAS GOING TO BE OUT ON A BIKE THIS MORNING, after suffering through a fast-moving bout of the infamous "norovirus" Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. At 50 you're a bit old for such undignified things as spending hours studying how style & function come together for the common toilet, but that's literally where I was at. I was so bad off I took perhaps my 3rd sick day in 27 years at the shop, although truth be told, by 8am Wednesday the only thing I was suffering from was exhaustion. Which was pretty much cured by a good night's sleep, allowing me to wake up quite ready to ride this morning! Not only that, but about 4 pounds lighter as well. Oh yeah, sure, tell me it's water weight. So? Maybe that extra 8 pounds or so I've been carrying lately was water weight too! Fat chance.
A big group for a Thursday, with Kevin, Karl, Millo, Eric, John (I think; he came out a couple weeks ago)... seems like I'm leaving someone out. A bit warmer than most rides lately, with 43 degrees at the start. Unfortunately, it was also a bit cooler than most rides lately, or at least felt that way, due to a bit of dampness (and a hint of fog) in the air. Nor did it warm up; it was still 43 when we returned!
So what's it like riding just after having been nastily-sick shortly before? Nice. Very nice. The legs still work, the lungs still don't quite work, and at mile 20 I felt like I was on mile 50. I struggled to make it up Kings in under 30 minutes, and then stayed either near or off the back a bit for the rest of the ride. But I got back home feeling infinitely better than the night before.
01/23/07- ON A GOOD DAY, EVERYTHING SEEMS TO BE IN SLOW MOTION. So I guess this morning was a good day, the first one in a very, very long time. It started out with the scale showing just the slightest drop in weight (and yeah, I stepped on it several times, just to make sure the needle wasn't stuck higher than it should be. Fat chance. So to speak.) It's still too darned cold, but, at 34, quite a bit nicer than 30. You'd think 4 degrees wouldn't make that much difference, but it does.
Fairly large group, and I'll try to remember everyone. Eric, Karl, George, Chris & Millo. A bit of a ragged pace up Kings, but that was fine with me, as I got a chance to alternately ride slow and not-quite-as-slow (my heart rate would indicate I was riding quite fast, but...). I rode a bit ahead of the group on Skyline, setting up to get a photo of the wild sprint past Swett Road, but Karl & Millo casually cruised over the top together, followed shortly by the rest, with no sprint. I jumped back in and had the first of my slow-motion experiences at Skeggs. A successful sprint, for me, seems to take forever. And that's a good thing. Time is on your side; people don't sprint well often because they give up too soon. Sit back and watch what goes on, look for the opportunities and make it happen. Don't give up, because you've got time to recover. Sometimes it seems like hours and hours. Unless Todd's with us; he just rides off into the sunset, due to an initial acceleration that I just can't overcome.
Just after Tripp road we came across a couple other guys out for a ride; as we rode by I distinctly heard one of them mentioning something about us being the "Chain Reaction ride." I could not determine if that was a good or bad thing to him.
We're a friendly, civilized group, so on the return through Woodside, Chris, Karl & George ride hard enough to gap me and causing me to give up long before we even get to the sprint. Karl took it after Chris's long leadout caused him to die. Karl said something about getting revenge on the sprinters; I pretended not to hear. I would so much rather be known as a climber. Hey, if I could handle turning 50 last year, you'd think I could finally surrender the idea that I can climb. Don't get me wrong; climbing is what I enjoy doing more than anything else. I'm just not so good at it anymore, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that when I could climb well, I was 6' and 133lbs. My best racing was at 154lbs (more endurance and at least a hint of a sprint, and just a little bit slower on the hills). Now, on a good posture day, I'm 6' and weigh... let's just say I weigh about 7 pounds more than the 170 I should weigh.
01/21/07- FOR ABOUT 20 MINUTES OR SO, MY SON HAD ME RIDING PRETTY DARNED HARD. Normally, Kevin climbs at about half the speed I do. Normally. But this afternoon, as we're riding over Jefferson towards Canada, I notice that Kevin doesn't have his sunglasses on, and, when asked, turns out he'd left them at home. So I give him my cell phone, tell him to ride on ahead, and I'll catch up. Shouldn't take too long, right? I mean, once he gets to Kings, I'm going to catch up very quickly. Maybe even before then.
Didn't turn out quite that way. You see, as soon as I turned around, Kevin decides he's going to ride hard and force me to work to catch him. And work I did; I kinda expected to find him on Manuella or just starting up Kings, but no. I keep on riding, thinking, geez, did he get confused about where we were riding? I finally catch up to him just before the first hairpin, after climbing several hundred feet. Evidence that he was trying to prove something came quickly, as he'd spent just about everything he had up to that point. With a bit of practice, he might do well at pursuit races on the track.
01/18/07- "WE'RE GETTING VERY GOOD RIDING ON ICE" Millo mentioned, as we encountered yet another patch, this time on west-side Old LaHonda. Just Millo & Kevin this morning, no sign of Karl. Not that we waited terribly long for him to show up, given that he's riding strongly enough that he wouldn't have had a problem catching up to us. Not quite as cold as the past few rides, with the computer showing 32 for the low. Skyline was a downright-pleasant 43 degrees at times, but even so
there was enough ice here & there that we called off any sprints. Most of the ice was on the upper part of Kings, near the top hairpin and just beyond (as seen in the photo). A bit of snow too, but nothing to write home about. By far the largest concentration of ice was at the Sky L'Onda intersection where, if we'd waited around a bit, I'm sure we would have seen some cars doing really stupid things.
Kevin only rode as far as the top of Kings, and was looking even deader than I was. However, he'd ridden a training ride out to the coast yesterday, and had already been swimming this morning. I have no such excuses, just a tired feeling in legs that have had about enough of this cold weather. Not only tired legs, but a body that seems to think the continuing cold is an excuse to hibernate and throw me a real scare when I got on the scale. Yikes. Haven't seen the likes of that for maybe two years. But at least I have much less fear of ice than I used to! Right now I'd trade such capabilities for warmer weather in an instant. What I feel I could really use, right now, would be a moderate-paced 70 mile ride in 55 degree+ temps. The idea of 90 mile rides in France on days when it's 95 degrees and 90+% humidity seem quite... foreign. At least for now. I'm ready for spring. I just hope I'm not carrying more than a few spare tires by the time it arrives!
01/16/07- DO YOU EVEN HAVE TO ASK? DARN RIGHT IT WAS COLD! Just exactly how cold I'm not sure, since my computer has a bit of a lag on its temp reading, causing it to average things out over a period of time. I know that the thermometer outside my house said 26 degrees when I left; I know that was cold enough that I could have cared less that the balaclava I finally found hadn't been washed; I know that the streets had a whitish coat of ice crystals that gave a mildly-pleasant crunching as you rode, and yet traction didn't seem to be an issue.
Millo, Karl and George rode with me this morning, on what was hopefully the end of our current cold snap. It's been at least three years since we've seen temps like these, and longer than that since we've seen them last more than a couple of days. Karl & George seem to be in pretty good shape these days, which is good, since they can keep each other company. Me? I've got Millo to keep me company, and if that's not enough, there's always the sound of my cold-weather breathing.
Truthfully, it didn't seem quite as cold as it was, probably because I'm beginning to get used to it, and have been learning as I go along how to dress appropriately. This morning I added something new to my cold-weather arsenel. Hopefully all of us who are silly enough to ride when it's below (or even close to) freezing use cold-weather booties over our shoes. But while booties make the ride survivable, you'll still have that wonderful feeling in the shower as you thaw out, where your toes half-itch and half-hurt, and look a color of purple that you didn't find in your box of crayolas growing up. So what's my no-longer-secret for keeping my toes comfy? Simple. Put a pair of Kucharik toe warmers over the front of your shoes, and then the booties over those. I didn't know it would actually work, it just seemed like something to try. They worked great! No itching, no pain, no numbness, not even that ugly color of purple. You gotta try it!
01/11/07- BRRRRR. WIMPS ARE US. ME ANYWAY. And this is just the beginning; it's supposedly going to be even colder tomorrow morning. But that's OK, since I don't ride on Friday mornings. Today will have to have been enough. And when you wake up, look at the outside thermometer and it says 30 degrees... you can pretty much assume it will be enough. By the time I got out the door it had warmed up to maybe 33, but we hit 30 in Woodside. Climbing Kings is always good for a temp boost, and that was the case today. At the "window" (before the park entrance, where you look to the right and see Canada College) it was a toasty 36 degrees, so we (that would be Kevin, Karl, Millo and newcomer John) stopped at the park to remove our jackets. John was initially apologizing for how long it was going to take him getting up the hill, but his sincerity was in question a short time later, as he seemed to have little trouble. He wasn't able to do the entire ride with us due to having to get to work by 9:30, but when he can, he won't be bringing up the rear.
That didn't last. It was back down to 32 degrees on Skyline, and stayed there all the way to Sky L'Onda. On average, this may have been our coldest ride in a number of years. We never saw 40 until we got back into Woodside on the return.
Truth be told, it didn't seem that bad when we were out there riding, but as my fingers and toes continue to thaw (and it's now 1pm, 4 hours later), with dry chapped skin that's not only annoying but suffering from something like little paper cuts... it did take its toll.
Would I have rather not ridden? Stayed home in a warm bed, thinking how smart it was that I was inside while other fools were out riding? Absolutely not. As long as it's warm enough that molecules still move, the only time I'll feel truly alive is when I'm out on my bike. But not quite as alive as Karl, who looks to be working back into racing shape. I had naively hoped that his idea of an "off season" would be more than a few weeks long.
01/09/07- 13- 29- 37. IT'S ALL IN THE NUMBERS.
13? That would be the number of feet climbed on Skyline, at the end of the flat/slightly-downhill section before the descent into Sky L'Onda (coming from King's Mtn). That dreadful nasty little rise that causes you to suffer like a dog 'cuz you're trying to hang onto someone's wheel. 13 lousy feet. That's it. Pitiful.
29? That would be about the time it took to claw my way up King's Mtn this morning, a fair amount longer than it took Kevin & George. I started up pretty strongly, despite having some issues breathing in the cold (more on that shortly), but on the steeper sections, I felt like I died a thousand deaths. I finished about 28:52 (about?), but it felt like so much more... or less. Unquestionably I could be doing better if I hit up a few Alto Velo "A" rides on Sundays, but right now priority #1 is to get my 14-year-old out on his bike, and it's going to be a couple years before he's ready for something like that. But y'know, it wasn't that long ago I might have thought he'd never be up to that, but he's progressing nicely. It still takes him almost exactly twice the amount of time it would take me to get up the hill (whether that hill be Kings or Old LaHonda), but his confidence is improving, his cornering is much better, and he doesn't actually enjoy climbing, but accepts it as a requirement for the reward (descending). In that way he's quite different from his Dad, who always preferred the climb to the descent.
37? That would be the temperature at the start of the climb. And that would also be about 8 degrees colder than my lungs find workable. 45 degrees & up and there's no wheezing, none of that raspy sick steam-engine sound, like someone needs to drain the gunk from the bottom of the tank. Above 45 my breathing is just as loud, but it's more of a healthy steam-engine sound.
Karl, George, Chris, Millo... seems like I'm leaving somebody out, but Kevin called on my cell phone, saying he couldn't make it because he had to "work." Kevin's a pilot, and has to "work" on a schedule the rest of us are quite envious of. In fact, he can pretty much choose his schedule to accommodate any ride he wants to do, so I guess the real question is, why didn't he want to ride with us this morning?
01/07/06- A REALLY TOUGH GUY OUT ON THE ROAD TODAY, and I'm not talking about my son finally getting to the top of Kings Mtn in less than an hour. I'm talking about the guy we passed (yes, we actually passed someone heading up the hill). We saw him as we passed the entrance to Huddart Park, and finally passed him at the wide clearing, about 2/3rds of the way up. What made him so tough is that he'd broken
one (or several?) of his ribs in a skiing accident just last week, so each breath was quite painful. That's him in the photo on the right, on the section of road just above the hairpin that precedes the "2 miles to go" marker on the pavement. He was in for a pretty long day, but was smiling all the way.
A bit later we came across a regular reader of our website, but darned if I can remember if his name was Gary or Garrett. He did mention he was a Western Wheeler. That's him in the photo to the left. (Got an email from him a couple days later- it's Gary)
And yes, it was a beautiful day to be out on a bike, with temps starting around 63 and cooling off to 50 up on Skyline. Kevin felt a bit overdressed in Woodside, and was thankful that it quickly cooled once we began climbing Kings. Just one stop this time, below the hairpin where I took the photo of the guy with the broken rib. Looking at our time I knew we couldn't stop too long, maybe a minute and a half or so and we were back at it. Having a rabbit (the guy with the broken rib) in front probably helped, although when I told Kevin we had a rabbit to chase, he kept looking around for... rabbits. Sigh.
We ate outside at Alice's this time, under one of those heat thingees that can make it quite comfortable even on a cooler day. Hot chocolate isn't an option on such days, it's a requirement (substituting for the canned lemonade we order on warmer days). I ordered a Yamaha (teriyaki chicken, pineapple & jack cheese) while Kevin had a Suzuki (same but with hamburger instead of chicken). Both grilled to perfection, as they say.
Lots of others out there on bikes, which shouldn't be too surprising. Green Webcor jerseys were everywhere! Makes sense, given their ride was a collection of assaults and descents on Skyline, including Kings. Since we got off to a late start (just after noon), we were seeing what was left of their ride, in scattered bits & pieces by that time.
What's next for Kevin (the 14-year-old version)? Good question. Kings, 84 & Old LaHonda are all under his belt. Page Mill would seem a bit on the cruel side, with those long steep pitches beyond what he'd consider fun at the moment. Doing Skyline/35 heading south from 92 would be logical, were it not for the traffic on 92, which is best dealt with by riders strong enough to get through the corners quickly. My best guess is that he might be ready for a Tunitas loop by sometime in the summer, but definitely not now. Maybe a LaHonda/Pescadero/San Gregorio loop, starting in LaHonda. That might be a good way to introduce him to some new territory without killing him off. Yes, that might be just the ticket!
01/04/07- A CONSTANT HEAVY DRIZZLE, OR WAS IT LIGHT RAIN? Never in question that it would be a day for the rain bikes to come out, with the messy and slightly-slick roads favoring a bit wider tires and, for the sake of being kind to someone drafting, fenders to keep them from eating the spray off your rear wheel. Just Millo & Kevin this morning, as more-sensible people probably caught wind of the fact that the latest killer storm was going to fizzle out completely by early afternoon. I had to ditch the west-side Old LaHonda loop in order to get back in time to see my daughter off to college (again... seems like she's at home as much as she's at school!). Hopefully Sunday I'll get a good ride in with my 14-year-old.
01/02/07- JUST ABOUT ALL THE REGULARS SHOWED UP THIS MORNING. just a day after many of us had climbed Mt. Hamilton (which has become a New Year's Day ritual for many of us). Karl, Millo, George, Kevin, Todd & Chris. Good thing I had my camera and got a group photo on west-side Old LaHonda, or I wouldn't have remembered everyone. The climb up Kings was very, very slow, and notably absent (at the time) were Karl & George (Karl had flatted on the way to the start). They caught up with us at the top though. Don't think anyone was feeling especially fast this morning, with the possible exception of Chris who, if his legs haven't failed him (which they rarely do), always seems to appear strong. Maybe it's just one of those not-nearly-50-like-the-rest-of-us things (aside from Todd who also tends to have a bit more zip than the rest of us, and, coincidentally, also happens to be about half our age).
A very nice morning, with it feeling a bit warmer than the temp indicated... the opposite of how the top of Mt. Hamilton always feels a whole lot colder than the computer says. And, according to the weatherman, a whole lot nicer than it's supposed to be for our ride on Thursday (wind & rain, yuck!). But we'll be there. Some of us, anyway. Myself, Kevin & Millo are the likely suspects to be out there when most sane people are putting their bikes onto a trainer in front of a TV showing their favorite Tour de France stage. What fun is that?
01/01/07- GREAT DAY ON MT HAMILTON! Got to share the climb with a whole lot of other people, probably more than I've ever seen on New Year's Day before. I've put some photos up on our Picasa site ; I'll get around to labeling them shortly. We did hear of one nasty accident, requiring that somebody be flown out by helicopter, but don't have any details yet, other than the person originally being knocked out but shortly afterwards was alert and sitting up.
Mt Hamilton ride New Year's Day! We've got various links to rides we've done here , here , and here . We'll leave from the base (Alum Rock and Mt. Hamilton Road) at 8:45am; very fast riders will make it to the top around 10am (not the people I can ride with!), moderately fast riders around 10:30. If your Old LaHonda times run over 30 minutes, you might want to leave a half hour earlier or so if you want the "group experience" at the top. It's a very long climb (about 20 miles), punctuated with two descents on the way up. Faster riders will be back at the start around noon; for some, it could be as late as 2pm.
No food or water anywhere but the top, and the "food" is candy from a vending machine. But the views can be spectacular, and you'll know for the rest of the year that at least you accomplished something on a bike!
This isn't a group ride per se, so if you want to be sure you're riding with others, bring them along! The more the merrier. And yes, we'll get photos up either late that evening or the next day. --Mike--
|
i don't know
|
Who won the Best Supporting Actor 'Oscar' for his role in 'An Officer And A Gentleman'?
|
1982 Academy Awards® Winners and History
The Verdict (1982)
Actor:
BEN KINGSLEY in "Gandhi", Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie", Jack Lemmon in "Missing", Paul Newman in "The Verdict", Peter O'Toole in "My Favorite Year"
Actress:
MERYL STREEP in "Sophie's Choice", Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria", Jessica Lange in "Frances", Sissy Spacek in "Missing", Debra Winger in "An Officer and a Gentleman"
Supporting Actor:
LOUIS GOSSETT, JR. in "An Officer and a Gentleman", Charles Durning in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", John Lithgow in "The World According to Garp", James Mason in "The Verdict", Robert Preston in "Victor/Victoria"
Supporting Actress:
JESSICA LANGE in "Tootsie", Glenn Close in "The World According to Garp", Teri Garr in "Tootsie", Kim Stanley in "Frances", Lesley Ann Warren in "Victor/Victoria"
Director:
RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH for "Gandhi", Sidney Lumet for "The Verdict", Wolfgang Petersen for "Das Boot", Sydney Pollack for "Tootsie", Steven Spielberg for
"E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial"
1982 became known as the year with many cross-dressing, gender-reversed, transvestite performances and roles with confused sexual identities: Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Julie Andrews and Robert Preston in Victor/Victoria, and John Lithgow in The World According to Garp. It must be noted that these four acting nominees all lost their bids. And it was known as the year that one of the most successful contenders, the box-office blockbuster
E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial , lost the top Oscar award.
Many of the major awards among 1982 films were swept by director Sir Richard Attenborough's earnest, conventional three-hour long, costume epic biography/story of the life of the great, noble and venerable Indian leader, the Mahatma Gandhi (with eleven nominations and eight wins). It won the largest number of awards for any British film up to that time - although the film was financed by Columbia Studios. (The year before, the British film Chariots of Fire was also honored with many accolades - seven nominations and four wins.)
The film's eight awards were for Best Actor (Ben Kingsley in a debut lead performance), Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art/Set Direction, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design - and director Attenborough won two Oscars - for Best Picture (as producer), and Best Director.
Two of the Best Picture nominees might have won instead, since they were also very-accomplished films:
director Steven Spielberg's extremely-popular and entertaining, block-buster science-fiction film
E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (with nine nominations and four wins for technical achievements, for Best Sound, Original Score for John Williams - his fourth Oscar, Visual Effects, and Sound Effects Editing)
Sydney Pollack's witty gender comedy Tootsie (with ten nominations and only one win, for Best Supporting Actress), the story of an out-of-work actor Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) whose female disguises help him get a job and become a female star on a daytime television soap opera. (Although the Academy awarded a Best Picture Oscar to
Annie Hall (1977) five years earlier, a rare occurrence for a comedy, it was not likely to occur at such regular intervals.)
The other two Best Picture contenders were:
Greek director Constantin Costa-Gavras' first American film, the South American political thriller Missing (with four nominations and one win - Best Screenplay Adaptation) that suggested CIA involvement in the overthrow of Chile's dictator Salvador Allende
Sidney Lumet's dramatic courtroom drama The Verdict (with five nominations and no wins), about an alcoholic Boston lawyer named Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) and with a screenplay by David Mamet
The only Best Picture-nominated director who wasn't nominated for Best Director was Costa-Gavras. Instead, German director Wolfgang Petersen was nominated for Das Boot (The Boat) (with six nominations and no wins), a tense and claustrophobic tale of a 1941 Nazi U-boat during World War II. [The film was awarded more Oscar nominations than any previous foreign language films in history - until this record was tied in the next year by Fanny and Alexander (1983) (with six nominations and four wins). Both films would be surpassed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which earned ten nominations and four wins including Best Foreign Language Film, including a rare Best Picture nomination.] The Verdict brought director Sidney Lumet his fourth -- and last unsuccessful Best Director Oscar nomination. (A fifth nomination was as co-writer of the Adapted Screenplay for Prince of the City (1981).)
Ben Kingsley deservedly won the Best Actor Oscar (with his first nomination and first Oscar) for his intelligent, sensitive, and realistic portrayal of Mohandas Gandhi's life and his doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience in Gandhi. With his half-Indian (birth name Krishna Bhanji) and half-English descent, Kingsley became the first South Asian performer to achieve such a feat.
All of newcomer Kingsley's Best Actor competitors were veteran actors - the two strongest were:
Dustin Hoffman (with his fifth nomination) as Michael Dorsey/'Dorothy' Michaels, who impersonated a feminist woman and fooled his/her co-actors in order to acquire a daytime soap-TV starring role, in Tootsie
Paul Newman (with his sixth unsuccessful career nomination) as alcoholic, ambulance-chasing, Boston trial lawyer Frank P. Galvin involved in a medical malpractice case in The Verdict
The other two Best Actor nominees were:
Jack Lemmon (with his eighth and last nomination, a two-time Oscar winner) as father Ed Horman searching for his missing writer/son Charles in violence-torn Central America in Missing
Peter O'Toole (with his seventh of eight career nominations, tying him with Richard Burton for the same number of losing nominations) as a former, alcoholic, Hollywood swashbuckler actor named Alan Swann in director Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year (the film's sole nomination)
The Best Actress winner was Meryl Streep (with her fourth nomination and second Oscar win) as tormented Polish refugee Sophie Zawistowska in New York, the survivor of the Nazi concentration camps (following her fateful 'choice' between which of her two children would die), who has an unstable relationship with a driven Brooklynite (Kevin Kline) in director/screenwriter Alan J. Pakula's melodramatic film Sophie's Choice (the film's sole Oscar win out of five nominations).
[Streep's win prevented Jessica Lange from winning both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Oscars this year. This was Streep's first Best Actress Oscar following her supporting win in 1979. She was nominated consecutively from 1981-1983 as Best Actress.]
The other Best Actress nominees included:
1964 Oscar-winner Julie Andrews (with her third nomination) in the title role of Victoria ("a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman"), a British singer/transvestite in a drag bar, in Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria
1980 Oscar-winner Sissy Spacek (with her third nomination) as Jack Lemmon's (as Ed Horman) daughter-in-law Beth Horman - a wife whose husband Charles Horman (John Shea) went 'missing and who seeks the truth in Chile in Missing
Debra Winger (with her first nomination) as Paula Pokrifki, a local millworker (who falls in love with officer candidate Richard Gere) in the Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School's town in director Taylor Hackford's An Officer and a Gentleman
Jessica Lange as tragic, ill-fated, self-destructive, mentally-ill starlet Frances Farmer in Frances
[Lange was also nominated - and won - in the Supporting Actress category for her bubbly role in Tootsie, mirroring the pattern of previous double-nominees. This was the first time, since 1942, and only the third time in all Oscar history, that an actress was nominated in both the lead and supporting categories. It also happened to Fay Bainter in 1938 and Teresa Wright in 1942. It was also only the fourth time in Academy history that a performer had competed in two acting categories in the same year. Lange was the first acting double-nominee since 1944 when Barry Fitzgerald was also nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards for Going My Way (1944).]
Louis Gossett, Jr. (with his sole career nomination and win) was selected as the Best Supporting Actor for his role as the tough, principled drill sergeant Emil Foley who shapes recruit Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. [It was a memorable win for Gossett - he was the third African-American actor to win an acting Oscar, following Hattie McDaniel who won in 1939 for
Gone With The Wind (1939) , and Sidney Poitier who won the Best Actor award for Lilies of the Field (1963). Gossett was the first black actor to win an Academy Award since Poitier's earlier win, and he was the first African-American actor to win Best Supporting Actor.]
The remaining Best Supporting Actor nominees were:
Charles Durning (with his first nomination) as the governor in the mediocre film version of the Broadway play The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (the film's only nomination) [Durning also starred in an un-nominated role as Jessica Lange's widowed father Les who falls in love with Dorothy Michaels (Hoffman) in Tootsie.]
John Lithgow (with his first nomination) as trans-sexual (or trans-gender) ex-football player Roberta Muldoon, in director George Roy Hill's version of John Irving's best-seller The World According to Garp
James Mason (with his third and last unsuccessful nomination) as the scheming lawyer Ed Concannon in The Verdict
Robert Preston (with his sole career nomination) as Parisian homosexual nightclub drag performer Toddy, who persuaded Victoria (co-star Julie Andrews) to pass herself off as a man), in Victor/Victoria
[Note: Preston wasn't even nominated for his definitive and famous role as Dr. Henry Hill in The Music Man (1962).]
And finally, in the Best Supporting Actress category, Jessica Lange (who was also nominated and lost in the Best Actress category for her tortured portrayal of the lead character in Frances) was nominated and won for her role as Julie, 'Dorothy's' unknowing, submissive best girlfriend in Tootsie. One of Lange's co-stars, Teri Garr (with her only nomination) was also competing in the category for her performance as Sandy, Hoffman's unemployed and rejected girlfriend. And Kim Stanley (with her second and last unsuccessful nomination) was nominated for her role as Lange's mother in Frances.
The other Best Supporting Actress nominees were:
Lesley Ann Warren (with her only nomination) as a gangster's girlfriend named Norma in Victor/Victoria
Glenn Close (in her film debut and with her first of five unsuccessful nominations in the 80s) as Jenny Fields (T.S. Garp's - Robin William's - unmarried, eccentric and liberated mother) in The World According to Garp
The Best Original Song category had fierce competition, with "Up Where We Belong" (An Officer and a Gentleman) edging out strong nominees including: "It Might Be You" (Tootsie) and "Eye of the Tiger" ( Rocky III ).
This year, an Honorary Award was presented to Mickey Rooney, "in recognition of his 60 years of versatility in a variety of memorable film performances." Rooney had earlier won a Special Oscar in 1938 (co-awarded to "juvenile player" Deanna Durbin), and had acquired four nominations (with no wins) - two Best Actor nods for Babes in Arms (1939) and The Human Comedy (1943), and two Best Supporting Actor honors for The Bold and the Brave (1956), and The Black Stallion (1979).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Except for its Best Original Screenplay nomination (for director/writer Barry Levinson's debut film), Diner was devoid of other nominations for its cast, such as Ellen Barkin for her role as Daniel Stern's neglected wife Beth. And Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner was sorely under-appreciated (with only two nominations for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration and Best Visual Effects - and no wins), lacking Best Picture and Best Director nominations. In addition, Jordan S. Chronenweth's Cinematography, the Costume Design, and Vangelis' Original Score also suffered the Academy's lack of recognition.
Both director/co-writer Jerzy Skolimowski's political allegory and compelling drama Moonlighting and director/co-writer Wim Wenders' complex film about film-making, The State of Things, lacked nominations of any kind. George Miller's Australian film The Road Warrior with Mel Gibson was nomination-less, as was Paul Bartel's black comedy Eating Raoul, and director Fassbinder's West German film Lola.
Other acting nominations were denied Albert Finney and Diane Keaton as a broken-up married couple in Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, and Jeremy Irons as Nowak - a Polish workers' foreman in Moonlighting. Director/writer Walter Hill's buddy cop/criminal film 48 HRS (with no nominations). was lacking in nominations for leads Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. And in an early role, Sean Penn was snubbed for his memorable portrayal of stoned surfer-dude Jeff Spicoli in Amy Heckerling's coming of age teen-comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Disney's TRON, with two nominations for Best Sound and Best Costume Design, was disqualified for a Best Visual Effects award because the Academy believed that it "cheated" by using a computer - the concept of using computers to craft environments, rather than drawing them by hand, was considered inauthentic. [Three years later, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) received an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, highlighted by Pixar's CGI "stained glass knight" effect using computer animation. An additional four years later, James Cameron's The Abyss (1989) was also honored with a Best Visual Effects Oscar (the film's only win) for using computer animation.]
Tobe Hooper's effective horror film (with producer/co-screenwriter Steven Spielberg), Poltergeist , received only three nominations (without wins): Best Original Score (Jerry Goldsmith), Best Sound Effects, and Best Visual Effects. There were no nods for the psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), young Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O'Rourke), the two main leads (JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson), the screenplay, or the director.
Two films suffered, in particular, because there were only three nominees for Best Visual Effects. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , a blockbuster film, was devoid of nominations - for Ricardo Montalban's performance as Khan Noonien Singh, for James Horner's musical score, or for the film's visual effects. Also amazing was that another film with fantastic visual effects, Jim Henson's Muppet-fantasy The Dark Crystal (with no nominations), was passed over in many categories (technical awards and score, to name a few).
Alan Parker's expressionistic rock musical Pink Floyd: The Wall was also overlooked, especially in the Best Original Song and Best Sound categories.
|
Louis Gossett, Jr.
|
Which artist painted the picture, 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp' in 1632?
|
An Officer And A Gentleman - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
TV Listings
Rating:
Lou Gossett, Jr., won a much-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his stellar portrayal of a drill instructor in this story of determination and love set against the backdrop of a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School. Richard Gere plays Zack Mayo, a would-be flyer with a tough-luck
background who, like his classmates, must survive the rigors of training under draconian Marine sergeant Emil Foley (Gossett) before moving on to flight school. Sgt. Foley singles out Zack for special derision, and though he pushes his charge to the limit, the feisty Zack refuses to give up,
eventually tangling with the DI in martial-arts battle. Meanwhile, Zack and classmate Sid Worley (David Keith), the film's tragic figure, become involved with a couple of local girls, millworkers Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger, who received a Best Actress nomination for her fine performance) and
Lynette Pomeroy (Lisa Blount). Paula becomes convinced that Zack is like all the other officer candidates who do their training, take advantage of local women, and then disappear forever once they've earned their white uniform. Douglas Day Stewart's Oscar-nominated screenplay is generally
involving (if a little overheated), but it is ultimately compromised by its sexism, particularly in the finale, which leaves Paula with only one hope for happiness--to be carried off by a dashing knight. Nonetheless, the performances are uniformly strong, with Gere offering some of his best
work--though it pales in comparison with Gossett's tour de force as the tough, principled Sgt. Foley, which he patterned after real-life army DI Bill Dower (familiar to some from his appearances in Miller Lite commercials). The film's memorable theme song, "Up Where We Belong" (sung by Joe Cocker
and Jennifer Warnes), also won an Academy Award.
Released: 1982
Rating: R
Review: Lou Gossett, Jr., won a much-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his stellar portrayal of a drill instructor in this story of determination and love set against the backdrop of a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School. Richard Gere plays Zack Mayo, a…
|
i don't know
|
"Which twentieth century US President once said, ""They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance""?"
|
Ronald Reagan - 32 Famous Quotes by the 40th US President
Ronald Reagan
32 Ronald Reagan Quotes You Should Know
Famous Quotes by the 40th President of the United States
President Ronald Reagan posing at his oval office desk. (October 25, 1984). (Picture courtesy the Ronald Reagan Library)
By Jennifer Rosenberg
Updated March 25, 2016.
Ronald Reagan served two terms as President of the United States, from 1981 to 1989. He was also the oldest person ever elected President, which was an issue during both elections. Known as "the Great Communicator," Reagan is often remembered for his quick wit and storytelling. Below you will find some of the funnier and more famous quotes by Ronald Reagan .
Reagan's Philosophy of Life
My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose - somehow we win out.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
All great change in America begins at the dinner table.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation, delivered in the Oval Office (January 11, 1989)
Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan from his letter announcing his Alzheimer's disease to the American public (November 5, 1994)
continue reading below our video
Profile of Ronald Reagan
It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan at the Gridiron Dinner (April 22, 1987)
Well, I'm Not Going to Make Age an Issue
I did turn 75 today - but remember, that's only 24 Celsius.
-- Comment by Ronald Reagan right before he signed the Annual Economic Report of the President (February 6, 1986)
Thomas Jefferson once said, "We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works." And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan during the Second Presidential Debate against Walter Mondale (October 21, 1984)
Funny Quips as President
I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
How can a president not be an actor?
-- Response by Ronald Reagan when asked by a reporter "How can an actor run for President?" during the presidential campaign (1980)
Humor Even After Being Shot
Please tell me you're all Republicans.
-- Comment by Ronald Reagan to the surgeons who were about to operate on him after the assassination attempt (March 30, 1981)
Honey, I forgot to duck.
-- Comment made by Ronald Reagan to his wife, Nancy Reagan , when she arrived at the hospital following the assassination attempt (March 30, 1981)
Albert Einstein, Your Virtue, and Your Neighbor's Job: Reagan's View of Taxes and Economics
Even Albert Einstein reportedly needed help on his 1040 form.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on Tax Reform (May 28, 1985)
A recession is when a neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Labor Day Address at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey (September 1, 1980)
Balancing the budget is a little like protecting your virtue: You just have to learn to say "no."
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Kansas State University at the Alfred M. Landon Lecture Series on Public Issues (September 9, 1982)
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business (August 15, 1986)
Tear Down This Wall! Communism and the Soviet Union
Mr. Gorbachev , open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Speech at the Berlin Wall (June 12, 1987)
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan during Remarks at the Annual Convention of Concerned Women for America held at the Crystal Gateway Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Virginia (September 25, 1987)
If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state , because everybody would join the other party.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Remarks to Polish Americans in Chicago, Illinois (June 23, 1983)
I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons , to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan during his Address to the Nation on National Security (March 23, 1983)
Politics Isn't a Bad Profession
Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July , but the democrats believe every day is April 15 .
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
You know, it has been said that politics is the second oldest profession and I've come to realize over the last few years, it bears a great similarity to the first.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Speech at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan (November 10, 1977)
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
Government Is the Problem
Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan at the National Conference of the Building and Construction Trades, AFL-CIO (March 30, 1981)
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (January 20, 1981)
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan during his gubernatorial campaign (1965)
Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on the Fiscal Year 1983 Federal Budget (April 29, 1982)
Abortion
I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.
-- Quote by Ronald Reagan during the Anderson-Reagan Presidential Debate in Baltimore (September 21, 1980)
|
Ronald Reagan
|
By what other name is the 'Battle of the Nile' (1798) known?
|
The Best and Worst Foreign Policy Presidents of the Past Century - The Atlantic
The Atlantic
The Best and Worst Foreign Policy Presidents of the Past Century
Most Popular
Text Size
Presidential candidate Richard Nixon meets with Lyndon Johnson at the White House, July 26, 1968 / LBJ Library
Who were the best and worst presidents in American history? It's the sort of barstool conversation bandied about amateur historian and policy nerds like myself on a semi-regular basis. But as this question has come up in recent weeks around the blogosphere it got me thinking about a slightly more discrete question: Who are the best and worst foreign policy presidents of the last 100 years?
After reaching out to host of historians, foreign policy experts, academics and various think tankers here's one stab at answering a question which, in many respects, has no right answer. How you choose the best and worst foreign policy President depends in large measure on what values inform your vision of what a good foreign policy looks like. If you're a foreign policy idealist, Wilson would seem pretty good; a foreign policy realist; you might cast a vote for George H.W Bush or even Richard Nixon. If you prefer your presidents to talk tough, Harry Truman might be your man; if you prefer a more modest and less partisan figure, Dwight Eisenhower might float your boat.
As my list suggests, I tend to lean toward the more restrained, pragmatic realists who are suspicious about the use of force. Conversely, I'm more wary of not only the idealistic and ideologically driven presidents, but also those who use foreign policy, most destructively, as a tool of domestic politics. For the purposes of brevity, I've gone back 100 years from today, and restricted the selections to eleven presidents who fall in the best to worst spectrum (that means no TR, no Clinton and no Taft, Ford, Coolidge, Hoover and Harding). These are the five best, the five worst and the one who is in a category all his own. But half the fun of assembling a list like this is in the writing; the other is in listening to people tell me all the reasons I'm wrong. So have at it.
The Five Best Presidents
#5 The Incomplete: John F. Kennedy
Was John F. Kennedy the worst president of the 20th century as defense blogger Tom Ricks suggests? Not even close. His foreign policy record is a tale of crucial mistakes, significant accomplishments and perhaps above all an evolution in thinking (an unusual trait among presidential office holders). He came into office having dangerously ratcheted up the Cold War rhetoric with his blatantly false warnings of a missile gap with the Soviet Union. His inaugural address, though deservedly praised, pointed the way toward greater US militarism and intervention in the periphery of the Cold War.
His presidency got off to a terrible start with the Bay of Pigs, an epically bad example of presidential mismanagement. But not long after he resisted calls for military action in Laos: an example of bold and assertive leadership from a young president. The Vienna Summit with Khrushchev was amateur hour and contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But JFK's handling of the one incident that brought the world as close to nuclear Armageddon as its ever come is an accomplishment that outweighs any negatives on Kennedy's record. Crisis management is a fairly essential part of the job of president and few of the holders of the top job did it as well as Kennedy did in the Fall of 1962.
The big unknown with Kennedy is, of course, Vietnam. Clearly he ramped up US engagement in the conflict, although clearly never took the step of sending ground troops to fight there - as his successor so flagrantly did.* Would he have escalated? We'll never know. Although the evidence that he would have been perhaps more rigorous in his analysis and decision-making than Johnson is compelling. Also the American University speech given only six months before his death suggests that Kennedy had softened, in part, his hard-line Cold War thinking. It's impossible to fully judge Kennedy's presidency and the detractors and supporters have strong cases to make, but it's easy to imagine that had he lived and continued the foreign policy transformation that was emerging near the end of his life, he could have been one of the great ones.
#4 A Tale of Two Terms: Ronald Reagan
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 he had a reputation as perhaps the most stridently anti-Communist presidential candidate in the Cold War era. As President he failed to disappoint. He turned up the anti-Communist rhetoric; branded the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'; raised defense spending significantly; and increased support for anti-Communist rebels, and authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the Far East, Africa and perhaps most enduringly, Afghanistan. By escalating the containment doctrine to one of "rollback" his first term as President saw the Cold War reach, perhaps, its most fever pitch with both sides seriously entertaining the potentiality of nuclear conflict. An ABC television movie, The Day After, which portrayed a post-apocalyptic United States seemed like more than mere fantasy, but a distinct possibility.
Yet, in retrospect, for all his political bluster Reagan turned out to be quite the political pragmatist. When Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985, Reagan shelved the tough talk and got down to business, almost making a deal with the Soviet leader to eliminate all strategic nuclear weapons at the Reykjavik summit. But the very fact that he was willing to work with the Soviet premier; that he ignored the heated claims of many of his advisers that the US should remain on heightened sense of alert with the Soviets gave Gorbachev the political space he needed to enact reforms that eventually toppled his country. It's a telling reminder that sometimes restraint is the most effective foreign policy option.
Moreover, for all of Reagan's hawkish image he only ordered one major military intervention during his presidency, Grenada, and he wasn't afraid to cut his losses when necessary as he did in Lebanon after 241 Marines were killed on a peacekeeping mission. While the Iran-Contra affair would become a black mark on his second term in office and it's hard to look past the human toll of his support for anti-Communist and un-democratic groups around the world, he deserves enormous acclaim for helping peacefully end the Cold War (though not 'win' as Reagan partisans are prone to argue).
#3 The Underrated: George H. W Bush
Generally speaking when "president" and "Bush" are used in the same sentence these days, rarely does the word "success" also appear (more on that later). But when it comes to the foreign policy performance of the elder President Bush the track record is actually pretty good. He handled the Iraq War with great deftness; of particular note was the assembling of a multi-national coalition and getting a UN Security Council imprimatur to turn Saddam out of Kuwait. By laying out modest, achievable goals for the war and resisting the urge to "go to Baghdad" Bush offered a model for foreign intervention that faithfully subscribed to the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine . . . and was of course flagrantly violated by his son. Nonetheless, the Gulf War bolstered the notion of collective security in the international system and offered a warning to other countries intent on conducting cross-border invasions in the post-Cold War world.
Speaking of the Cold War, while Bush might have been a bit late in supporting Russian reformers, he was able to, in part, manage an international process that brought Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, reunified Germany and eventually saw the demise of America's greatest strategic threat. All this was achieved with no violence and unfolded in such a way that saw vibrant democracies take root across Europe (if not Russia). That's no small accomplishment (even if the lion's share of credit belongs to European and Russian leaders). In the Middle East, the political pressure he put on Israel after the Gulf War (which hurt his re-election chances) led to the Madrid Peace conference. Even more important, open conflict with the Israeli government contributed, in part, to the election of Yitzhak Rabin and defeat of Yitzhak Shamir in 1991; these were two moves that helped pave the way for Oslo.
On the negative side, Bush's hands-off policy toward the Balkans while true to his realist impulses likely undermined the possibility of resolving the conflict before a full-scale civil war emerged. His encouragement of uprisings in Iraq that he failed to back up with use of force (not to mention a terrible cease fire deal with Saddam that allowed him to suppress Shiite and Kurdish revolts) are black marks on the Bush record. Criticism is perhaps also due for his failure to try and stabilize Afghanistan after the Soviet departure, but it's highly questionable as how to much the United States could have done to alter the situation. His post-Tiananmen support for Chinese leaders was morally dubious but may have, in the long-run, strengthened the process of reform in China. All in all Bush's success in his one-term suggests that had he served another his final ranking might have been even higher.
#2 Dwight Eisenhower: The Runner-Up
Everybody likes Ike it seems (well except of course the Guatemalans, the Iranians, and the Indonesians, and for good reason). His presidency gets high marks from historians and foreign policy analysts alike - and deservedly so.He played nuclear poker beautifully to end the Korean War and also convinced the Chinese from keeping their hands off Taiwan. His policy of ratcheting up the nuclear arms race lessened the chances of US-Soviet conflict and also prevented the military budget from spiraling out of control. His remainder method for defense spending (after domestic priorities the remainder would go to the Pentagon) brought some sanity to what he later dubbed the military-industrial complex.
Ike also gets points for his handling of the Suez crisis and staring down those in his own administration who wanted to support the French militarily when they were getting their clocks cleaned in Indochina. And he used Cold War fears to push for national highway system and more money for higher education, two smart national security investments. From the a political standpoint he quietly helped usher in the downfall of Joseph McCarthy; and more prominently his 1952 campaign had the intended effect of burying the isolationist wing of the GOP and enshrining an internationalist vision in US foreign policy. He was also a non-partisan on foreign policy issues; a far cry from Truman or the presidents who would follow in his footsteps.
As Sean Kay, a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University (and Eisenhower devotee) said to me; "what really made him a great President on foreign policy was his capacity to see American power in more than military terms, and to see the essential relationship between domestic programs, like education, and national security. I could not think of a more appropriate worldview today." It's hard to disagree.
#1 The Gold Standard: Franklin Roosevelt
On the strength alone of winning World War II and handling the delicate diplomacy of dealing with wartime US Allies, like Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-Shek Roosevelt is far away the greatest foreign policy president of the 20th century. With this record of accomplishment it's hardly even a contest.
When one considers also that he laid the groundwork for the international system, via the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, he practically floats into the stratosphere. This latter accomplishment is among FDR's most enduring in that it re-shaped the global system after World War II. But even Roosevelt's lesser well-known achievements stand out. The Good Neighbor policy ended (at least temporarily) US military interventions into Latin America and solidified the support of Western Hemispheric leaders for America's larger foreign policy goals.
Critics will rightfully complain that Roosevelt stumbled into conflict with Japan (or manufactured the war in order to ensure a US entry intro to the larger European conflict); or that he sold out the Eastern Europe countries at Yalta. All fair charges, but then they are also reflective of the hard-nosed pragmatism that bookended Roosevelt's idealism. Obviously no president is perfect and even the best ones have their downsides. Indeed, few American presidents fall easily into the great or even really good category - in the 20th century Roosevelt is clearly the one who does.
The Five Worst Presidents
#5 When He Was Good, He Was Good; When He Was Bad, Whoa: Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon is generally considered one of the worst American Presidents - impeachment and resignation tends to have that effect. But his foreign policy record is more mixed. His accomplishments are among the most consequential of the Cold War, in particular, his opening to China in 1971 and his efforts at détente with the Soviet Union. Considering that these had been his two overriding priorities upon taking office it's even more impressive.
Of course the ledger on the other side is pretty ugly. It took Nixon four years to wind down the Vietnam War (with tens of thousands more American dead as a result). This came after he and his top foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, had scuttled a potential breakthrough only days before the 1968 presidential election (an act that to the less charitable might be considered borderline treason). His decision to bomb and then later invade Cambodia led to the ascendance of the Khmer Rouge and the death of a million Cambodians. He escalated the bombing of North Vietnam to get a final peace deal, which led to horrible civilian casualties; and then when that deal was reached his political problems at home over Watergate helped to undermine the case for continuing to support South Vietnam. There was also the deposing of Prime Minister Allende in Chile, Nixon's virtual nervous breakdown during the Yom Kippur War (although Kissinger's subsequent shuttle diplomacy paved the way for the Camp David Accords) and, the stain of Watergate badly undermined the US image in the world.
From the narrow perspective of US interests, Nixon had important successes and might even be considered an above average presidency; but with the fuller range of human consequences of his policies is considered it's much harder to give him a passing grade.
#4 The Overrated: Harry S. Truman
Harry Truman has in the nearly 50 years since he left the White House grown significantly in the estimation of both the public and many historians. To be sure, he deserves enormous credit for protecting and stabilizing Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. These are signal achievements but as historians from Robert Dallek and Walter Lafeber to Fredrik Logevall have suggested there is a pretty significant downside to Truman's presidency as well.
First there was Korea. An impulsive response to a cross-border attack that re-shaped American foreign policy. It was the final nail in the coffin of the more modest containment strategy proposed by George Kennan and by default enshrined the notion that the US had a responsibility to contain Communism wherever it showed its fangs. But while the decision to go to war can be considered a debatable one; the failure in rein in Douglas MacArthur's push to the Yalu River, which triggered a Chinese intervention is a disaster that can't be washed away (even by Truman's later decision to fire the general). Considering that more than 20 million North Koreans continue to live in terrible hardship today because of that decision only compounds the mistake.
Beyond Korea, the Truman Doctrine and its declaration that it was the "policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures" laid the groundwork for the limitless definition of US national interests that unfolded over the next 60 years. As Kennan would later note, it was one thing to contain Communism in Europe (a goal on which Truman succeeded). It was quite another to broaden that goal to the rest of the world. There is, as a result, a straight line between Truman's foreign policy choices and the war in Vietnam.
Then there was Truman's use of anti-Communist rhetoric for political advantage that turned what might have been a balance of power, geo-political clash into an ideological one. This, of course, also helped to politicize the Cold War in the United States and heightened the issue of anti-Communism. Indeed, few Presidents more flagrantly used foreign policy as a political punching bag as frequently as Truman.
Finally, ask yourself a counter-factual: how would the Cold War have unfolded if FDR had lived out his fourth term, rather than having the inexperienced Truman become the leader of the Free World? It's not hard to imagine that the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, so deftly handled by FDR during WWII, would have been minimized and a less militarist and dangerous conflict might have emerged. At the very least, as Robert Dallek points out even if superpower, ideological conflict between the US and Soviet Union was inevitable, Truman never really sought to find an alternative.
#3 Judge Me Not For What I Did; But What I Said: Woodrow Wilson
One can just easily find foreign policy commentators who will pronounce Wilson the best foreign policy president of the 20th century and those who will call him the worst. The latter argument is tangibly the more persuasive. Wilson was a dangerous interventionist in Latin America and a dangerous utopian in Europe. He sent troops into Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Mexico; all efforts that Wilson convinced himself were intended to further democracy and not US interests. "I am going to teach the South American Republics to elect good men," he once said.
Wilson's willful blindness to the consequences of his foreign policy actions - and his apparent conviction that America's intentions were almost always pure - would define US involvement in World War I as well. Though it helped to end the war in Europe, Wilson was complicit in the disastrous Versailles peace deal. But his greatest failing was in losing the peace at home and failing to build public support for US entry into the League of Nations. The failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty (aided and abetted by Wilson's stubborn and foolish refusal to negotiate over its terms) contributed to the anti-internationalist backlash that emerged after he left office.
Yet, Wilson's advocacy of self-determination and democracy has carried on. As Fareed Zakaria noted several years ago, "when someone argues in favor of human rights and democracy, advocates self-determination for minority populations or the dismantling of colonial empires, criticizes secret and duplicitous diplomacy, or supports international law and organizations, he is rightly called Wilsonian." The Wilsonian impulse in American foreign policy has both spoken to the "better angels" of the American spirit at the same time that it has led to overly ambitious policies far outside the capabilities and interests of the United States (case in point: George W Bush) - and has matched it with a dangerous and often misguided American exceptionalism. In some respects, one could argue that the rightness of Wilson's vision was matched only by the wrongness of the policies that has generally flowed from it. There is no question that Wilson's idea of America's role in the world has endured; it's far less clear that this has had a positive impact on US foreign policy.
#2 Speaking of Hopeful Idealists: Jimmy Carter
If any president speaks to the failures of Wilsonian foreign policy it would be Jimmy Carter. He came into an office with a focus on human rights but found that the intricacies of global politics don't necessarily allow for US presidents to so easily devalue American interests in the name of promoting national values. With the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, more disastrously with the Shah in Iran and in relations with the USSR, Carter tied himself in knots trying to uphold US interests all the while adhering to a human rights first agenda.** Like Wilson, Carter deserves credit for highlighting the importance of the issue after the excesses of Vietnam, but loses points for producing a foreign policy that was hopelessly muddled.
On the flip side, the Camp David Accords were a significant diplomatic achievement and one that strengthened the US position in the region vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. But the Carter Doctrine to protect the Persian Gulf was an under appreciated mistake that expanded the US security umbrella in the defense of . . . cheap oil. Finally, in the last year of his presidency Carter moved further to the right, expanded the defense budget, heated up the anti-Soviet rhetoric, partly in response to the invasion of Afghanistan but also with one eye on Election 1980 (Like so many of his predecessors Carter allowed politics to play a far too significant role in his foreign policy decision-making). As a result he helped to validate the more strident anti-Communism of his opponent, Ronald Reagan. Good intentions that turned out badly . . . one might even detect a pattern here.
#1 The Worst: Lyndon Baines Johnson
One of the reasons that John F. Kennedy looks pretty good as a foreign policy president is because of how bad the foreign policy performance was of the man who replaced him. Say what you will about Lyndon Johnson's domestic accomplishments. They are impressive. As steward of America's global role, Johnson was a train wreck.
The obvious answer as to why LBJ was so bad is, of course, Vietnam. But it was how he screwed up the war that really explains his terribleness. First, his foreign policy thinking was defined by a knee-jerk misuse of historical analogy (Munich, appeasement etc). Second, a focus on the domestic implications of foreign policy decision-making led him to adopt maximalist positions - and made him deeply fearful of any policy shift that would lead to charges of "retreat." (Johnson was deeply affected by the "Who Lost China" attacks of the 1950s and was apprehensive that he would be attacked in a similar manner if he lost Vietnam.) Third, he derided principled war opposition as unpatriotic (in 1966 he called anti-war advocates "Nervous Nellies") and escalated the conflict surreptitiously, without fully informing the American people. The credibility gap he created on the war went a long way toward undermining the confidence of the American people in their elected leaders.
Lastly, as the country became more enmeshed in the war he was practically immune to information and opinion that contradicted his biases. He surrounded himself with supplicants like Walt Rostow who told him what he wanted to hear and got rid of those who offered a dissenting view (for example, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara).
By the fall of 1967, Johnson had one last opportunity to save his presidency and end the war. Instead he continued to mislead American people about how Vietnam was going and the nature of the enemy threat - an effort capped off by General William Westmoreland's famous 'light at the end of the tunnel' speech. The result was that he hopelessly divided the Democratic Party (a rift that has never completely healed), destroyed his domestic agenda, cost himself a chance at re-election and helped to ensure Nixon's victory in November 1968. Put it all together and you have a President whose foreign policy was one for the ages - and not in a good way.
A Category All His Own: George W. Bush
The only saving grace that keeps Lyndon Johnson out of the cellar is that this list included 21st century presidents as well. After all there are bad foreign policy presidents . . . and then there is George W. Bush. The decision alone to go to war in Iraq, an unnecessary and pointless conflict based on dubious intelligence and hyped threats of nuclear, biological attack, would place Bush squarely in the cellar. Yet there is so much more. In making the case for war, Bush ran roughshod over the international system that his own country had helped to form; angered and undermined key allies and cratered the US image in the world. A failure to prioritize post-war planning ensured that a successful military victory against Saddam Hussein turned into a long-term and disastrous occupation that weakened America even further. It's pretty hard to fight a war that literally does not one thing to further US interests and strengthens the enemy you nominally went to war against in the first place (al Qaeda), but Bush accomplished that feat.
Iraq also diverted necessary resources from the war in Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda (leading to further escalation and American loss of life after Bush left office). Bush's second term Freedom doctrine to spread democracy around the world failed badly and opened up the US to charges of hypocrisy (it also led in part to a Hamas government taking over in Gaza). And Bush offered little response as North Korea officially became a member of the nuclear club during his presidency. Bush supporters will argue that it's too early to judge the success of his foreign policy performance. Perhaps, but early judgments are in; and they're not good. It's pretty hard to imagine any situation under which that judgment will be reversed.
*This sentence originally referred to LBJ as Kennedy's "predecessor."
**This sentence originally mistook Iran for Iraq. We regret the errors.
|
i don't know
|
In the 2008 Olympics, Mark Hunter won a gold medal in which sport?
|
Olympics 2008: Great Britain's 27 gold medal-winning Olympians reveal their hopes and dreams for the year ahead | Sport | The Guardian
'In 2009 I am determined to moisturise more'
Great Britain's 27 gold medal-winning Olympians reveal their hopes and dreams for the year ahead
Bradley Wiggins says he is not one for New Year's resolutions. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA
Tuesday 30 December 2008 16.38 EST
First published on Tuesday 30 December 2008 16.38 EST
Athletics
Christine Ohuruogu 400 metres
'I'd like to put aside more time for just watching TV. In the past couple of months things have got really hectic and you don't realise how much time you don't have to yourself. It is pretty hard to have to go back into full-time training so it is good to give yourself a chance to rest and chill out as well'
Boxing
James DeGale
69-75kg
'I'm going to try not to speed in my new Range Rover Sport. I'm training twice a day and it feels nice to be sweating again and have my heart pumping. I'm pleased to be back in the gym and I'm looking forward to my first professional fight in February'
Cycling
Victoria Pendleton
Sprint
'I'm going to give myself time to chill out and do my nails – a bit more Vicky time, because I'm not very good at that at the moment. That's not necessarily because of the Olympics, it's just generally the type of person that I am. I never schedule in enough time for me to do the things I want to do'
Bradley Wiggins
Individual pursuit, Team pursuit
'I've nothing in mind at the moment. I never have had any. I think it's just a load of rubbish, to be honest. No one ever keeps up their New Year's resolutions'
Ed Clancy
Team pursuit
'I'm going to watch more TV. My coach is always getting on to me because a big part of our training is resting. The more time we can rest on the sofa when we're not training is obviously beneficial. I'm into my toys and I've got a few motorbikes and mountain bikes and I'm always a bit restless and running around, doing things'
Paul Manning
Team pursuit
'I don't really do New Year's resolutions. I just think it's best to get on with your life. I have retired from cycling and I am starting a new job in the New Year, working for the company building the velodrome for the 2012 Olympics – so that's my big change for the year. I am approaching it with a little bit of trepidation because it is such a change, but I still keep in touch with the guys from the cycling team'
Geraint Thomas
Team pursuit
'I'm just keen to get back to being a proper athlete – training and cycling and just doing what I do best. I'm heading out to my base in Tuscany, Italy, in January, where I live and race and train. Not such a bad life, is it?'
Rebecca Romero
Individual pursuit
'I'm going to get some new hobbies and interests, because I've committed the last 2½ years so intently to what I've been doing in sport. I've been saying for the last four years that I'm going to learn to speak Spanish properly because I'm half Spanish and I'd love to be able to speak it a bit better and get out and visit my family a bit more'
Jason Kenny
Team sprint
'I don't smoke, I don't drink too much and I don't need to go on a diet, so I'm really struggling to come up with a New Year's resolution. I suppose it couldn't do any harm if I did a bit more training'
Jamie Staff
Team sprint
'I have just bought myself an acoustic guitar so my resolution is to find the time out from training to practise playing the guitar and stick with it'
Chris Hoy
Team sprint, Keirin, Sprint
'It would be great to be able to find more time to spend with my friends and family – the last year has just been a blur'
Nicole Cooke
'It may seem a little strange, but in 2009 I am determined to moisturise more'
Rowing
Zac Purchase
Lightweight double sculls
'The same as every year, which is not to have a New Year's resolution. I just get on with it and when you want to do something just do it, no excuses, and if you want to quit something just quit it there and then – don't wait for January'
Mark Hunter
Lightweight double sculls
'I don't think I could give anything up because life is really good at the moment. My plan is to just keep living my dream in California, and enjoy Vegas while celebrating New Year. I'm loving my job coaching rowing at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], the lifestyle out there is just amazing, so my other resolution is to keep sunbathing on the beach'
Andy Hodge
Coxless fours
'To not forget how hard it was. Looking forward to the next four years it is important to remember how hard we trained to achieve what we did in Beijing. It's quite easy to look back and think 'we won the gold medal so we can slacken off' and forget how hard it was'
Tom James
Coxless fours
'To get organised. I've had three months of unconstructive – but you could say necessary – time off. I'm taking some time out of rowing before I come back next autumn. I'm going to do a marathon, some strengthening and conditioning and will bulk up a little bit. I'm just going to enjoy myself – I played rugby for the first time in about 10 years last week, but I was really annihilated. I had no speed in running or coordination, even something like falling was incredibly awkward'
Peter Reed
Coxless fours
'To stay in touch more with my brother and sister – we're all in the same country, but we're all very busy. The important things in my life are my family, my girlfriend and training. My brother wants to be an Olympian in 2012, in the cycling team. He's got his foot in the door now, he's extremely talented but it's just being noticed'
Steve Williams
Coxless fours
'I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no intentions of making any New Year's resolutions. I can't think of anything and if you can't think of a resolution you clearly shouldn't make one up for the sake of it'
Tim Brabants
K-1 1000m kayaking
'To get a job. I didn't apply for a new job at my last hospital when my previous contract ran out because I knew I'd be going back into full-time sport. I hope to get a job as an accident and emergency doctor in the Nottingham area. Training is just going to be once a day, or whenever I can muster the motivation and energy outside of work and then in February 2010, if I keep my body ticking over until then [and] hit training hard again from there'
Sailing
Iain Percy
Star class
'Celebrating should definitely be on the list of things to cut out. If it wasn't for London I might consider calling it a day with two gold medals – but London is such a massive pull, to be doing it back home, and me and Andrew [Simpson] are really fired up. To get back into training is my New Year's resolution, really. Physically, I'm back in training, but to get back out on the water in New Zealand with Team Origin in preparation for the America's Cup is my resolution'
Andrew Simpson
Star class
'From January the really hard work starts – getting back in the boat, getting fit and no more drinking and getting back on with the job. I can imagine all the guys are in the same boat, no pun intended – crack on and get on with it and get back to normal'
Paul Goodison
Laser class
'I'd love to try and make it into the Sheffield United team but I don't think my skills are quite up to it, so it will be just back to the sailing. I've only sailed once or twice since the Olympics as I've been taking time out to really appreciate what we've done. The biggest bad habit I have to rectify is losing my gym routine and also my diet, I've been a bit slack and put on a bit of weight'
Ben Ainslie
Mixed finn
'To get back into fitness training. I haven't had any time to do that since the Games and it doesn't feel great, to be honest. It's been quite a busy time since Beijing, probably even busier than it was before. I've been doing some racing but not in the Olympic classes, more match racing which is along the lines of the America's Cup, which takes place in 2010 and is the next real goal'
Sarah Ayton
Yngling class
'To begin dieting in earnest. It's about time I kick-started my Olympic diet. In the build-up to and during the Olympics all three of us were on a pretty strict diet to ensure we were at an optimum weight for the Yngling. Since returning from Beijing I have got married and been on my honeymoon'
Pippa Wilson
Yngling class
'Between training and competing and the post-Beijing events and celebrations I really would like more time for myself. Two things I really want to do are to read more, nothing in particular but just a variety of books, and also I would love to learn a language'
Sarah Webb
Yngling class
'To read more, in particular history books on different countries. The second thing is perhaps a little more optimistic and more of a challenge, but no less enjoyable: I really want to do one thing per month to encourage more kids to take up a sport'
Swimming
Rebecca Adlington
400m freestyle, 800m freestyle
'I've always been this energetic, go-go-go person who has done everything for herself, so in 2009 I am going to ask for help. I want to learn to relax and be patient. I've never really asked people for things but now I'm living on my own for the first time I will be asking for assistance from my parents and my boyfriend. For example, I will be asking my parents to sort out my council tax! As for the swimming, I will be concentrating on the world championships, because I didn't do well in 2007'
Panasonic, worldwide Olympic Games partner and Team GB sponsor, has rewarded each of the gold medal-winning Olympians and Paralympians from Beijing with a 32in Panasonic Viera television with HD Freesat built in and a Blu-ray player. More details at panasonic.co.uk/olympicgames
Compiled by Mikey Stafford
|
Rowing
|
Where was Europe's biggest US air base in the 1940's and 1950's?
|
From Beijing to London 2012: Where are Britain's gold medal winners? | Sport | The Guardian
From Beijing to London 2012: Where are Britain's gold medal winners?
How the past four years have unfolded for Britain's 27 champions from the last Olympic Games
From left, Andrew Triggs Hodge, Tom James, Steve Williams and Pete Reed celebrate gold at the Beijing Olympics. Photograph: Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images
Tuesday 24 July 2012 18.02 EDT
First published on Tuesday 24 July 2012 18.02 EDT
Tom James
Rowing Coxless four
The Cambridge engineering graduate took a year off after the 2008 Games to run the London marathon, coach and do charity work. In 2010 he missed most of the season with a back injury as well as discovering he suffers from an abnormal heart rhythm. Things improved and in 2011, the four, comprising James, Alex Gregory, Ric Egington and Matt Langridge, won world gold. Only James and Gregory have kept their places in the four for London with Pete Reed and Andy Triggs-Hodge coming in.
Iain Percy
Sailing Star class
Percy had already won Olympic gold at Sydney 2000 when he and Simpson won the Star Class in Beijing. After China he and Simpson joined Team Origin, captained by Ben Ainslie, which aimed to compete in the 2013 America's Cup but Percy and Simpson retrained their sights on defending their Olympic title when Team Origin withdrew. Percy, 36, and the oldest member of the British sailing squad, is now fully fit after missing last year's world championships with a back problem.
Bradley Wiggins
Cycling Individual pursuit, team pursuit
Wiggins will go into London 2012 as favourite to win the time-trial after becoming the first British rider to win the Tour de France. After Beijing he signed for Garmin-Slipstream, finishing fourth in his first Tour before moving to Team Sky and recording back-to-back wins in the Dauphiné. He will also compete in the road race in London.
Ben Ainslie
Sailing Finn class
Britain's most successful Olympic sailor, Ainslie won his third gold in a row in Beijing and will be aiming for No4 at the London Games in the Finn class. Made a CBE following his success in China, Ainslie was the first person to carry the Olympic torch in the UK this year. The 35-year-old has battled through a difficult period that saw him disqualified from last year's world championships for threatening a photographer. He goes into the Olympics as this year's world champion.
Victoria Pendleton
Cycling Sprint
Pendleton's rivalry with the Australian Anna Meares, whom she beat in the sprint in Beijing, continues into London 2012, with the latest instalment, at the world championships this spring, won by Pendleton. After Beijing the British rider pursued her interest in fashion, appearing for Stella McCartney at London Fashion Week. She struggled in 2011, was told to work harder by the British performance director, Dave Brailsford, and returned to form this year to defend her sprint title and compete in the team sprint and keirin in London.
Christine Ohuruogu
Athletics 400m
Britain's only reigning Olympic champion in track and field, Ohuruogu was British Olympic Association athlete of the year in 2008 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2009 by the University of East London. Since Beijing she has suffered from injury and a loss of form and was disqualified in her heat at last year's world championships. But a defeat of the world champion Amantle Montsho at the Aviva London Grand Prix this month has raised hope she is back to her best.
Ed Clancy
Cycling Team pursuit
Clancy's success made a star of his mum, Cathy, a primary school teacher, whose pupils covered her classroom with pictures of her cycling son. Clancy admitted he struggled for motivation after Beijing as GB's performances slipped. Along with Geraint Thomas, another surviving member of the 2008 quartet, he will compete in the men's pursuit team – back on track after beating Australia in April – and will also represent Britain in the men's omnium at the Olympics.
Andrew Simpson
Sailing Star class
Since the open-top bus parade that welcomed Simpson and four other sailors back to Weymouth – "We're sailors, we're not like footballers, we never expect anything like this," – Simpson has continued his partnership with Iain Percy, his childhood friend, who was best man at his wedding in 2009. This year, as they aim to defend their Olympic title, they have traded places at the top of the World Cup circuit standings with the Brazilians Robert Scheidt and Bruno Prada, who won silver in Bejiing.
Sir Chris Hoy
Cycling Sprint, team sprint, keirin
Having carried the British team flag at the closing ceremony in Beijing, Hoy, the team's most successful athlete in China, was the unanimous choice to bear the flag at the opening ceremony for London 2012. In 2008 he won sports personality of the year while in 2009 he was made a knight. He also secured a deal to promote Kelloggs Bran Flakes. Since Beijing he has won four world championship gold medals. Now 36, he will compete in the keirin and the team sprint but not the individual sprint.
Andrew Triggs-Hodge
Rowing Coxless fours
After the success of Beijing Triggs Hodge, alongside his team-mate Pete Reed, switched to the men's coxless pair, where they came runners-up in the world championship three times in a row from 2009 to 2011, behind the New Zealand pair each time. Like the rest of the successful men's coxless four Triggs Hodge was awarded an MBE in 2009. He also finished his masters in water science, policy and management. Triggs Hodge and Reed have returned to the four for London 2012.
Geraint Thomas
Cycling Team pursuit
The year after Beijing Thomas left his professional racing team, Barloworld, to join Team Sky. He also appeared alongside other 2008 Olympic cyclists, Clancy, Kenny and Staff, at a concert by German instrumentalists Kraftwerk at the Manchester Velodrome. Skipped this year's Tour de France in preparation for the 2012 Games where he will defend the pursuit title with the British team, who are the current world champions. Currently starring in the ad campaign for the new Fiat Punto.
Rebecca Adlington
Swimming 400m, 800m freestyle
Britain's most successful Olympic swimmer was awarded an OBE and the freedom of Mansfield and had the Sherwood baths, a local pub in her home town and a javelin train named after her at the age of 19. Her form dipped after Beijing and she came fourth in the 800m at the 2009 world championships, admitting: "I let the pressure get to me." But at the 2010 Commonwealth Games she repeated her Beijing success. In 2011 she became Britain's first freestyle world champion.
Pete Reed
Rowing Coxless four
Reed was meant to return to his post as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy after his success in the coxless four in Beijing but after receiving "overwhelming support from the most senior admirals in the service" he was able to continue training for London 2012. Featured with Andy Triggs Hodge in the pair until this summer's World Cup season when they joined the coxless four. They won gold at both the Lucerne and Belgrade World Cup meets but lost to the Australian boat in Munich.
Paul Goodison
Sailing Laser class
Before the 2008 Games were finished a brewer near Sheffield had launched a beer called Goodison's Gold, stocked in 11 local pubs. "When a man born in Sheffield wins gold at the Olympics it has to be something worth celebrating," the brewery said. A Sheffield United fan, Goodison was invited on to the pitch before a game. He lives in Weymouth, the Olympic sailing venue, with fellow sailor Saskia Clark, and won a battle with his British rival Nick Thompson to defend his title at London 2012.
Sarah Ayton
Sailing Yngling class
Ayton was made an OBE after her second Olympic gold in 2008. She married the Olympic windsurfer Nick Dempsey two months after Beijing and had their first child, Thomas, the following year. She returned to competition in 2010, aiming for London 2012 in the 470 class, but retired a year later, saying she could not commit to the sport and be a full-time mum. She is mentoring young members of Team GB ahead of the London Olympics, works as a motivational speaker and is a patron of Meningitis UK.
Tim Brabants
Canoe sprint K1 1000m
Brabants won Britain's first ever gold in canoeing in Beijing but took an 18-month break after the Games to return to his medical career in A&E at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham. He returned to the sport in early 2010 aiming to reach his fourth Olympics. Selection was not easy, however. Paul Wycherley was chosen for Britain at last year's world championships and Brabants had to beat Wycherley in two out of three World Cup meetings this summer to compete in London.
Sarah Webb
Sailing Yngling class
Having won gold alongside Ayton in 2004 and also received an MBE at the time, the pair formed a new Yngling Team with Pippa Wilson for 2008. Webb then received an OBE when the trio won gold in Beijing. After the success Webb decided to retire from sailing to concentrate on her family and a different career. Now Sarah Gosling, she has started her own consulting company and begun work in the media. She also gives corporate motivational talks. Gosling will be a volunteer at London 2012.
Pippa Wilson
Sailing Yngling class
While the two other two members of her crew have retired from sailing and with the yngling class being replaced by the Elliott 6m for London 2012, the youngest member of the gold-winning trio from Beijing decided to take an indefinite break from sailing from January 2010, spending some time travelling. For the London Games, Wilson, 26, will be taking up a position as a commentator for BBC radio on the sailing alongside Juliette Ferrington.
James DeGale
Boxing Middleweight
DeGale, from Harlesden, London, turned professional in December 2008. Soon after he stripped for a photo shoot, and told Cosmopolitan magazine about the social benefits of winning Olympic gold: "I am not being big-headed. I used to get birds before I went to Beijing, but when I won Olympic gold it went up. And when I turned pro, it went up even more." Current European super-middleweight champion.
Jason Kenny
Cycling Team sprint
The Bolton cyclist was 20 in Beijing when he came away with a gold in the team sprint and a surprise silver in the individual race behind Chris Hoy. Kenny won the 2011 world sprint crown – after Grégory Baugé lost his title for infringing anti-doping rules – and finished second to the Frenchman the following year having beaten Hoy in the semi-finals. He has been picked ahead of Hoy to contest the sprint at London 2012.
Mark Hunter
Rowing Lightweight double sculls
Hunter took a year off to work as an assistant coach to the women's rowing team at UCLA in California after winning Great Britain's first ever lightweight medal and Olympic gold alongside Zac Purchase. Hunter missed competing while he was in the United States and returned to Britain in 2009 with the aim of reaching London 2012. The duo won the world championship in 2010 and 2011 andon a personal level Hunter was made an MBE and awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of East London.
Jamie Staff
Cycling Team sprint
The former World BMX champion was the third member of the men's sprint team and was made an MBE in the 2009 New Year Honours list. He was also part of the team that won silver in the team sprint at the World Track Championships that same year before a back injury made him take the decision to retire from cycling in 2010 at 36 and move to the United States with his American wife. Since then he has become the director of USA cycling's track sprint programme.
Zac Purchase
Rowing Lightweight double sculls
While his rowing partner was in California Purchase spent his year off after winning gold partying and "burning the candle at both ends" in his words. In 2011 he was diagnosed with post-viral fatigue. He returned to training only six weeks before the world championships in Bled that year but he and Hunter still snatched the gold medal. This summer's World Cup series began with gold in Belgrade but fifth- and sixth-place finishes followed in the run-up to London.
Paul Manning
Cycling Team pursuit
Manning, who won team pursuit silver in Athens in 2004, went one better with the British quartet in Beijing as they won gold while breaking the world record and immediately announced his retirement. He joined ISG – the company building the 2012 velodrome – as an assistant construction manager, before coming back into the sport in 2009 first as endurance coach of the Under-23 squad, and now as endurance coach of the women's senior team.
Nicole Cooke
Cycling Road race
After taking gold in Beijing, Cooke won the World Championship road race in the same year, making her the first woman to hold the two titles simultaneously. Since then, her career has stalled – the professional road race team that she set up, Vision1, collapsed and she has not won a race since 2009. Cooke, who was sixth in this year's British road race championships, will compete at London 2012 but is expected to act as a support rider for current British No1 Lizzie Armitstead.
Steve Williams
Rowing Coxless four
A year and a half after winning gold in China when the four made an epic push to the line to overhaul the Australians, the Leamington Spa-born rower decided to call time on a career in which he had won consecutive Olympic golds and four world championship titles. Since then he has walked to the North Pole and climbed Mount Everest with the former Wales rugby union international Richard Parks and earlier this month the 36-year-old was appointed a fitness consultant to Ipswich Town FC.
Rebecca Romero
Cycling Individual pursuit
Romero's track gold meant she became the first Briton to win Olympic medals in different events, having won rowing silver in 2004. Her event was dropped from the 2012 Games and while she tried the time-trial, she withdrew from British cycling's programme in October last year. Tried to cycle from Land's End to John O'Groats on a tandem with rower James Cracknell in 2009, but abandoned the journey after 505 miles on medical advice. Romero has now turned to triathlon and is creating a "high performance sports consultancy service".
|
i don't know
|
Who wrote 'The Leatherstocking Stories'?
|
The Leatherstocking Tales | novels by Cooper | Britannica.com
The Leatherstocking Tales
Alternative Title: “The Leather-Stocking Tales”
Related Topics
The Pathfinder
The Leatherstocking Tales, series of five novels by James Fenimore Cooper , published between 1823 and 1841. The novels constitute a saga of 18th-century life among Indians and white pioneers on the New York State frontier through their portrayal of the adventures of the main character, Natty Bumppo , who takes on various names throughout the series. The books cover his entire adult life, from young manhood to old age, though they were not written or published in chronological order. The individual novels are The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841).
The Pioneers is both the first and the finest detailed portrait of frontier life in American literature; it is also the first truly original American novel . The main subject of the book is the conflict between two different views of the frontier—that of Natty Bumppo (here called Leather-Stocking), who sees the land as “God’s Wilderness,” and that of another main character who wants to tame and cultivate the land. The Last of the Mohicans takes the reader back to the French and Indian War . This work was succeeded by The Prairie, in which the very old and philosophical Leather-Stocking dies, facing the westering sun he has so long followed. Identified from the start with the vanishing wilderness and its native inhabitants, Leather-Stocking becomes an unalterably elegiac figure.
Cooper intended to bury Leather-Stocking with The Prairie, but many years later he resuscitated the character and portrayed his early maturity in The Pathfinder and his youth in The Deerslayer. While all of The Leatherstocking Tales have been criticized as artless, some critics see The Deerslayer as the best of the five novels. Mark Twain mocked it (and The Pathfinder) in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”
Learn More in these related articles:
|
James Fenimore Cooper
|
Drill, Poplin and Velour are all types of what?
|
The Complete Leatherstocking Tales: All 5 Books eBook by James Fenimore Cooper - 9781518309083 | Kobo
Show more
Show less
Many are unfamiliar with James Fenimore Cooper, even though every American comes across his work in the class or on TV. Today he is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s most famous novel is The Last of the Mohicans, which was one of the novels comprising The Leatherstocking Tales and was later made into a popular movie.
Buy the eBook
|
i don't know
|
Who is credited with the design of the 'Mini skirt'?
|
History of the Miniskirt: How Fashion’s Most Daring Hemline Came To Be | StyleCaster
255 Shares
2 years ago
From super-short python dresses that came down the runway at Gucci to the pastel quilted minis at Miui Miu, one thing’s for sure: Fall fashion is all about thinking short—and we mean very short.
While today it’s easy to take for granted that hemlines rise and fall based on the whims of designers rather than political statement, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, the miniskirt had pretty controversial origins.
MORE: A History of the Swimsuit, From Bathing Gown to String Bikini
If anyone should be credited with pioneering the mini it would be British-designer Mary Quant, who told the New York Daily News this year: “A miniskirt was a way of rebelling.” The Quant definition of a mini: The bottom edge of the skirt must hit roughly halfway up the thigh, and fall no more than four inches below the butt.
Here, a look back at how one of fall’s biggest trends came to be in the first place.
5400-4700 B.C: Think miniskirts were born during Britain’s Youthquake in the 1960s? Think again. Archaeologists have uncovered figurines in Europe dating from between 5400-4700 B.C. dressed in miniskirts. This isn’t the only very early example of a miniskirt, either. Ancient Egyptian frescos depict female acrobats wearing miniskirts.
1926: Cut forward a few hundred years, and hemlines began rising in earnest during the 1920s with the advent of the flapper, but it was the entertainer Josephine Baker who made waves with a miniskirt made of bananas during performances of the “Folies Bergère” in Paris.
Josephine Baker. Photo: Getty
1950s: While the hot fashions following WWII were all about the full skirt that hit below the knee, the miniskirt began to make appearances in science fiction films like “Flight to Mars” and “Forbidden Planet.”
1962: The earliest direct reference to the miniskirt came from Wyoming newspaper The Billings Gazette describing the miniskirt as a controversial item in production in Mexico City. In the piece, the miniskirt was described as stopping eight inches above the knee.
1964: If anyone should be credited with pioneering the miniskirt it is British designer Mary Quant. Quant opened what became the iconic boutique Bazaar in 1955 on King’s Road in London’s Chelsea neighborhood. Inspired by the fashions she saw on the streets, Quant raised the hemline of her skirts in 1964 to several inches above the knee, and the iconic miniskirt was born. She named the skirt after her favorite car, the Mini.
Quant wasn’t the only pioneer of the miniskirt at the time. French designer André Courrèges began experimenting with hemlines as well in the early 1960s, and he began to show space-age dresses that hit above the knee in late 1964. Because both designers had something to do with the miniskirt, a debate has raged on for decades as to who actually invented it, though Quant famously said, “It wasn’t me or Courrèges who invented the miniskirt anyway—it was the girls in the street who did it.”
Regardless who who technically invented it, supermodel Twiggy became the unofficial poster child at the tim for the miniskirt look.
Twiggy. Photo: Getty.
1965: The miniskirt continued to have a banner year in 1965. Model Jean Shrimpton caused a stir when she wore a miniskirt with no stockings, hat, or gloves to the Melbourne Cup Carnival in Australia. The mini also got a boost when Yves Saint Laurent debuted his famous and very short “Mondrian” dresses.
Jean Shrimpton. Photo: Getty
1966: Paco Rabanne launched plastic chain-mail miniskirt in 1966, followed by the throw-away minidress. The mini was officially a high fashion statement.
1967: Goldie Hawn’s “Laugh In” debuted on TV, inspiring girls around the U.S. to don miniskirts and minidresses copying her signature mod style.
1968: Fully cementing the trend, Jackie Kennedy chose a short white pleated Valentino dress when she married Aristotle Onassis.
1969: With political tensions high because of the Vietnam War, the fashion pendulum swung, becoming increasingly nostalgic, and hemlines fell back down to the ankle in a style called the “maxi.” Hemlines hadn’t been so long since 1914.
1974: The 1970s weren’t good to the miniskirt, but Debbie Harry, who began fronting Blondie in 1974, helped to revive the miniskirt, regularly wearing it on stage. The mini, favored by punk acts at the time, was reinvented in black leather and PVC.
Debbie Harry. Photo: Getty.
1982: The rah-rah (or ra-ra) skirt began having a major moment in the 1980s, originating from cheerleading uniforms. The Oxford Dictionary noted this as the first successful miniskirt revival and the rah-rah skirt even appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1982.
1984: Madonna wowed the crowd at the MTV Video Music Awards, rolling around the stage in a white tulle minidress resembling a wedding dress. Virginal it was not.
1990s: Julia Roberts set a fashion trend wearing a shorter than short skirt and thigh high boots in “Pretty Woman.” Also, throughout the decade, miniskirts were incorporated into the wardrobes of working women thanks to the influence of TV shows like “Melrose Place” and “Ally McBeal.”
Photo Via Fox
2000s: Miniskirts got a boost in the aughts thanks to stars like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, who wore theirs with midriff-baring tops.
2009: In recognition of Quant’s impact pioneering the miniskirt, the Royal Mail in the UK released a stamp in homage to her signature design.
Photo: Imaxtree
2014: Proof that it is only a matter of time before what is old is new again, runways were awash in mini-skirts, particularly minis inspired by swinging 1960s. Gucci, Raf Simons at Dior, and Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent all had mini fever. “My haute couture was all legs, legs, legs,” designer Giambattista Valli told the Wall Street Journal , describing his most recent haute couture collection.
|
Mary Quant
|
Who was British Prime Minister at the time of the 'American Declaration of Independence'?
|
Miniskirts years 60s 70s � 1 � Girls sixties + seventies images gallery minidress pictures
minijupe minigonne minir�cke
UK 1967 - Chelsea ► FOTO � VIDEO
UK 1967 - SHAKE ► VIDEO � VIDEO � VIDEO
La minigonna e' una gonna con il bordo ben sopra il ginocchio ( generalmente 20cm o piu'... ) ed e' stata il simbolo piu' significativo della "Swinging London" degli anni 60 .
L'invenzione della minigonna e' generalmente accreditata alla disegnatrice di moda Mary Quant , che fu ispirata dall'automobile Mini Cooper , ed allo stilista Francese Andr� Courr�ges , anch'esso spesso citato come suo inventore . Ancora esistono discussioni su chi sia stato il primo .
Molti accreditano anche Helen Rose , che ideo' alcune minigonne per l'attrice Anne Francis nel film cult di Fantascienza " Il Pianeta Proibito " , del 1956 ; anche se esempi di mini vestiti erano gia' apparsi in film di fantascienza precedenti, come l'abito di Dale Arden in " Flash Gordon " del 1940.
AU 1967 - Ragazze di Melbourne
The miniskirt is a skirt with a hemline well above the knees ( generally 20 cm , or more , above knee level ).
The mini was the defining fashion symbol of "Swinging London" in the 1960s.
The miniskirt's existence in the 1960s is generally credited to the fashion designer Mary Quant , who was inspired by the Mini Cooper automobile, although the French designer Andr� Courr�ges is also often cited as its inventor (the French referred to it as la mini-jupe), and there is disagreement as to who invented it first.
Some give the credit to Helen Rose who made some miniskirts for actress Anne Francis in the 1956 science fiction movie " Forbidden Planet " , but examples of midresses appeared in previous sci-fi movies , like the minidress of Dale Arden in 1940s movie " Flash Gordon " .
Recently, Marit Allen, a Vogue " Young Ideas " editor at the time, has stated that "John Bates, in particular, has always been completely unappreciated for his contribution to the innovation and creativity he brought to the London design scene." He bared the midriff, used transparent vinyl and, Marit Allen asserts, was responsible for "the raising of the hemline. It was John Bates, rather than Mary Quant or Courr�ges, who was responsible for the miniskirt."
Bates' costumes and accessories for Diana Rigg , as Emma Peel in the ABC TV series, The Avengers, from 1965-7, helped to define " Mod style " . As The Avengers' filmed episodes were made several months before screening, Avengers producer Brian Clemens confirmed in interviews that the miniskirt designed by Bates had to be used as a "gamble", since they did not know if it would catch on in public or be seen as a fashion failure by the time the episodes aired . However, Emma Peel's fashions were accepted by the public and even spawned a line of replicas of her clothes for public sale.
Another, more "immediate" proponent of the miniskirt on television was Cathy McGowan, who introduced the weekly rock music show, Ready Steady Go! (1964-66).
USA 1968 - Sharon Tate ► FOTO � VIDEO
|
i don't know
|
The magnificent altarpiece in the Cathedral of Ghent and the 'Arnolfini Wedding' are masterpieces painted by which 15th.century Flemish artist?
|
1000+ images about Jan V A N E Y C K on Pinterest | Wings, Portrait and Belgium
Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas
Jan V A N E Y C K
Jan Van Eyck is remembered as a Flemish painter who revolutionized the use of oil painting in Europe. His realistic style caught the eye of both royalty and patrons of the arts. His technique was revered for its unique richness of color and his keen attention to detail, both utilized in his notable paintings "Arnolfini Wedding" and the "Ghent Altarpiece."
86 Pins310 Followers
|
Jan van Eyck
|
In which Irish city does the Salmon Weir Bridge span the River Corrib?
|
Jan Van Eyck - The complete works
(Self portrait?)
Jan van Eyck or Johannes de Eyck (before c. 1395 - before July 9, 1441) was an Early Netherlandish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century.
There is a common misconception, which dates back to the sixteenth-century Vite of the Tuscan artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting. It is however true that he achieved, or perfected, new and remarkable effects using this technique.
Jan van Eyck has often been linked as brother to painter and peer Hubert van Eyck, because both have been thought to originate from the same town, Maaseik in Limburg (Belgium). Another brother, Lambert van Eyck is mentioned in Burgundian court documents, and there is a conjecture that he too was a painter, and that he may have overseen the closing of Jan van Eyck's Bruges workshop. Another significant, and rather younger, painter who worked in Southern France, Barthelemy van Eyck, is presumed to be a relation. (From Wikipedia)
|
i don't know
|
Jose Socrates has been Prime Minister of which country since 2005?
|
Portugal ex-PM Jose Socrates to be held amid corruption probe - BBC News
Portugal ex-PM Jose Socrates to be held amid corruption probe
25 November 2014
Image copyright EPA
Image caption The decision to detain Jose Socrates sent shockwaves through Portuguese politics
Portugal's former centre-left PM, Jose Socrates, has been remanded in custody on suspicion of corruption, tax fraud and money laundering.
Mr Socrates, 57, was detained on his return from Paris on Friday and has already spent three nights in jail.
The judge delivered the decision after investigators looked into suspicious money transfers and banking operations.
Mr Socrates, who denies any wrongdoing, is being investigated alongside his driver, a close friend, and a lawyer.
The former prime minister was in office from 2005 to 2011. His lawyer, Joao Araujo, told reporters on Monday that his client would appeal against the decision.
Under the Portuguese system, formal charges only come at the end of an investigation which could last up to eight months, says the BBC's Alison Roberts in Lisbon.
Portuguese politics was already reeling after the resignation of Interior Minister Miguel Macedo in the wake of a separate corruption inquiry linked to the allocation of residence permits.
Portugal in shock - by Alison Roberts, BBC News, Lisbon
Jose Socrates' detention has sent shockwaves through the political system. Reports purporting to provide details of the investigation - which is covered by judicial secrecy - have swirled since Friday night, when the news broke. They focus on Mr Socrates' supposedly lavish lifestyle in Paris, where he moved after stepping down in 2011.
In past interviews, he has denied anything untoward about his finances.
Image copyright EPA
Image caption Antonio Costa, elected Socialist leader on Saturday, said everyone was in shock over Mr Socrates' detention
His detention - on arrival at Lisbon airport, rather than at his flat, and with photographers present - prompted some prominent Socialists to argue it was to divert attention from suspicions of corruption in the right-of-centre government's "golden visa" programme, which fast-tracks residence for foreign investors.
The Socialists' newly elected leader, Antonio Costa, a minister under Mr Socrates, was until now expected to sweep to victory in next year's general election following years of austerity. He is conscious of the perils of the situation.
Portugal's ex-PM Jose Socrates
Because the case surrounding Mr Socrates comes under judicial secrecy, few details have been confirmed.
It is unclear whether the inquiry relates to his time in office. However, Portuguese media has reported allegations that his driver Joao Perna made a number of trips transporting cash to Paris, where Mr Socrates has been working in a new role at a pharmaceutical company.
Image copyright Reuters
Image caption Current Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho gave his backing to the country's "strong institutions"
One of Mr Socrates' long-time friends, Carlos Santos Silva, is being questioned along with lawyer Goncalo Trindade Ferreira.
Two of the suspects are also being held on remand, while a fourth has been barred from foreign travel.
Centre-right Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said the case involved law rather than politics, adding that "Portugal has strong institutions that work".
But the investigation has rocked Mr Socrates' Socialists, now led by Lisbon Mayor Antonio Costa who was elected as secretary-general of the party on Saturday.
Mr Socrates resigned in 2011 in the midst of Portugal's mounting debt crisis. The Socialists are currently leading in opinion polls and Mr Costa said on Saturday that "we mustn't let personal feelings of solidarity and friendship impede the political action of the (party)".
|
Portugal
|
"Which lager was first launched in England in 1961 as ""the new blonde in your bar""?"
|
Ex-Portuguese PM remanded in custody in fraud case | News | Expatica Portugal
Ex-Portuguese PM remanded in custody in fraud case
25th November 2014,
0 comments
The detention of Portugal's former prime minister Jose Socrates on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering has set off a new political earthquake in a country already rocked by high-level scandal.
Socrates, 57, has been held since his shock arrest at Lisbon airport on Friday, a first for a former leader of Portugal since its military dictatorship ended in 1974.
After lengthy questioning on Monday in connection with the corruption probe, a judge ordered the brash former Socialist leader be held in custody in a prison in the southeast of the country.
Socrates, who was prime minister from 2005 to 2011, has been placed under formal investigation suspected of "tax evasion, corruption and money laundering", according to the judge's statement read out to reporters.
His attorney Joao Araujo branded the decision "deeply unjust and unjustified" and vowed to appeal.
Under "provisional detention", Socrates can be held for up to a year because his case is of "extreme complexity", although the investigating magistrate must reexamine his situation every three months.
Businessman Carlos Santos Silva and Socrates's chauffeur Joao Perna were also being held, while lawyer Goncalo Trindade Ferreira was freed on bail.
Searches have been carried out in recent days at business premises and Socrates' home in Lisbon.
Luis Montenegro, parliamentary leader of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD), said Portugal's image had been tarnished "both internally and abroad" by the probe.
Socrates's arrest is the latest bombshell in Portuguese politics, coming hard on the heels of a scandal that cost interior minister Miguel Macedo his job last week.
Macedo resigned on Sunday over a money-laundering and influence-peddling scandal linked to a so-called "golden visa" programme, which gives residency permits to wealthy foreigners.
The head of the border police, Manuel Jarmela Palos, who has since resigned, was among those arrested in the "golden visas" probe.
He has been placed under house arrest and ordered to wear an electronic bracelet, Portuguese media reported Tuesday, as has justice ministry official Maria Antonia Anes, also arrested in the visa probe.
"Corruption is a serious problem in Portugal for political leaders because there are so many situations that involve conflicts of interest," Joao Paulo Batalha, a local representative for Transparency International, told AFP.
- Government stays quiet -
The centre-right government has said little about the corruption case.
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said Sunday that the probe "pertains to the law and not politics" and that Portugal "has strong institutions that work".
According to Portuguese media reports, it was information from state-owned bank Caixa Geral de Depositos that sparked the probe.
Investigators have been looking into transfers involving the former Socialist leader's account in comparison with earnings he has reported to tax authorities.
Particular attention is said to have been given to an apartment in Paris estimated at nearly three million euros ($3.7 million). Socrates lived there in 2012 while studying philosophy in the French capital.
"I have no money or accounts abroad. I have always lived off the income from my own job," Socrates said in July, when he was questioned by the press over another money laundering case.
Socrates is a colourful character, even down to his name. Opponents say his choice to shorten his full name to Socrates, like the ancient Greek philosopher, was no more than political marketing.
The timing of the case is awkward for Lisbon mayor Antonio Costa, a former interior minister under Socrates and the Socialist party's new secretary general.
So far Costa has refused to distance himself from Socrates, saying the Socialist party "does not adopt Stalinist practices of getting rid of photos" of former leaders.
Socrates' tenure as prime minister was marked by the financial crisis that hit the EU member state hard.
He announced his resignation as prime minister in March 2011 after parliament rejected an austerity budget.
Shortly afterwards the country received a 78-billion-euro ($97 billion) bailout package from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a rigorous programme of fiscal discipline which came to an end in May.
© 2014 AFP
|
i don't know
|
What is the distinctive feature of birds of the class 'ratites'?
|
Aves - Birds - Animalia
Index
Birds are amongst the most easily seen of wild animals, they are probably also the most easily identifiable. Superficially similar, they vary greatly in what they eat, where they go and how they live their lives. Some brave the weather all year round in the same region, others fly thousands of miles to follow the sun, and/or abundant food supplies.
Aves - Birds - Animalia
There are about 10,000 species of birds. They are found worldwide from the deep Arctic to the deep Antarctic and all stations in between. The fact they can fly in and fly out again means that they are able to make short visits to many places to take advantage of seasonal food supplies in a way that other animals can't. They are able to make use of what otherwise would be very harsh environments by visiting in the better months only.
Birds are the most recently evolved of the vertebrate classes, with the oldest fossils going back about 160 million years. They are considered to be the modern descendants of the dinosaurs, being the only direct evolutionary line that survived the extinction event that wiped out all the other dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
Typical Birds
House sparrow (female), Passer domesticus - Passeriformes
A contender for the commonest wild bird title. Originating in Europe house sparrows are found across 2/3rds of the worlds land surface.
picture used permission of David Friel
Blue-eyed shag, Phalocrocorax atriceps - Pelecaniformes
The blue ring surrounds the eye, it is not the iris, the yellow wattle develops during the breeding season
Snow petrels, Pagadroma nivea, Procellariiformes
Courtship behaviour, the female out in front leads the male who must prove himself by following her aerobatics that often take place close up to cliff faces. In a relatively calm moment, the male is calling to her.
Red-billed quelea, Quelea quelea - Passeriformes
Another contender for the commonest wild bird title. Found in sub-Saharan Africa, there are estimated to be 1.5 billion of these small birds, though other figures have put the number at up to 10 billion. They are regarded as being a significant pest as huge flocks can settle on and decimate crops grown for human food.
picture - Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC2 Attribution-Share Alike Generic license.
Great tit, Parus major - Passerine (left) and Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Dendrocopos major - Piciforme (right) on a garden bird feeder.
Almost anywhere in the world, it is possible to put out a feeder in your garden and start to attract the local bird life so you can see it (fairly) close up. I use porridge oats mixed with dripping to stuff the holes in this piece of wood in my garden that hangs from a tree.
Cool Birds
Adelie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae - Strigiformes
these are probably two males rather than being a breeding pair. Penguins usually mate for life, these are on the sea-ice in Antarctica early in the spring, the males arrive first and make a nest for the later arrival of the female. They often travel together whether on ice or sea.
Brown Pelican, Pelicanus occidentalis urinator - Pelecaniformes. A typical pelican, this one is from the Galapagos.
Magnificent Frigate Birds*, Fregata magnificens - Pelecaniformes
This group are heading out to sea to go fishing in the Galapagos Islands. The ones with white under-bellies are female, while the darker ones are male. These are large birds with up to a 2.3m wingspan. *This is their full name, we missed a trick there, we could have been the "Magnificent Humans" if someone was paying attention.
Ostrich, Struthio camelus - Struthioniformes
Native to Africa where it is widespread, the ostrich is the largest bird, lays the largest egg and runs faster than any bird at up to 70 kmh (43 mph)
picture - Stig Nygaard from Copenhagen, Denmark, CC2 Attribution Generic license.
Arctic terns, Sterna paradisaea - Charadriiformes
Despite just weighing about 100g (4 oz), these birds fly around 90,000 km (56,000 mls)a year from the Arctic to Antarctic and back again. During this they experience both polar summers and see more daylight than any other animal on earth.
Basic Features:
Aves is a Class in the Subphylum Vertebrata of the Phylum Chordata, so they have all of the characteristics of both of these groups in addition to the following:
Waterproof skin covered in feathers
Endothermic, warm blooded
Hard shelled eggs that are waterproof (cleidoic - closed egg)
Beak or bill rather than teeth
Bipedal (walk on two legs only)
Forelimbs developed into wings
Most members are highly adapted for flight with forelimbs modified as wings and many weight saving features such as hollow bones
Kingdom - Animalia
Class - Aves
The group includes:
Possibly more than any other animal group, the birds are the easiest to identify and the least likely to be mis-identified. The combination of the obvious characteristics of bipedalism, a beak and feathers is unmistakable. There are around 10,000 species of birds arranged in 29 orders, some examples are given here:
Anseriformes - waterfowl, web-footed for swimming - ducks, geese, swans
Apodiformes - "footless" in Latin (they do have feet though), legs are used for perching and have no scales as other birds do - swifts, hummingbirds
Cathartiformes - large scavenging birds, usually have a bald, featherless head - New World vultures or condors
Charadriiformes - usually found around water, frequently the sea - gulls, auks, plovers, terns
Columbiformes - the only birds capable of drinking by sucking without having to tilt the head back, able to produce "crop milk" to feed the young - doves and pigeons
Falconiformes - raptors, sharp hooked beak, strong legs and feet with strong claws - falcons, eagles, hawks
Galliformes - fowl, ground feeding, heavy bodied birds, usually able to fly but only for short distances, walk to get about - chicken, turkey, grouse, pheasant, ptarmigan
Opisthocomiformes - young possess claws on two of their wing digits (fingers), a very primitive feature - a single species the hoatzin
Passeriformes - songbirds or perching birds, usually smallish birds, more than half of all bird species are in this order - sparrows, crows, drongos, birds of paradise, larks, swallows
Pelecaniformes - water birds that feed on marine life, webbed feet, some have a large throat pouch - pelicans, cormorants, frigate birds
Phoenicropteriformes - long-legged, long-necked filter-feeding waders - flamingos
Piciformes - mainly tree-dwelling, feet have two toes forwards, two backwards - woodpeckers, toucans,
Procellariiformes - tubenoses, most feed in the open sea, nostrils in tubes, nasal gland to secrete excess salt, long narrow wings, webbed feet - albatrosses, petrels
Psittaciformes - mostly tropical and subtropical, strong curved bill, upright stance, strong clawed feet, often bright or vivid colours - parrots, macaws, cockatoos, parakeets
Sphenisciformes - aquatic flightless birds found in the southern hemisphere only as far the equator - penguins
Strigiformes - sharp hooked beak, strong legs and feet with strong claws, large forward-facing eyes in a characteristic and obvious circle of feathers, binocular vision, the eyes can't move in the socket so the whole head moves - owls
Struthioniformes - ratites, large flightless birds, no "keel" on the breastbone (sternum) which is used in other birds attach their flight muscles - ostriches, emus, kiwis
The smallest bird is the bee hummingbird at 5.7cm (2.25in) long and 1.6g (1/18th of an ounce).
The largest bird is the ostrich at over 2.7m (9 feet) high, weighing 156kg (345lb), this is 97,500 times heavier than the smallest bird.
The largest wingspan is that of the wandering albatross with a measured maximum of 3.63m (nearly 12 feet).
The commonest bird is the domestic chicken as it is reared for food, there are around 4 chickens for every person on earth which comes to 25 billion + chickens. Of wild birds, the European house sparrow is thought to be the most common being found on about 2/3 rds of the land surface. A small songbird, the red-billed quelea is thought to be close in numbers with a population of 1.5 billion though is confined to sub-Saharan Africa.
What do birds eat?
You would expect such a widespread and varied group as the birds to include members that eat most things. This is largely true, though there is usually one common factor to the food eaten by birds and that is that it is high-energy.
Birds have the highest body temperatures of any animal with the highest metabolic rate in terms of energy needed per gram of body mass.
This means that they can't afford to waste time eating bulky low energy foods as they wouldn't be able to be so active. It also means that they need highly concentrated energy foods in order to still be light enough to fly. Birds can't keep food in their digestive systems for long as the weight would soon build up and make flight very difficult. There are no bird equivalents of cows or sheep for instance.
As examples of the energy needed, a warbler (small songbird) might eat 80% of its own body weight a day, while a shrike can digest a whole mouse in three hours.
Generally speaking food from an animal source, invertebrates, fish, small mammals, other birds etc. is more nutritious than much plant derived food.
Birds that do eat plant material eat the higher energy parts such as seeds, nectar and fruit rather than leaves and stems. Those birds that do eat leaves tend to be very selective choosing only the most tender nutrient dense ones that are the easiest and quickest to digest.
One herbivorous bird, the Canada Goose removes the easy to get at nutrients from grass that it eats and then rather than further digestion to recover more nutrients, it defecates it out and then eats fresh grass. The faecal pellets so produced may be eaten by reindeer such is their remaining nutritional content.
Another unique aspect of the way that birds feed is that they have a beak or bill and no teeth, most food is swallowed more or less whole and not chewed in the way that other animals might. The digestive systems of birds are very efficient with a gizzard to grind up the food and very aggressive digestive enzymes.
Birds eat fish, squid, worms, grubs, ant and termite eggs, other birds, small mammals, snakes, lizards, frogs, toads etc. any animal smaller than them that they can catch.
They may eat fruit, seeds, unopened flowers, young leaves, buds, nuts, and other concentrated energy easy to digest plant material.
What eats birds?
Catching birds to eat is not easy because they can quickly fly away. However while flight enables them to escape predation it also puts them in the way of predation.
Flight requires birds to be lightweight, so when they reproduce, they carry the young for as short a time as possible. The fertilized egg with a very large food supply is produced. This means that birds are tied to their nests in order to reproduce which makes them very vulnerable to predation at this time. So what eats birds?
Predatory birds such as falcons, eagles, hawks and owls eat other birds.
Domestic cats eat birds, catching hundreds of millions a year world-wide, perhaps billions.
Some unexpected animals like large spiders, frogs and toads eat small birds.
Mammalian predators such as stoats, weasels, raccoons, jaguars, foxes, lions, tigers, and bears will eat birds especially if they can catch them on the nest where even if they don't catch the adults, there are likely to be nestlings or eggs to eat.
Seals, sharks and large fish eat water-birds.
Birds are often in the middle to the top of food chains being both predator and prey to different animals.
|
Flightless bird
|
Who is credited with the design of the 'New Look' in 1947?
|
Kiwi Facts & Characteristics :: Kiwis for kiwi
Kiwi facts & characteristics
Instagram
Kiwi facts & characteristics
Kiwi have many weird and wonderful features thanks to New Zealand's ancient isolation and lack of mammals. It is thought they evolved to occupy a habitat and lifestyle that elsewhere in the world would be filled by a mammal, and their one-off evolutionary design holds all sorts of biological records.
Quick Kiwi Facts
An average of 27 kiwi are killed by predators EVERY WEEK. That’s a population decline of around 1,400 kiwi every year (or 2%). At this rate, kiwi may disappear from the mainland in our lifetime. Just one hundred years ago, kiwi numbered in the millions.
A single roaming dog can wipe out an entire kiwi population in a matter of days
Approximately 20% of the kiwi population is under management.
In areas under where predators are controlled, 50-60% of chicks survive. When areas are not under management 95% of kiwi die before reaching breeding age.
Only 20% survival rate of kiwi chicks is needed for the population to increase.
Proof of success – on the Coromandel, in the predator controlled area, the kiwi population is doubling every decade.
What’s so unusual?
Kiwi are flightless – their Latin species name is Apteryx, which means wingless. They belong to an ancient group of birds that can’t fly – the ratites . Because they can’t fly, how they arrived in New Zealand is not completely clear.
Kiwi habits and physical characteristics are so like a mammal the bird is sometimes referred to as an honorary mammal . It has feathers like hair, nostrils at the end of its beak and an enormous egg .
Most kiwi are nocturnal birds , like many of New Zealand’s native animals. Their calls pierce the forest air at dusk and dawn.
Kiwi are omnivores. Discover what foods they find with their unusual beak.
Even though kiwi are unusual enough, tall stories abound about the bird.
Find out more about kiwi
|
i don't know
|
"Which movie of 1972 used the tag line ""This week end they didn't play golf""?"
|
Deliverance (1972) - Taglines - IMDb
Deliverance (1972)
This is the weekend they didn't play golf.
What _did_ happen on the Cahulawassee River?
Four men ride a wild river. A weekend turns into a nightmare.
See also
|
Deliverance
|
Which European country was ruled by the House of Braganza, 1640-1910?
|
Cinematic Terms - A FilmMaking Glossary
Cinematic Terms
Example (if applicable)
sword-and-sandal epic
a term for a movie, usually a Roman or Biblical epic , characterized by the weapons (swords) and footwear (sandals) of the period
Examples: the many Victor Mature films, such as Samson and Delilah (1948), The Robe (1953), and Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954).
sword and sorcery
a term for the class of fantasy movies characterized by the presence of wizards and warriors, magic and sword fighting
Example: Conan the Barbarian (1982).
symbol
an object in a film that stands for an idea, or that has a second level of meaning to it, e.g., a window or train=freedom, a rose=beauty, a cross-roads=a decision point, etc.; the more a symbol is repeated, the greater its significance
Example: in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) - the visual clue or symbol of cold air indicating the presence of ghost spirits
symmetry
within a film when two or more distinct plotlines 'mirror' each other or develop variations on the film's theme or plot; aka mirroring
Examples: David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997), and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
synchronous sound
refers to sound whose source can be seen in the image's frame, or whose source can be understood from the context of the image
tag line
a clever phrase or short sentence to memorably characterize a film, and tease and attract potential viewers, or sell the movie; also creates a catchy 'soundbite' often repeated or presented in a trailer or on a film's poster, sometimes along with the film's leitmotif
Examples: "This is the weekend they didn't play golf" ( Deliverance (1972) ), "The Night He Came Home!" ( Halloween (1978) ), "Where were you in '62?" ( American Graffiti (1973) ), "Small town. Big crime. Dead cold" ( Fargo (1996) ), "This is Maggie the Cat..." ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) ), "It's Terrific!" ( Citizen Kane (1941) )
take
a single continuously-recorded performance, shot or version of a scene with a particular camera setup; often, multiple takes are made of the same shot during filming, before the director approves the shot; in box-office terms, take also refers to the money a film's release has made
a term applied to the actors, as a group, on a film set
talkies
the common term used for films with sound (beginning in 1927), although rarely used currently. The advent of talkies marked the dawning of the era of sound films, as opposed to silent films
Example: the landmark film In Old Arizona (1929), was advertised as "100% All-Talking", and "You Hear What You See" on its poster, because it was the first sound western from a major studio (Fox Pictures); Singin' in the Rain (1952) took a look back at the dawning of the talkies
talking head(s)
a medium shot of people conversing; used as a criticism - denoting an uninteresting image
a slang term, meaning to "pick", "select", "name", or "appoint"
tearjerker (s)
an excessively-sentimental or emotional film, usually with suffering female protagonists, tragic circumstances, manipulative scenes, and dramatic musical scoring; aka melodramas or weepies; derogatively known as a 'woman's film' or 'chick flick' ; contrast to feel-good film
Examples: Dark Victory (1939) , Now, Voyager (1942) , Mildred Pierce (1945) , Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) , Love Story (1970) (pictured), Beaches (1988), and Steel Magnolias (1989)
Technicolor
the trade name for the best known color film process; 3-strip color is often used as a synonymous term; also used generically as a term for rich, bright, vibrant, sometimes garish colors; Technicolor films were described as highly saturated (with pure and vivid colors); Technicolor (a 3-color dye transfer system) was introduced in the Disney short cartoon, Flowers and Trees (1932)
This new process in the 1930s involved a camera that used prisms to split the light coming through the lens onto three strips of black-and-white film, one each for the primary colors (red, green, blue; with complementary color dyes: cyan, magenta, yellow)
tech-noir
modern day (or post-modern) expressionistic film noirs set in the future, with dark, decaying societies
Examples: Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) (pictured), Outland (1981), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), The Terminator (1984) , Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998), and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999)
telefilm
refers to a feature-length motion picture made for television; also known as telepic or telepix; see also made-for TV movie
telephoto
(lens)
refers to a camera lens with a very long focal length and narrow angle of view - the effect is to compress or condense depth in space, thereby bringing distant objects closer to the viewer (without moving the camera), but it also flattens the depth of the image; it has the opposite of the effect of a wide-angle lens
Example: Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967) and the extreme telephoto shot of Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) running towards the church - and appearing to run in place;
or the scene of Indy Jones (Harrison Ford) running from natives in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
tentpole
an industry slang or trendy buzzword term, meaning a film that is expected to serve as a primary support for a studio, i.e., to be a top-grossing blockbuster (usually during the summer season), to compensate for a studio's other flops; usually the film is the start of, or an installment in, a franchise
Example: Armageddon (1998) and other $100 million-plus films, such as Spider-Man (2002) or Shrek (2001)
theatre - theater
the place for screening, presenting, or viewing a film or motion picture; aka cinema
a slang term referring to a feature-length motion picture
the central characteristic, idea, concern or motif in a film
theme music
the opening or closing music of a motion picture, often containing the film's 'signature' or leitmotif tune/phrase that is associated with a character or situation within the film
Examples: 'Laura's theme' in Laura (1944) , John Williams' shark music in Jaws (1975) .
three-shot
refers to a medium shot that contains three people; compare to two-shot
tie-in
refers to any commercial venture connected to a film
Examples: the simultaneous release of a novel and the film based upon it, or of model characters, such as the Harry Potter novels
tilt shot
(or oblique angle)
a camera tilted up or down on a diagonal along a vertical axis; a vertical camera movement from a fixed position often used to suggest an imbalance, or strangeness, or to emphasize size, power or menace; also known as tilt pan, tilt up or tilt down (or reveal), or vertical pan, although not technically the same as "pan up" or "pan down", similar to a moving close-up; a dutch angle is filmed at an extreme diagonal tilt
time lapse
a method of filming where frames are shot much slower than their normal rate, allowing action to take place between frames, and giving the appearance of the action taking place much faster in the finished product; often done for nature filming (the blooming of a flower, the movement of clouds, etc.), allowing the viewer to witness the event compressed from real time (hours or days) into a few seconds; (one frame shot every 30 seconds over 24 hours of real time would equal two minutes of film time); opposite of slow-motion
Example: Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
tint
the use of color to physically tint film stock to achieve a desired mood, usually done selectively by hand; often used by silent black-and-white films before the widespread use of color film. See gel and sepia.
Example: The Great Train Robbery (1903) was selectively hand-tinted. D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) (pictured) tinted each of its four episodes (and its "cradle rocking" interludes) in a different color: the "Modern" Story was tinted amber, the "Judean" Story was tinted blue, the "French" Story was tinted in sepia, and the "Babylonian" Story was tinted grey-green. Gold tinting was also used to "color" the gold, brass beds, gold teeth, gilt frames, and the canary cage in Greed (1924) . The 1984 re-release of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) also tinted various scenes
title role
the lead part in a movie or other production for an actor or actress, that is named after the title of the film
Example: Harrison Ford in the title role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) , or Angelina Jolie in the title role of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
titles
the words that appear on the film screen and convey information; categories of titles include: credit titles, main titles, end titles, insert titles, and subtitles; a creeper title, also known as a roll-up title, refers to a film title that appears to move solwly across the screen - vertically or horizontally; in silent film, "titles" (called title cards or intertitles) included the written commentary and full screens of textual dialogue spliced within the action; title design refers to the artistic manner in which the title of a film is displayed on screen; the working title is the name by which a film is known while it is being made (e.g., during the filming of Psycho (1960) , it was known as Production 9401); see Movie Title Screens ; see also credits
topline
to star; or to be billed above the title of a film; the topliner is the star of a particular film
Example: Bette Davis, top-billed or starring in the melodrama Marked Woman (1937), with lesser billed and lesser-known actor Humphrey Bogart.
topper
refers to the head of a company or organization
tour de force
literally "forceful turn" (French); usually refers to a lead actor's performance that was incredibly skillful, brilliant, notable, masterful, reflecting a very high standard, and perfectly displaying the actor's ability; compare to 'stealing a scene' - the equivalent for a supporting actor role
Examples: Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940) as Hildy Johnson, and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) as Randle P. McMurphy (pictured).
tracking shot
(or truck)
a smooth shot in which the camera moves alongside ('tracking within') the subject, usually mounted on a dolly, in a side-to-side motion (relative to the scene or the action); also known as following shot; sometimes used interchangeably with dolly shot, pull back (pull-out, push-out, widen-out or push-back) shot, track back (moving away) or track in (or push-in) (moving forward), or zoom shot; see also Steadicam
Examples: from Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (pictured here); some other famous examples of tracking shots are examples of Steadicam 'tracking', including Danny's point of view (POV) shots in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) , when wheeling around the Overlook Hotel; the shot on top of the train or the shot walking through the camp in Bound for Glory (1976); the shot from the dressing room to the ring in Raging Bull (1980) ; the following and tracking shots in Marathon Man (1976) ; the entire Hitchcock film Rope (1948) - composed of long segments of uncut film; Mikhail Kalatozov's amazing hand-held tracking shot in I Am Cuba (1964) - beginning with views of a rooftop beauty pageant with contestants wearing swimwear that descended to an outdoor pool and went underwater; the continuous opening shot in Robert Altman's The Player (1992), or the lengthy 7-minute final shot in The Passenger (1975) which ended back in the Spanish hotel room and discovered the murdered body of David Locke (Jack Nicholson);
also the famous track-back shot from upstairs to the outside of an apartment in Frenzy (1972) (pictured); the 8 minute shot in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) viewing surrealistic and nightmarishly apocalyptic images of the roads littered with traffic jams, car wrecks and accidents, bloody casualties, and burning cars; the opening shot in Boogie Nights (1997) that tracked into the 70s disco; also the 3-minute entrance of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco into the Copacabana club in Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990) ; the lengthy and uninterrupted crane and hand-held Steadicam shots in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006) in the car chase in the woods scene, and the 6-minute trek through an embattled war zone; and the uncut, single 5 1/2-minute Steadicam shot of British soldier Robbie (James McAvoy) along the embattled beach at 1940s Dunkirk in Atonement (2007) as the British Expeditionary Forces retreated
trademark
refers to a personal touch or embellishment of an actor, director, writer or producer within a film; aka signature, calling card.
Example: Hitchcock's 'cameos' in all of his films, or Stanley Kubrick's use of the in-joke CRM-114 (in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) , the serial number on one of the pods was "CRM114"; in his A Clockwork Orange (1971) , the central character Alex was injected with "serum 114" - CRM=serum; in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the mortuary was located on Level/Wing C, Room 114)
trades
refers to the professional magazines and publications that report the daily or weekly entertainment news of the entertainment industry.
Examples: Variety , and the Hollywood Reporter (pictured here), and Boxoffice Magazine .
trailer
a short publicity film, preview, or advertisement composed of short excerpts and scenes from a forthcoming film or coming attraction, usually two-three minutes in length; often presented at the showing of another film. Historically, these advertisements were placed at the end of a newsreel or supporting feature and so "trailed" them, hence the name; also commonly known as preview(s); also, another name for the tail - a length of blank leader (strip of film) at the end of a reel; a teaser is basically a very short trailer (of 15-30 seconds in length) that only provides a few hints about the film (a Web address, a few bars of music, a quick sequence of images, specially-shot footage, etc.).
transition
(or transitional technique or device)
one of several ways of moving from one shot or scene to the next, including such transitional effects or shots as a cut, fade, dissolve, and wipe; a transition focus between two scenes means the current scene goes out of focus and the next scene comes into focus
Example: in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) , the bone-cut-to-satellite transition - one of the most famous match cuts in cinematic history
trash film
refers to second-run, low-budget films that are deliberately over-the-top, infantile, amateurish, sometimes excessively gory or raunchy which are intended to shock, disgust, and repel mainstream audiences, and appeal to non-traditional audiences. Sometimes described as a sub-category of exploitation and cult films, or called a 'turkey' film. Compare with sexploitation, B-films, and Z-films.
Examples: Films distributed and produced by Troma Studios, the splatter films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Paul Morrissey's Trash (1970), John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), William Sach's The Incredible Melting Man (1977), Meir Zarchi's Day of the Woman (aka I Spit on Your Grave (1978)).
travelogue
a film made for the purpose of showing scenes from foreign, exotic places
Example: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
treatment
a detailed literary summary or presentation of a film's story, with action and characters described in prose form, often used to market and/or sell a film project or script; a completed treatment is a late stage in the development of a screenplay after several story conferences have incorporated changes into the script; contrast to a synopsis (a brief summation of a film);
|
i don't know
|
In Greek mythology, who was abducted by Zeus disguised as a bull?
|
Europa | Greek mythology | Britannica.com
Greek mythology
Isis
Europa, in Greek mythology , the daughter either of Phoenix or of Agenor, king of Phoenicia . The beauty of Europa inspired the love of Zeus , who approached her in the form of a white bull and carried her away from Phoenicia to Crete . There she bore Zeus three sons: Minos , ruler of Crete; Rhadamanthys, ruler of the Cyclades Islands; and, according to some legends , Sarpedon, ruler of Lycia. She later married Asterius, the king of Crete, who adopted her sons, and she was worshipped under the name of Hellotis in Crete, where the festival Hellotia was held in her honour.
Europa being abducted by Zeus disguised as a bull, detail from an Attic krater, 5th century; in the …
Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale Tarquiniense, Tarquinia, Italy; photograph, Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Learn More in these related articles:
Zeus
in ancient Greek religion, chief deity of the pantheon, a sky and weather god who was identical with the Roman god Jupiter. His name clearly comes from that of the sky god Dyaus of the ancient Hindu Rigveda. Zeus was regarded as the sender of thunder and lightning, rain, and winds, and his...
in Greek mythology: Myths involving animal transformations
...(animal worship) was ever practiced by the Greeks. Gods sometimes assumed the form of beasts in order to deceive goddesses or women. Zeus, for example, assumed the form of a bull when he carried off Europa, a Phoenician princess, and he appeared in the guise of a swan in order to attract Leda, wife of a king of Sparta. Poseidon took the shape of a stallion to beget the wonder horses Arion and...
in Cadmus
in Greek mythology, the son of Phoenix or Agenor (king of Phoenicia) and brother of Europa. Europa was carried off by Zeus, king of the gods, and Cadmus was sent out to find her. Unsuccessful, he consulted the Delphic oracle, which ordered him to give up his quest, follow a cow, and build a town on the spot where she lay down. The cow guided him to Boeotia (Cow Land), where he founded the city...
|
Europa
|
Which island country has two languages, Greek and Turkish?
|
Zeus and Europa in Greek Mythology | Mythography
Zeus and Europa in Greek Mythology
Home | Greek Legends | Lovers | Page 2 | Zeus & Europa
Europa was one of the god Zeus’s many love interests in Greek mythology. She was a beautiful mortal woman, and the noble daughter of a King Agenor (according to some sources, Agenor was the king of Phoenicia).
The legend of Europa and Zeus begins when the ruler of the Olympian gods glimpses the young woman one day. At first sight of Europa, Zeus is instantly overcome by her beauty and grace. Not being one to ignore his desires, the god immediately comes up with a plan - he assumes the form of a glorious white bull and swims to the shore on which Europa and her female companions are playing (it should be noted that in some versions of the story, rather than disguising himself, Zeus sends a real white bull to lure the girl). The bull is so sleek and handsome, not to mention gentle, that the maidens all take turns stroking and petting the pretty creature.
In time, Europa feels comfortable enough with the bull to climb upon his back for a little ride. However, as soon as she is safely seated, the bull moves toward the sea, carrying the object of his affection with him. They together cross the water. Their strange but compelling journey leads them eventually to the island of Crete.
Upon arriving in Crete, Zeus finally casts off his disguise and reveals his divine identity to Europa. The mortal woman then becomes yet another of the god’s lovers. Ultimately, Europa gives birth to a trio of sons - Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon.
It was said that Zeus so loved Europa that he gave her three priceless presents. The first was Talos, a magical man made of bronze, who served as a guard on Crete. The second was Laelaps, a dog that excelled at the hunt. And the third and final gift was a javelin that always hit its target. In addition, as a last poetic touch, it is worth mentioning that the bull that “stars” in this story was transformed into the constellation Taurus.
|
i don't know
|
Donald Tusk has been the Prime Minister of which country since 2007?
|
Donald Tusk, the new head of Europe - Telegraph
EU
Donald Tusk, the new head of Europe
Tusk has also long been a proponent of free markets, privatisation and minimal government interference - a stance that should made him a natural ally of the UK
Donald Tusk, president of the European Council Photo: AFP
By Matthew Day, in Warsaw and Bruno Waterfeld in Brussels
7:00AM BST 31 Aug 2014
Initially reluctant to leave national politics, Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister was persuaded by his wife Malgorzata for the “prestige, better money and less problems at work” that come with a top Brussels job at the top of EU officialdom renowned for its “gravy train” pay and perks.
Mr Tusk currently earns 240,000 zloty a year, a salary that is worth just €60,000 (£47,500) a year, making him one of the lowest paid EU leaders. In the EU post, he will earn over five times with a pay and perks package worth well over €300,000 a year, including a personal motorcade of five limousines.
That Mr Tusk could step into some of Europe’s biggest shoes has surprised many in Poland. Unlike Radek Sikorski, his ardently Europhile foreign minister, he has never made any public declaration of seeking a job in Brussels - even last month saying that he intended to stay in Poland - and has never really outlined in depth his views on Europe.
Senior EU officials have described a growing consensus building around Mr Tusk, who is supported by Germany, as the star of his main rival, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister and daughter-in-law of Lord Kinnock, wanes.
“It is a progressive consensus. Her name is Angela Merkel,” joked a Brussels ambassador. Earlier last week, perhaps seeking to curry favour in Berlin, David Cameron added his support to Mr Tusk’s bandwagon.
Related Articles
Merkel under pressure to ditch 'blackmailing' Cameron in EU president row
02 Jun 2014
The Prime Minister backed Mr Tusk to please the German chancellor and also in the hope that the centre-Right Pole will act as a counter-balance to the federalist ambitions of Jean-Claude Juncker, the incoming president of the European Commission. The 57-year-old prime minister’s prospects for a European role are mainly hindered by his weakness at English.
Although improving, Mr Tusk rarely speaks English in public and when he does it comes with a strong Polish accent. Although Mr Tusk’s commitment to the EU has grown over his seven years in office as Poland prospered from union membership, the 57-year-old Polish leader has retained a pragmatic stance on European policy and is committed to its reform.
Mr Tusk has also long been a proponent of free markets, privatisation and minimal government interference - a stance that should made him a natural ally of the UK. Despite this, Poland and the UK have clashed in Europe with the two falling out over Mr Cameron call for limits on EU freedom of movement rights that benefit millions of Poles working in Britain.
His relationship with Mrs Merkel, has been a mixed blessing domestically, leading to accusations from nationalists circles that he is too close to a country that was for long Poland’s traditional enemy but her blessing counts for a lot in Brussels. Mr Tusk’s instinct to form strong bonds with Germany may stem from his own background.
Although born in the northern city of Gdansk, his family hail from the Kaszuby region of Poland, a small distinctive area not far from the city where, for years before the Second World War, Polish and German culture entwined and national divisions blurred. One of Mr Tusk’s grandfathers was even forced to join Hitler’s armies in 1944 after spending time in a concentration camp.
This fact was picked up by his opponents, and used in an attempt derail his political career - but the attempt failed and Mr Tusk went on to become a dominant force in Polish politics. As leader of the economically liberal Civic Platform party, he became prime minister in 2007 after inflicting a heavy defeat on his bitter foe Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Credited with bringing order and stability after the turbulent Kaczynski years, which were punctuated by frequent scandals and arguments with Poland’s neighbours, the softly-spoken Mr Tusk made Polish history in 2011 by becoming the first prime minister to be re-elected since the fall of Communism.
But since then his star had waned. His government has been dogged by scandal and accusations that it is doing too little to reform the economy, and to the chagrin of its supporters Civic Platform now trails Mr Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party in the opinion polls. Sensing that the departure of Mr Tusk will hasten the demise of Civic Platform, Jaroslaw Kaczynski said he hoped his rival would get the job because it would mean “he will not be here”.
Rafal Pankowski, an expert on Poland’s political Right, also said he feared Tusk leaving Poland could inflict a hammer blow on his party, which faces a general election next year. “Without him it is difficult to imagine how the party will survive and maintain the same level of support,” he commented. “There is no successor who has the same track record as he does. He holds the party together.”
|
Poland
|
In the 2008 Olympics, Louis Smith won Britain's first ever medal (bronze) in which sport?
|
Poland's Tusk, Italy's Mogherini get EU top jobs
Poland's Tusk, Italy's Mogherini get EU top jobs
Alex Pigman
Share
View photos
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk arrives on August 30, 2014 for a European Union summit at EU headquarters in Brussels (AFP Photo/Alain Jocard )
More
Brussels (AFP) - European leaders have named Polish Premier Donald Tusk the next EU president and Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini to head its diplomatic service as the bloc faces a series of challenges topped by Ukraine.
Tusk, who speaks only halting English and no French, is the first eastern European to hold such a senior post in the EU and is known as a tough critic of the Kremlin, especially over the Ukraine crisis.
"The suspense is up, the new EU leadership team is complete," said current EU President Herman Van Rompuy moments after the announcement was made.
Van Rompuy said the new team faced three major challenges: the stagnating European economy, the crisis in Ukraine which he called "the gravest threat to continental security since the Cold War," and Britain's place in the EU.
"I come to Brussels from a country that deeply believes in the significance of Europe," the centre-right Tusk told a news conference with Van Rompuy and Mogherini.
He insisted that "no reasonable person can imagine the EU without the UK" and pledged to do everything possible to meet London's demands for reform.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was "delighted" by Tusk's appointment and by his comments.
Tusk will take office on December 1 while Mogherini, if confirmed by the European Parliament, will start her new job on November 1.
Strongly backed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the 57-year-old Tusk is a pro-European free marketeer with roots in Poland's Solidarity anti-Soviet trade union who has been prime minister since 2007.
Merkel said Tusk "faced big challenges" and lauded him as "a qualified, committed and passionate European, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 25 years after the end of the Cold War."
He will also head up summits of the countries that use the euro, despite years of questioning the wisdom of eurozone bailouts as prime minister and Poland not being a member of the single currency.
- 'Polish my English' -
Tusk denied his poor command of foreign languages would handicap him as EU president, a job that requires a deft touch to find compromise amid conflicting positions and prepare European leaders for often delicate summits.
"Don't worry, I will 'Polish' my English and be 100 percent ready on December 1," Tusk said in English, punning on the word for his nationality and showing a command of the language one journalist openly questioned at the press conference.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said the choice of the next EU president was "a recognition of Poland's achievement and its place in Europe."
Mogherini, Italy's 41-year-old foreign minister, has long been a favourite to replace Catherine Ashton as head of the EU's foreign service, hailed by her supporters as a new, younger face for Europe.
"I hope I can join the new energy of the new European generation that is there not only among the EU citizens but also in the EU political leadership," Mogherini said.
With leaders unnerved by Russia's latest actions in Ukraine, the nomination of Tusk to replace Belgium's Van Rompuy could send a message of resolve to Moscow as EU leaders also mull fresh sanctions.
The White House congratulated Tusk and Mogherini.
"As we advance security and prosperity around the world, the United States has no more important partner than Europe," the White House statement read.
Mogherini's candidacy initially faced fierce resistance, with Eastern European countries -- and reportedly British officials -- criticising her as both inexperienced and too soft on Russia.
She was initially sidelined at a first EU summit in July. But six weeks later, and after Italy staunchly backed more sanctions against Russia, Mogherini, who speaks fluent English and French, was put in a stronger position.
"I know the challenges are huge, especially in these times of crisis," Mogherini said.
"All around Europe we have crisis."
Hours before the summit, left-of-centre EU leaders meeting in Paris formally backed her as the bloc's new foreign policy chief.
"I have high hopes that she will be chosen," said French President Francois Hollande, eager to see a socialist and southern European in a top role.
Reblog
|
i don't know
|
Which stretch of water lies between North and South islands, New Zealand?
|
New Zealand
New Zealand
Area: 268,680 square kilometers (103,737 square miles)
Highest point on mainland: Mount Cook (3,764 meters/12,349 feet)
Lowest point on land: Sea level
Hemispheres: Southern and Eastern
Time zone: 12 midnight = noon GMT
Longest distances: 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) from north-northeast to south-southwest; 450 kilometers (280 miles) from east-southeast to west-northwest
Land boundaries: None
Coastline: 15,134 kilometers (9,404 miles)
Territorial sea limits: 22 kilometers (12 nautical miles)
1 LOCATION AND SIZE
New Zealand lies in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and consists of two main islands and a number of smaller ones. The main North and South Islands, separated by the Cook Strait, lie on an axis running from northeast to southwest, except for the low-lying Northland Peninsula on the North Island. With a total area of 268,680 square kilometers (103,737 square miles), New Zealand is roughly the size of the state of Colorado.
2 TERRITORIES AND DEPENDENCIES
New Zealand has three island dependencies in the Pacific Ocean.
The Cook Islands are located roughly halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, in the middle of the South Pacific. The islands have local self-government but voluntarily rely on New Zealand to represent their interests in foreign affairs and defense. The Cook Islands consist of two island chains: seven low-lying coral atolls in the north, and eight larger and more elevated volcanic islands in the south.
Niue Island, which extends over more than 263 square kilometers (102 square miles), is one of the world's largest coral islands. Located east of the Cook Islands, Niue also governs itself in local affairs but depends on New Zealand in international matters.
Tokelau, another territory of New Zealand, is an island chain in the middle of the South Pacific northwest of the Cook Islands. It consists of three small coral atolls and surrounding islets.
Besides these three Pacific island groups, New Zealand also claims land in Antarctica in and near the Ross Sea.
3 CLIMATE
New Zealand has a mild oceanic climate with little seasonal variation. Mean annual temperatures range from about 11°C (52°F) in the southern part of South Island to 15°C (59°F) in Northland, the northernmost part of the North Island. Daytime high temperatures in summer generally vary from 21°C to 27° C (70° to 81°F); winter highs are usually at least 10°C (50°F). Temperatures rarely extend beyond the extremes of -10°C (14°F) and 35°C (95°F). Due to prevailing westerly and north-westerly winds, the western mountain slopes of both islands receive the heaviest rainfall. Average annual rainfall for the country as a whole ranges from 64 to 152 centimeters (25 to 60 inches). Precipitation amounts vary widely, however; on South Island, for example, central Otago Harbour receives as little as 30 centimeters (12 inches) per year, while southwestern Fiordland can get as much as 800 centimeters (315 inches).
4 TOPOGRAPHIC REGIONS
New Zealand is very mountainous; more than 75 percent of its land exceeds an altitude of 200 meters (656 feet). The South Island covers an area of 149,883 square kilometers (57,870 square miles). Its major regions are the Canterbury Plains to the east; the central mountain highlands, which cover much of the island; and a narrow western coast. The North Island, which spans an area of 114,669 square kilometers (44,274 square miles), is characterized by hill country. The mountain highland here is narrow and lies to the east. North and west of the Kaimanawa Mountains is a volcanic plateau. There is little coastal lowland; even in Taranaki, where it is widest, Mount Egmont (also called Mount Taranaki) rises well over 2,438 meters (8,000 feet). The narrow northern peninsular section of the North Island is mostly low-lying, though its surface is broken and irregular in many places.
5 OCEANS AND SEAS
New Zealand lies in the South Pacific Ocean to the southeast of Australia, across the Tasman Sea. At the Tamaki Isthmus on the North Island, these two bodies of water are separated by only 2 to 3 kilometers (1 to 2 miles) of land.
Sea Inlets and Straits
The North and South Islands are separated by the Cook Strait, which is 26 to 145 kilometers (16 to 90 miles) wide. The Foveaux Strait lies between the South Island and Stewart Island to the southeast. The North Island's bays include North and South Taranaki Bights to the west, Palliser Bay to the south, the wide Hawke Bay to the east, and the even wider Bay of Plenty to the northeast. The South Island's major bays include Golden Bay and Tasman Bay in the north, Karamea Bight at the northern end of the west coast, and Canterbury Bight and Pegasus Bay to the east.
Islands and Archipelagos
New Zealand's largest island, aside from its two primary landmasses, is Stewart Island to the southeast, which covers an area of 1,746 square kilometers (674 square miles). Other islands include the Chatham Islands (963 square kilometers/372 square miles) to the east and several other mostly uninhabited outlying islands, including the Auckland Islands (567 square kilometers/219 square miles).
Coastal Features
North Island has a more heavily indented coastline than South Island. The long arm of land that juts out to the northwest has so deep an indentation at its midsection that the land mass narrows to a width of only 2 or 3 kilometers (1 or 2 miles) at Auckland. The east coast and northern tip of Northland have multiple bays and harbors, while the west coast is almost completely smooth. The northern and southern ends of the South Island have numerous indentations, while the long eastern and western coastlines are smoother. In the east, the Banks Peninsula juts out somewhat less than halfway down the coast. The coast of Fiordland to the southeast is broken up into numerous sounds and inlets. The northernmost part of North Island has many sand dunes.
6 INLAND LAKES
New Zealand has many lakes. Those in the South Island are particularly noted for their magnificent scenery. The country's largest natural lake is Lake Taupo on the North Island, followed by Lakes Te Anau and Wakatipu on the South Island.
7 RIVERS AND WATERFALLS
The rivers are shallow and swift, and only a few are navigable. The longest river is the Waikato (425 kilometers/264 miles), which flows north-westward across the North Island and empties into the Tasman Sea, as do the Wanganui and Rangitikei. Rivers that flow into the Pacific from the South Island include the Clutha, the Taieri, and the Clarence; the Mataura, Wairau, and Oreti flow from the South Island into the Foveaux Strait. The Clutha is the South Island's longest river, and its volume is the greatest of any river in the country.
8 DESERTS
|
Cook Strait
|
The name of which part of the former Roman province of Dacia, translates into English as 'land beyond the forest'?
|
Whenua – how the land was shaped – Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Māui in New Zealand
Māori tribes all have stories about how New Zealand was created, and how its mountains, rivers, lakes and hot springs were shaped.
How the land was created
In one legend the demigod Māui pulled up a huge fish from the sea, which became the North Island. His canoe became the South Island, and its anchor Stewart Island.
In another well-known story, the land is from the womb of Papatūānuku, the earth mother, whose body lies under the water.
Kupe forms the islands
Kupe is an important ancestor from the Polynesian homeland, Hawaiki. According to tradition, when he arrived in New Zealand there was only one island. He is said to have split the land, forming the North and South islands. One of the Māori names for Cook Strait, which flows between the islands, is 'te moana a Kupe’ (the sea of Kupe).
How the mountains were placed
It is said that the mountains of the central North Island – Tongariro, Taranaki (Mt Egmont), Tauhara and Pūtauaki (Mt Edgecumbe) – once lived together. But, according to a version told by the Ngāti Tūwharetoa tribe, they fought a battle for the affections of Pīhanga, the maiden mountain. Tongariro won, and the other mountains were obliged to leave. They walked as far as they could before the rising sun fixed them to the spot, where they stand to this day.
The thermal wonders
According to tradition, when the explorer Ngātoroirangi was travelling in the North Island, he became cold and called to his sisters, Te Hoata and Te Pupu. They came underground from Hawaiki in the form of fire. When they appeared above the ground, they formed the boiling mud pools, volcanoes and geysers that are famous in this region.
Making the lakes and rivers
The lakes of the South Island were carved out by the ancestor Rākaihautū as he travelled across the Southern Alps.
In tradition, taniwha (water spirits or monsters) shaped many of New Zealand’s rivers, lakes and harbours. At Wellington Harbour an earthquake stranded a taniwha above ground, so that he formed a stretch of land.
|
i don't know
|
The 'Foumart' or 'Foul-Marten', is an old name for which creature?
|
Foumart | Define Foumart at Dictionary.com
foumart
[foo-mert, -mahrt] /ˈfu mərt, -ˌmɑrt/
Spell
the European polecat, Mustela putorius.
Origin of foumart
1300-50; Middle English fulmard, folmarde. See foul , marten
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Examples from the Web for foumart
Expand
Historical Examples
In my county, as well as in many parts of England, the popular name is "foumart," which is said to be derived from "foul marten."
British Dictionary definitions for foumart
Expand
a former name for polecat (sense 1)
Word Origin
C15 folmarde: from Old English fūl foul + mearth a marten
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
|
Polecat
|
Which English writer of humorous novels and stories, born in 1881, made radio broadcasts for the Germans during World War II?
|
Definición sweet marten | Diccionario inglés definiciones | Reverso
n (Brit) a hard sticky sweet of boiled sugar with any of various flavourings
honey-sweet
adj sweet or endearing
Sweet
n Henry. 1845--1912, English philologist; a pioneer of modern phonetics. His books include A History of English Sounds (1874)
sweet alyssum
n a Mediterranean cruciferous plant, Lobularia maritima, having clusters of small fragrant white or violet flowers: widely grown in gardens
See also → alyssum
adj (of food) cooked in a sauce made from sugar and vinegar and other ingredients
sweet basil
n See → basil → 1
sweet bay
n a small tree, Magnolia virginiana, of SE North America, having large fragrant white flowers: family Magnoliaceae (magnolias), (Sometimes shortened to) bay
sweet cherry
n
1 either of two types of cherry tree that are cultivated for their red edible sweet fruit, the gean having tender-fleshed fruit, the bigarreau having firm-fleshed fruit
2 the fruit of any of these trees
See also → heart cherry (Also called) dessert cherry
n another name for → melilot
sweet corn
n
1 (Also called) sugar corn, green corn a variety of maize, Zea mays saccharata, whose kernels are rich in sugar and eaten as a vegetable when young
2 the unripe ears of maize, esp. the sweet kernels removed from the cob, cooked as a vegetable
sweet fern
n a North American shrub, Comptonia (or Myrica) asplenifolia, having scented fernlike leaves and heads of brownish flowers: family Myricaceae
sweet flag
n an aroid marsh plant, Acorus calamus, having swordlike leaves, small greenish flowers, and aromatic roots, (Also called) calamus
(C18: see flag2)
sweet gale
n a shrub, Myrica gale, of northern swamp regions, having yellow catkin-like flowers and aromatic leaves: family Myricaceae, (Also called) bog myrtle (Often shortened to) gale
(C17: see gale2)
sweet gum
n
1 a North American liquidambar tree, Liquidambar styraciflua, having prickly spherical fruit clusters and fragrant sap: the wood (called satin walnut) is used to make furniture
Compare → sour gum
2 the sap of this tree, (Also called) red gum
sweet marjoram
n another name for → marjoram → 1
sweet marten
n a name for the pine marten, referring to the fact that its scent glands produce a less offensive scent marker than that of the polecat (the foul marten or foumart)
sweet oil
n another name for → olive oil
sweet pea
n a climbing papilionaceous plant, Lathyrus odoratus, of S Europe, widely cultivated for its butterfly-shaped fragrant flowers of delicate pastel colours
sweet pepper
n
1 a pepper plant, Capsicum frutescens grossum, with large bell-shaped fruits that are eaten unripe (green pepper) or ripe (red pepper)
2 the fruit of this plant
sweet potato
n
1 a convolvulaceous twining plant, Ipomoea batatas, of tropical America, cultivated in the tropics for its edible fleshy yellow root
2 the root of this plant, (Also called (N.Z.)) kumera
sweet shop
n (Chiefly Brit) a shop solely or largely selling sweets, esp. boiled sweets
sweet spot
n (Sport) the centre area of a racquet, golf club, etc., from which the cleanest shots are made
sweet-talk Informal
adj
1 cloying, honeyed, icky (informal) luscious, melting, saccharine, sugary, sweetened, syrupy, toothsome, treacly
2 affectionate, agreeable, amiable, appealing, attractive, beautiful, charming, cute, delightful, engaging, fair, gentle, kind, likable or likeable, lovable, sweet-tempered, taking, tender, unselfish, winning, winsome
3 beloved, cherished, darling, dear, dearest, pet, precious, treasured
4 aromatic, balmy, clean, fragrant, fresh, new, perfumed, pure, redolent, sweet-smelling, wholesome
5 dulcet, euphonic, euphonious, harmonious, mellow, melodious, musical, silver-toned, silvery, soft, sweet-sounding, tuneful
6 sweet on enamoured of, gone on (slang) head over heels in love with, infatuated by, in love with, keen on, obsessed or bewitched by, taken with, wild or mad about (informal)
n
|
i don't know
|
Who in 1994 was the first Briton since Tommy Simpson to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France?
|
Cycling: Tour de France: Boardman's flying start: British sprinter breaks speed record to lay first claim to yellow jersey | The Independent
Cycling: Tour de France: Boardman's flying start: British sprinter breaks speed record to lay first claim to yellow jersey
Saturday 2 July 1994 23:02 BST
Click to follow
The Independent Online
CHRIS BOARDMAN became only the second Briton to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France when he won yesterday's Prologue time trial here. In humid conditions, the 25- year-old Merseysider beat Miguel Indurain, winner of the Tour for the past three years, over the 4.4-mile course on the streets of Lille, using the Lotus- developed bike that helped him to Olympic gold.
'The next thing I would like to do is to take the yellow jersey to England,' Boardman said afterwards. 'It's probably the only time it will go to England in my professional career so we're going to fight very hard to keep it.'
'From now on every day is a bonus for me. There is no longer any pressure on me. It's on Indurain and Rominger. They have to win the Tour. I have hit my objective.'
Tommy Simpson was the first Briton to wear yellow, for one day in the Pyrenees in 1962. Five years later, he died after collapsing on the Ventoux mountain in extreme heat.
Indurain was 15 seconds slower yesterday as Boardman averaged 34mph - a Tour record - to finish in 7min 49sec with Toni Rominger of Switzerland third, 19 seconds slower. Boardman will wear the yellow jersey on today's first road stage, over 145 miles from Lille to Armentieres. Boardman's compatriot Sean Yates, a Tour veteran, was 54th, 51 seconds behind.
To beat Indurain by 15 seconds is impressive, but sprinters can cut that to pieces in a matter of days. ''I have to be very careful of that time gap. My team must help keep the sprinters at bay,' Boardman said. 'I gained valuable experience when I held the leader's yellow jersey in the Dauphine Libere race for two days. In this race you have to be a bit of a racehorse, a decathlete, and a chess player, to survive.'
'It is a bonus for me that the Tour is going to England,' Boardman said. 'I could have gone faster from the start but I did not want to blow up. The Olympics taught me how to handle the pressure, but this is a different league, even to the Olympics.
'I didn't use the brakes today. If I crash, I crash. I was at 101 per cent. For this year my first objective was the prologue. It's like a dream for me. I have always watched the Tour de France and for me to be in it is incredible.'
It was Boardman's 11th victory since he turned professional last September with a winning debut. In his first outing for the French team GAN, he won the Eddy Merckx Grand Prix time trial in Brussels. Two years ago his victory in the Olympic 4,000m pursuit in Barcelona brought Britain's first cycling gold medal for 72 years.
Boardman, a time-trial specialist, was always touted as one of the favourites to take the Prologue after six wins this season, five of them in solo rides. But Indurain, despite being beaten in the Tour of Italy this year, was expected to mount a formidable challenge in a discipline he has dominated since his first Tour de France win in 1991.
The 33-year-old Rominger, however, was also delighted with his performance, which kept him in Indurain's shadow. Rominger enjoyed a tremendous start to the season by winning the Spanish Vuelta, the Paris-Nice and the Tour of the Basque Country, while Indurain suffered his first defeat in a major Tour since the 1991 Tour of Spain when he finished third in the Giro d'Italia earlier this month.
'People are predicting the start of his decline,' his team- mate Gerard Rue, of France, said, 'but I can assure you that he's just as strong as last year and that there's plenty more to come for him. He's hungry.'
The time trial specialists, Alex Zuelle and Armand de las Cuevas of France, considered as possible contenders for victory, had strong rides to finish fourth and fifth respectively.
The Italian Claudio Chiappucci, more at ease in the mountains than in time trials, came a surprising ninth, but there was disappointment for his compatriot Gianni Bugno, who finished in 63rd place, 54 seconds down the field.
(Photograph omitted)
|
Chris Boardman
|
Who won the Best Supporting Actor 'Oscar' for his role in 'Jerry Maguire'?
|
Bradley Wiggins plans to keep yellow jersey in the Tour de France | Sport | The Guardian
Bradley Wiggins plans to keep yellow jersey in the Tour de France
• Bradley Wiggins intends holding lead for rest of Le Tour
• Chris Froome takes stage for Team Sky in Tour de France
Bradley Wiggins took the overall lead in the Tour de France after the mountainous seventh stage into La Planche des Belles Filles. Photograph: Laurent Cipriani/AP
William Fotheringham at La Planche des Belles Filles
Saturday 7 July 2012 14.48 EDT
First published on Saturday 7 July 2012 14.48 EDT
Close
This article is 4 years old
In a potentially decisive moment in this year's Tour de France , Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to wear the fabled leader's yellow jersey in 12 years, joining the small elite group of Britons who have led the Tour in the half-century since Tom Simpson became the first to pull on the maillot jaune. Capping a dominant performance by the Londoner's Team Sky squad, their Kenyan-born, British-licensed rider Chris Froome won the stage and took the polka-dot jersey of King of the Mountains leader.
A year to the day since he crashed out of the 2011 Tour with a broken collarbone, Wiggins now has a chance of becoming the first Briton to win cycling's toughest event. At the summit of the Planche des Belles Filles climb in the Vosges mountains, only two other contenders for this year's race managed to keep in touch with Wiggins and Froome: the defending Tour champion Cadel Evans of Australia and the Italian Vincenzo Nibali, winner of the Vuelta a España in 2010. Overall, the race remains finely poised, with Evans just 10 seconds behind Wiggins, and Nibali at 16sec, margins that can be lost and won within sight of any stage finish.
"It's enormous," said the triple Olympic gold medallist. "I realise how historic the Tour is and the position I'm in now. I have the utmost respect for the yellow jersey and it's something I'm planning to keep now. You can't get cocky and choose when you take the yellow jersey. I feel very fortunate to be in this position after a crazy week. I'd rather be in yellow than in hospital like half the peloton."
Before Wiggins, the last Briton to wear yellow in the Tour was David Millar, the Scot who won the prologue time trial in the 2000 race.
Chris Boardman – Wiggins's mentor at one point in his track racing days – was a prologue specialist who wore the maillot jaune in 1994, 1997 and 1998, while Sean Yates, now directeur sportif at Sky, and Simpson had the jersey on their shoulders for a day each, in 1994 and 1962 respectively. The closest any Briton has come to winning the race was in 2009, when Wiggins finished fourth in his breakthrough performance in the race, equalling the record set by the Scot Robert Millar 25 years earlier.
The Team Sky leader started this Tour as the bookies' favourite, and rode his luck in the opening week as crashes eliminated 16 of the 198-man field. He has already won three of the most prestigious shorter stage races in cycling this season, taking overall victory in the Paris-Nice in March, the Tour de Romandie in early May, and the Critérium du Dauphiné stage race in early June.
The withdrawals following Black Friday's crashes now total 13 with Garmin-Sharp the worst-hit team, with both leaders out
Published: 7 Jul 2012
British cyclist Bradley Wiggins finishes in the yellow jersey at the end of the seventh stage, leading reigning champion Cadel Evans by 10 seconds
Published: 7 Jul 2012
|
i don't know
|
The Fosse way runs southwest from Lincoln to which city?
|
h2g2 - The Fosse Way - A Journey through Roman Britain - Edited Entry
Watling Street | The Fosse Way | Ermine Street
This is a journey along the Fosse Way 1 , the important north–south road running up the western side of Great Britain. The road runs from Exeter (Devon) in the South to Lincoln (Lincolnshire) in the North, forming one of the main routes in Roman Britain.
At Lincoln, the Fosse Way joins Ermine Street where travellers could continue their journey north through Owmby or could turn back towards the south through Ancaster (Cavsennae). This would suggest that trade goods from the Empire entered Roman Britain from the southern end of this major thoroughfare and were distributed throughout Britain.
Travelling on the Road
Travellers on the road were served by a system of way stations or mansios. The privately-owned cauponae were also established along the routes, providing basic hostel-like accommodation. The upper classes, however, would have used the better tabernae; these began as houses on the roadside offering a service similar to the modern 'bed and breakfast' system. Travellers would also need sufficient money to pay the various tolls along the way.
The Start of The Fosse Way
Unlike Watling Street , the Fosse Way has one clear starting point: Exeter in Devon. This was originally a Roman legionary fortress , founded by the Second Legion in 46 AD in a riverside settlement of the Dumnonii. It was clearly a well-placed settlement, as the town flourished and developed into a prosperous town and port.
The Fosse Way follows two separate routes for one portion of its length, in the section between Exeter and Bath. The northeastern route goes directly from Honiton to Ham Hill. The eastern route goes from Honiton to Ham Hill via Axminster.
We are going to travel back in time to 100 - 200 AD, when the journey described in this Entry would have been possible. You will see over 20 settlements, from the grand to the rural, some of which existed just to serve the garrison of the fort near where they were built, and to give shelter to the travellers on the Fosse Way. The journey on foot will take a minimum of about nine days - that's assuming you walk eight hours a day, travelling an average of 32 to 33 miles per day. It is interesting to note that the longest distance between any two points on this journey is the 23 miles between Honiton and Ham Hill on the northeastern route. This is less than one day's travel for foot soldiers, although wagons and carts could be as slow as eight miles a day. All distances given are starting from Exeter.
The condition of the towns and sites today are shown by the numbers at the start of each section:
1 = No longer visible, or built over.
2 = Some evidence visible in the ground: building platforms, mounds and crop marks.
3 = Some ruins are visible above ground.
4 = Visible site with museum support.
5 = A major site and tourist attraction.
In addition, the Roman name of the each site is given, where known.
Exeter
Translation: 'The riverside settlement of the Dumnonii'
Condition: 4
Exeter was a British tribal city and a Roman legionary fortress of the Second Legion 2 , and was founded in 46 AD. Originally a Celtic oppidum (tribal capital), Exeter was built on the river Exe. The town had a basilica, a forum, temples and baths. The houses were of timber and stone, and mosaic floors and painted plasterwork were not uncommon. The town also had a very busy and prosperous port at Topsham, 3 miles to the southwest.
Topsham - the port for Exeter
Condition: 1
The settlement was originally intended to provide a port to supply the legions in Exeter and the West of Britain. There were timber-framed houses and a few stone buildings, with some paved streets.
To start your journey:
On the Fosse Way, travel east-northeast from Exeter to Honiton - 18 miles.
Honiton
Translation: 'Hillfort of the dead'
Condition: 1
Honiton 3 was a small religious and trading settlement built alongside the Fosse Way. The settlement developed around 48 AD, around a hill fort that was on the border between the territories of the British tribes the Dumnonii and the Durotriges.
Total so far, 18 miles.
To continue your journey, there are two routes:
On the Fosse Way northeast, continue to Ham Hill - 23 miles.
On the Fosse Way east, continue to Axminster - 9 miles.
Axminster
Condition: 1
Axminster is reached on the eastern route of the Fosse Way between Honiton and Ham Hill. Alternatively it can be bypassed by taking the northeastern direct route.
The settlement was founded as a fort in 64 AD, on the Fosse Way and built as a defended settlement with earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. Sited in a farming area, it was a prosperous settlement of timber-framed and stone housing and some municipal buildings, trade buildings and warehouses with paved streets. There was a small port on the River Axe.
Total so far, 27 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue north 4 to Ham Hill - 20 miles.
Ham Hill
Condition: 2
There was a fort at Ham Hill built by the Second Legion, the Augusta, in 46 AD. A trading settlement developed alongside the fort and the Fosse Way. The settlement was of timber-framed housing and a few stone buildings, with some paved streets. The settlement was established to take advantage of the stone quarries in the area 5 .
Total so far, 41 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Ilchester - 6 miles.
Ilchester
Translation: 'The place of lime trees'
Condition: 2
A settlement defended with earth and stone ramparts and ditches, the town had a wide variety of housing, several temples and a theatre, with stone municipal buildings, and mainly paved streets.
There was a junction of the Fosse Way and local roads to Old Sarum (Sorbiodunum), Bawdrip, East Anton, West Coker and Dorchester to the east of the town.
Total so far, 47 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Shepton Mallet - 16 miles.
Shepton Mallet
Condition: 2
The Roman town at Shepton Mallet was a prosperous settlement of timber-framed and stone housing and stone-built municipal buildings. There were trade buildings, warehouses and paved streets. The town was a local centre for a pottery-producing industry that supplied the whole province. There were more than seven pottery kilns sited to the southwest of the town.
Total so far, 63 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Camerton - 9 miles.
Nettlebridge Valley Roman Coal Mines
Condition: 1
The Fosse Way passes a landmark on this part of the journey, the open cast Roman coal mines in the Nettlebridge valley. There is evidence of this in the area together with traces of buildings associated with trade in this resource.
Camerton
Condition: 1
The settlement at Camerton was a thriving one, with earth and timber ramparts and ditches, a wide variety of housing, a temple, a theatre, stone municipal buildings, some paved streets and a busy market.
Total so far, 72 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Bath - 7 miles.
Bath
Translation:'Waters of Sul'
Condition: 5
An important settlement and a major religious centre, the town was the site of a hot water spa, with a pool and springs dedicated to the deity Sul (Minerva). The pool was enclosed by a bath house sanctuary complex with eight or more temples surrounding it. Of the main temples, one was built with a square floor plan and three had a rectangular plan. They were all built alongside the Fosse Way. The town was defended by earth and stone walls. Within the walls, the settlement was of stone and timber-framed housing and fine stone municipal buildings with paved streets, inns and bathhouses. Stone and mosaic floors were not uncommon. There was a wide variety of shops and traders serving the town and surrounding area. The town also had a small port at Sea Mills at the mouth of the Avon river. There was a local pottery industry near the town. Bath was also connected to the South Coast trading port at Poole Harbour, 37 miles away. Salt , local produce, limestone and shale from Purbeck and Wareham were all traded for goods from Gaul.
Total so far, 79 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Nettleton - 8 miles.
Nettleton
Condition: 3
The settlement at Nettleton 6 was defended by earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. There were timber-framed houses and a few trade buildings and shops. There was a stream alongside the settlement with evidence of a water wheel to serve the settlement. Of the three religious sites in the settlement, the temple to the goddess Diana was built with a rectangular floor plan; the other two were both shrines dedicated to the god Apollo .
Total so far, 87 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Easton Grey - 8 miles.
Easton Grey
Condition: 2
The settlement was founded on the Fosse Way and defended by earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. Sited in a farming area, it was a prosperous settlement of timber-framed and stone housing and some municipal buildings, trade buildings and warehouses with paved streets.
Total so far, 95 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Cirencester - 14 miles.
Cirencester
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Bourton on the Water, passing Chedworth - 15 miles.
Chedworth Villa Estate
Condition: 2
The Fosse Way passes a landmark on this part of the journey, the villa estate of Chedworth. The largest of the many estates in the area, it was built near the river Coln. Evidence of the wealth of the villa are found in the remains of mosaics and hypocausts 8 . With its size and wealth, it would have dominated this part of the Cotswolds.
Bourton on the Water
Condition: 2
The Roman trading settlement at Bourton on the Water was built on either side of the Fosse Way. The settlement was of timber-framed housing and a few stone municipal buildings, with mainly paved streets.
Total so far, 124 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Dorn - 8 miles.
Dorn
Condition: 1
Situated at the modern hamlet of Dorn near the village of Moreton-in-Marsh, this was a large market town, built as a defended settlement with earth and timber ramparts. There were timber-framed houses and buildings, and mainly paved streets. Little is known of the settlement and all but the location are lost.
Total so far, 132 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Ettington - 9 miles.
Ettington
Condition: 1
The settlement at Ettington was a small market town, with timber-framed houses and buildings and some paved streets. Little is known of it, as all but the location are lost.
Total so far, 141 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Chesterton on Fosse - 8 miles.
Chesterton on Fosse
Condition: 1
Chesterton on Fosse was founded as a way station at a point where the Fosse Way crossed a small river. This grew into a small market town, with timber-framed houses and buildings, and mainly paved streets.
Total so far, 149 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to High Cross - 22 miles.
High Cross
Translation:'Place of poison plants'
Condition: 2
Founded before the arrival of the Romans in Britain, and built as a defended settlement with earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch, High Cross was at the junction of Watling Street and the Fosse Way. It was a settlement of timber-framed houses and a few trade buildings, with mainly paved streets.
Total so far, 171 miles.
To continue your journey:
On Watling Street, go west-northwest to Mancetter (Mandvessedum) - 10 miles.
On Watling Street, go southeast to Caves Inn (Tripontium) (2) - 7 miles.
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Leicester (Ratae Corieltauvorum) - 12 miles
Leicester
Translation:'The capital of the Corieltauvi 9 '
Condition: 3
Leicester was probably a Claudian vexillation 10 fortress of the 14th Legion 11 in 46 - 47 AD, and a British tribal city (civitas) of the Corieltauvi.
Total so far, 183 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Willoughby on the Wolds (Vernemetum) - 14 miles.
Willoughby on the Wolds
Translation:'Spring Grove'
Condition: 2
Vernemetum was a walled town defended with earth and timber ramparts and ditches, with a wide variety of good housing, a temple and a theatre. There were stone municipal buildings and mainly paved streets.
Total so far, 197 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to East Bridgford - 10 miles.
East Bridgford
Translation:'The margin of the hill'
Condition: 1
The Roman settlement of Margidunum lay right on the Fosse Way at the point where the present roundabout leads to East Bridgford 12 . It was defended by earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. Sited in a farming area, it was a prosperous settlement of timber-framed and stone housing and some municipal buildings, trade buildings and warehouses, with paved streets.
Total so far, 207 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to East Stoke - 7 miles.
East Stoke
Translation:'The place of the bridges'
Condition: 2
The settlement at East Stoke 13 was first founded as a fort of the Ninth Legion 14 in 46 - 47 AD, and the Roman name 'The Place of the Bridges' gives the reason for the fort's founding. It was established at a crossing of the river Trent where a pre-Roman trackway (from Denton to Aldborough - Isurium Brigantum) also crossed the river. The settlement grew to serve the fort and the surrounding areas. It was an ideal site and the defended settlement grew with a wide variety of housing. There was a busy market and trading centre, and there were several temples and a theatre, with good stone municipal buildings, and mainly paved streets.
Total so far, 214 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Brough - 7 miles.
Brough
Translation:'The place of crows'
Condition: 2
Founded on the Fosse Way and close to the river Trent, Brough was built as a defended settlement with earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. It had timber-framed housing and a few trade buildings and shops. The town also had some impressive stone buildings that were possibly temples, and a way station or mansio for travellers on the road.
Approximately two miles west of Brough, there is a marching camp of the 14th Legion built in 46 AD.
Total so far, 221 miles.
To continue your journey:
On the Fosse Way, continue northeast to Lincoln - 10 miles.
Lincoln
Translation:'A pool of dark water'
Condition: 4
The settlement of Lincoln was first founded as a legionary fort of the Ninth Legion in 46 - 47 AD.
With good connections to London (Londinium) via Ermine Street, trade flourished. A basilica, forum, temple and baths were built; these were followed by a temple complex. The homes were of timber and stone and mosaic floors were not uncommon. There was a wide variety of shops. Bronze making, brick, tile and pottery production were all established in the town.
Lincoln was the terminus of the Fosse Way. The total distance travelled from Exeter was 231 miles on the direct route, and 237 miles if the route through Axminster was used.
Although this is the end of the route, you could continue your journey in a few ways:
To the east to Horncastle (Bannoualum) - 22 miles.
On Ermine Street, north to Owmby - 10 miles.
On Ermine Street, south to Ancaster (Causennae) - 17 miles.
Horncastle
Roman name: Bannoualum
Condition: 1
The town was founded as a defended settlement. Substantial defensive works similar to Portchester were built. Good connections to the sea were important for trade: there is no evidence of a port, but landing areas were possible. The settlement lay on the road connecting to Lincoln and the Fosse Way, and was defended by earth and timber ramparts and faced with a ditch. It had timber-framed housing and a few trade buildings and shops.
Total so far: 253 miles, 231 miles on the Fosse Way and 22 miles on unnamed roads.
To continue your journey:
To the east to Skegness - 20 miles.
Skegness
Condition: 2
The town was founded as a port; good connections to the sea were important for trade. The settlement was connected to Holme next the Sea by a ferry running across the Wash, the great estuary on the east coast of England. It had timber-framed housing and a few trade buildings, warehouses and shops.
Total so far, 273 miles: 231 miles on the Fosse Way and 42 miles on unnamed roads.
To continue your journey:
On the ferry, cross southeast to Holme next the Sea on the southern shore of the Wash - 14 miles.
Holme next the Sea
Condition: 2
The settlement was a ferry port on the southern shore of the Wash. Good connections had already been established before the Roman invasion. There is evidence for a small trade port. It had timber-framed houses and a few trade buildings and warehouses.
Total so far: 287 miles, 231 miles on the Fosse Way, 42 miles on unnamed roads, and 14 miles by sea.
To continue your journey south to London and the south coast.
On the Peddars Way, to Kempstone.
On the Fen Causeway, from Kempstone to Water Newton (Durobriuae), Cambridgeshire.
On Ermine Street, from Water Newton to London - Londinium.
On Stane Street, from London to Chichester and Bosham, a sheltered harbour with trade routes to Gaul and the Empire. This would have been a very important east coast route.
Milestones
A Roman mile is 1,000 paces 15 and a milestone was set up to mark each mile. Each milestone had a dedication to the Emperor of the day.
The Milliarium Aureum (golden milestone) was placed in Rome, on the orders of the Emperor Augustus, as the starting point from which all distances to other parts of the empire were to be measured. Milestones on Roman roads gave the distance to Rome as well as local information. 'All roads lead to Rome'... and, evidently, away from it.
Notes on Roman Roads
At the height of the expansion of the Empire, roads were built at the rate of one kilometre every day. Initially, the cost of the road was borne by the state; after that it was the responsibility of the local government to raise the money to keep the road in good repair. An official called the Curatores Viarum was appointed who had to raise the money to maintain the roads in his care.
Roman roads were not free. There were tolls collected at the towns along the course of the road. As a point of interest, the bridges were a particular source of revenue. This explains the survival and continuous use of fords along the routes.
The Roman surveying tool the groma or 'surveyor's cross' could not be used to survey round corners. It was a line-of-sight tool that could only be used to plot straight lines, as in roads, or in 90 degree right angles as used in laying out towns. Thus Roman roads are straight or cornered in a series of straight sections.
1 The word 'fosse' comes from the Latin word fossa meaning 'ditch'; this may refer to the Roman practice of digging ditches on each side of their roads. 2 Legion II, the Augusta. 3 This site is also known as Hembury. 4 The route passes through Chard; this, however, is a town founded after Roman times by the Saxons and is not mentioned as a town on this route. 5 This was not the place where a particularly fine stone called 'Ham Stone' was quarried; that was a different Ham Hill, 11 miles to the north. 6 The site is also known as West Kingston. 7 Mithras was a popular god who was believed to have been born of a virgin on 25 December. 8 A hypocaust is a type of Roman underfloor heating. 9 This tribe were for many years thought to be called the Coritani, leading to the name Ratae Coritanorum appearing in many references. 10 A vexillation was a company of troops under a company commander known as a vexillum. 11 Legion XIV - Gemina Martia Victrix. 12 The site is also known as Castle Hill. 13 The site is also known as Thorpe by Newark. 14 Legion IX, the Hispania. 15 A pace being the distance marched between two placings of the same foot. A Roman mile works out at about 1,500m, slightly smaller than a modern British mile.
|
Exeter
|
After which film star is the airport in Orange County, California named?
|
Fosse Way | Roman road, England, United Kingdom | Britannica.com
Roman road, England, United Kingdom
Written By:
London Underground
Fosse Way, major Roman road that traversed Britain from southwest to northeast. It ran from the mouth of the River Axe in Devon by Axminster and Ilchester (Lindinae) to Bath (Aquae Sulis) and Cirencester , thence straight for 60 miles (100 km) to High Cross (Venonae), where it intersected Watling Street , and on to Leicester (Ratae). After crossing the River Trent near Newark , it reached Ermine Street south of Lincoln (Lindum). It was probably laid as a military road along the temporary frontier reached in the Roman conquest before ad 47.
Fosse Way, near Brinklow, Warwickshire, England.
Snowmanradio
in United Kingdom: The conquest
By the year 47, when Plautius was succeeded as commanding officer by Ostorius Scapula, a frontier had been established from Exeter to the Humber, based on the road known as the Fosse Way; from this fact it appears that Claudius did not plan the annexation of the whole island but only of the arable southeast. The intransigence of the tribes of Wales, spurred on by Caratacus, however, caused...
in Cirencester
Cirencester occupies the site of the Romano-British town Corinium, capital of the Dobuni tribe, at the junction of the important Roman and British roads known as Fosse Way, Ermine Street, and Akeman Street. The walls enclosed a town of 240 acres (100 hectares), and remains of a basilica, an amphitheatre, and many rich villas have been discovered. The town was the largest in Roman Britain after...
2 References found in Britannica Articles
Assorted References
significance in British history (in United Kingdom: The conquest )
External Links
Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback.
MEDIA FOR:
You have successfully emailed this.
Error when sending the email. Try again later.
Edit Mode
Roman road, England, United Kingdom
Tips for Editing
Submit
Tips For Editing
We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.
Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience.
You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.
Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources.
At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.)
Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions.
Submit
Thank You for Your Contribution!
Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article.
Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed.
Uh Oh
There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later.
Close
Date Published: May 19, 2008
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fosse-Way
Access Date: January 20, 2017
Share
|
i don't know
|
In which Irish city can one stroll along the Mardyke Wall, between the north and south channels of the River Lee?
|
Cork, Ireland
World Facts Index > Ireland > Cork
Cork's claim of being Ireland's 'real capital' is supported by culture, class, and history, yet the city effortlessly holds onto its country town charm. The second largest city in the Irish Republic, Cork is modern, lively, and attractive, with lots to offer the short- or long-term visitor. The centre of Cork is located on an island between two channels of the Lee River.
City Centre
Patrick's Street runs through the heart of the city. It offers a host of shopping opportunities and boasts some of Europe's largest retail chains. Oliver Plunkett Street, which runs partly parallel to Patrick's Street, bustles with smaller shops, life and colour. Second-hand books, hand-made chocolates, an infinite array of surprises can be found in the alley-ways and lanes around this central shopping district. Heading west, one comes to the English Market, the culinary heart of Cork, boasting a huge array of fresh local produce, and tantalising international delicacies. Following Patrick's Street eastwards leads to the statue of Father Matthew, much respected founding-father of the Irish Temperance Movement. Tucked off to the left, one finds the Cork Opera House, venue for national and international theatre, opera, and concerts. The Crawford Art Gallery with its impressive collection to suit modern and traditional tastes is to be found here as well. At the other end of Patrick's Street lies the Grand Parade. A visitor might wish to turn left here, past the cheerful greenery of Bishop Lucey Park, and view the impressive Nationalist Monument, or turn right to ramble along the Coal Quay, with its bustling Saturday open-air market, second-hand shops, and enjoy a pint or a coffee in the spacious, gracious Bodega. One block further west lies North Main Street, and the Cork Vision Centre: situated in the historic St Peter's Church, it offers the visitor the opportunity to really get a feel for the city with a magnificent 1:500 scale model of the whole city.
Further south is the Triskel Arts Centre, a vibrant cluster of gallery, theatre, and drinking spaces, with a Sushi Bar thrown in for good measure. Further along this stretch one finds the graceful Tudor-styled Beamish & Crawford Brewery, (Cork also boasts the Murphy's Brewery, and the rich, sweet aroma of brewing stout often wafts through the city). Venturing further west, one leaves the inner centre of the city, past corner-shops, and pubs, and toward the Mardyke Walk. This delightful stretch, which has been an institution amongst locals for over a century, leads directly to Fitzgerald Park, a popular family spot in the Summer, but boasting a beautiful array of well kept flora whatever the season. The Cork Public Museum is situated within the park and offers a wealth of information for those interested in local and national history. Defined by the two channels of the Lee, the city centre of Cork has a beauty of its own, easily and best experienced on foot. A stroll along any of the water-ways can be surprising and rewarding, while the island itself invites the visitor to lose their way, yet easily to find it again.
North of the City
The "North Side" is defined by hills rising up from the river, and toward the city's more hidden charms. Dominating the landscape is St Anne's Church; the lime and sandstone, (two walls built of each), clock tower can be seen from all over the city. For only £2, one can climb the tower to ring the famous Shandon Bells, and savour the spectacular view from the top. Directly below "the bells", is the old Cork Butter Exchange, now home of the intriguing Butter Museum, and the Shandon Craft Centre. The old weighing-house of the Butter Exchange has been transformed into The Firkin Crane Centre, a two stage theatre which is famous for showcasing the best of Irish ballet and contemporary dance. A little further north, one finds the impressive North Cathedral, a triumph of modern design fused with reverent antiquity. Perched on a more western point of the hill, lies the Cork City Gaol; this gloomy nineteenth-century prison welcomes the modern visitor with interesting exhibits and audio-visual displays.
On the eastern end, Patrick's Bridge links the city centre with the charming MacCurtain Street, a busy stretch of road offering everything from antiques to ice-cream. Worth noting on this street is the majestic Everyman Palace, venue for local and touring theatre productions, and the historic Metropole Hotel, head-quarters for the annual Cork Jazz Festival. Once a year the whole street travels, effortlessly, back in time for the Victorian Street Fair.
South of the City
The Gothic grandeur of St Finbarr's Cathedral dominates the horizon of Cork's "South Side". This nineteenth-century, Anglican cathedral is as impressive on the inside as the gargoyle clustered exterior. Legend has it that the golden angel, perched on the cathedral's eastern extreme, will blow her horn to announce the ending of the world. In 1999, her two horns were stolen during construction work; they were returned some days later, to the great relief of locals. Nearby, one finds the ruins of the seventeenth-century Elizabeth Fort, a sombre reminder of the Cromwell era, and the rambling character of Barrack St, as featured in the film Angela's Ashes. The street also offers a number drinking and live-music venues, popular with students of the nearby University College Cork (UCC). The stately college quadrangle is itself worth a visit, while the fascinating collection of Ogham stones (on public display), and the stained-glass windows of the Honan Chapel, make a visit to the campus an enlightening experience.
The eastern end of the South Side is dominated by the City Hall, from the steps of which President John F Kennedy gave a public address in 1963. Perhaps he glanced longingly at the Lobby Bar, just across the road, and famous for nurturing and presenting the best of Irish traditional music. To the other side of the City Hall is the bustling docks area, while further out of town parks and walkways follow the river as far as the quaint and curious Blackrock Castle. Currachs (Irish traditional rowing boats), school-boy eights, and mammoth container ships share this stretch of the Lee, reflecting the tradition and the industry that so define the city.
Beyond the City
Cork also makes an ideal base from which to explore the surrounding area. Busses leave frequently to the famous Blarney Castle. Traditionally, a kissing of the Blarney Stone invests the visitor with the "gift of the gab", though the more reticent guest might prefer a silent stroll in the beautiful surrounding gardens. Cobh (pronounced Cove), is connected by an hourly train to Cork. The Cobh Heritage Centre documents the town's place in history as the departure point for generations of emigrant, commercial and leisure vessels, as well as the last port visited by the ill-fated Titanic. Picturesque, and boasting some of Ireland's finest restaurants, Kinsale is only a short bus-ride from Cork, as is the Jameson Heritage Centre Whiskey Distillery in Midleton. Further afield, the beauties of West County Cork lay just waiting to be discovered.
However long one choses to stay, Cork city is able to repay the visitor's investment with interest. It is easily accessible with airport, rail, and bus stations, and offers a fine, as well as reasonable range of hotels, restaurants, pubs and clubs. For history, charm, and culture, 'the real capital' is a perfect, compact option.
History of Cork
Pre AD.820
It is possible that Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer, makes the first recorded reference to the district now occupied by Cork City. In AD.150, he mentions a town 'Ivuernis', and would have got the information from Mediterranean ship masters; some believe this to be the first reference to the modern city. In the seventh century the famous monastic settlement associated with St. Finbarr was established. This was in some ways a golden age in Cork City's history and for 250 years the Abbey thrived. Dignitaries and scholars from all over Europe came here to learn in what was a setting of overwhelming peace. But as in the Garden of Eden, paradise would not last long. The site of the settlement stretched from the present St.Fin Barre's Cathedral to the present site of University College Cork. It is thought, however, that the modern city developed not from here but from the putative Viking settlement built on the low ground between the present South Gate and Griffith (North Gate) bridges.
820-1166
This second phase begins with the invasion of the Vikings in about 820. These newcomers are also referred to as Danes and Norsemen. It is believed they traded in cloth, corn, honey, furs, hides, fish and slaves, mainly with their home countries in Scandinavia and with other settlements established by them in England, the Hebrides, the Orkney Islands, Normandy, Iceland and Russia. After their defeat at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Norse survivors continued to live in the separate communities they had established in Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford. They and their descendants became known as Ostmen from this time on.
1176-1660
1776 marks the beginning of the Anglo-Norman occupation. Henry II divided most of Munster among two of his men. He retained the 'City of Cork' and the 'Cantred of the Ostmen' for himself, exempting them from the control of his feudal lords. Between 1185 and 1189, Prince John as Lord of Ireland, made Cork City a corporate town endowed with powers of self-government. These powers have been maintained to the present day. A wall was built up around the perimeter of the city, it remained for 500 years after the Norman occupation. It is possible by investigating a list of levies dating from 1284 to deduce what commodities were being traded at this time. They included wine, honey, timber, hides, skins, wool, silk cloth ,wax, live ox, cow, horse, mare and pig as well as many vegetables. Coins were minted in Cork in 1295 and 1304 under royal authority and the city built a thriving trade with many English ports including Bristol, Fowey, Padstow, Ilfracombe, Exeter and Weymouth and other unspecified towns on the southern British coastline. There is little information on trade between Cork and Europe though there are some references to trade with France, the import being wine.
Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were two notable denizens of Cork City during the 16th century. Raleigh lived in the suburb now known as Tivoli, where cedars said to have been planted by him still stand. It was from here that he wrote some of his most memorable love letters to Queen Elizabeth I. A somewhat remarkable state of affairs, since he was a youthful twenty five and she was presumed to be a maiden and had just reached seventy. Cork was his headquarters in a long series of military services against the MacCarthys, the Desmonds, the Roches and the Barrys. The poet Spenser was sheriff of Cork in 1597 and it is said that he wrote part of the 'Faerie Queen', in a lane off North Main Street.
As the 16th century came to an end Cork's citizens incurred the wrath of their rulers for trading in munitions and firearms with the French. These weapons were then being bartered with the Irish 'rebels' in return for cattle and hides. One significant commercial development from this time was the export trade in beef preserved by salting and packed in barrels. Cork was to achieve pre-eminence on an international scale during the next two centuries in this branch of commerce.
At the start of the 17th century living conditions in Cork amounted almost to destitution. The defeat of the Irish at Kinsale in 1601 meant that the Crown's authority in Ireland was absolute and colonial outposts such as Cork were no longer needed. The insurrection of 1641 had further disastrous consequences for Cork's inhabitants. In 1664, many were expelled and forced to surrender their possessions and property. Some were allowed return in 1648 but another general expulsion took place in 1649 under Cromwell.
To get an idea of the appearance of the city at around this time: it was described by Camden in 1586 as 'of oval shape, surrounded by walls and encompassed and intersected by the river, and accessible only by rivers'. It had only one straight street (now known as North Main and South Main Streets), about 690 yards long. The city was, on average, about 240 yards wide. East and West of the walls were waterways and marches. As such, most of the modern city is built on reclaimed land. Up to the 1700s, Cork was a series of waterways. Patrick Street, currently Cork's busiest shopping street, follows the course of a once navigable channel with quays on either side along which ships sailed to the city.
The population in 1659 of the city proper was recorded as being 1,089, and of these 409 were classified as Irish. By this time erection of houses had begun outside the city, and the population of the 'Liberties' was 4,826, of which 3,219 were Irish. These 'Liberties' were added to the City following a charter of James I naming the entire area the 'County of the City of Cork'.
1660-
Cromwell's reign of terror came to an end in 1660 with the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne. Throughout the country, recovery from the depredations of the Cromwellian regime was quite swift. By 1960 over 183,000 cattle had been exported to England. Following an outcry from British breeders, Parliament passed the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1666. The first prohibited the import of cattle from Ireland into England from 1 July to 20 December each year and the second prohibited absolutely the import of cattle, sheep, swine, bacon and pork into England from Ireland. Ironically, as a result of the embargo Irish trade began to flourish, firstly with mainland Europe and then with North America and the West Indies. This export trade developed in Kinsale but grew to such proportions that the harbour could not adequately accommodate the calling ships. The trade shifted to Cork with its safe sheltered harbour. In 1688 10,000 cattle were slaughtered in Cork, and the city had become a recognised port-of-call for transatlantic shipping going westward and supplies of butter, beef, pork, could be loaded on vessels as provisions for their crews.
This increase in business saw the city's first bank, Hoares, open in 1680. Huguenots, escaping religious persecution in France, settled in Cork shortly after 1685. These refugees set up woollen mills and they were also expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. Their contribution to the development of Cork City has been acknowledged with part of the modern city named the Huguenot Quarter. Despite the Williamite siege of 1690 resulting in the destruction of the city's wall, economically Cork continued to flourish. By 1750 the number of cattle being slaughtered annually exceeded 100,000. Another important event at this time was the establishment of the Cork Butter Market. In 1769, finding that the butter trade was in decline, merchants appointed officials to inspect and brand the butter, thus guaranteeing its quality. The Market and the Committee of Merchants had a great deal of influence on the commercial life of the city for the next century and a half. The building in which the business was conducted was situated near the Church of St. Anne, Shandon, and is still open for visitors today.
The Sirius, the first ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean westwards under steam power left Cork for New York on April 3, 1838. This momentous event was celebrated on both sides of the ocean, and signalled the beginning of a new era. The Atlantic could now be crossed in a much shorter time, and the duration of the voyage was a lot easier to estimate. This event also initiated a decline in the Cork beef trade that had flourished for so long. This new technology meant that the demand for salted meat was greatly diminished; there was no need for food to last for the months, maybe years that it took a sailing ship to complete long voyages. Other factors, such as advances in mechanical refrigeration also contributed to the decline. Cork did not really develop or share to any great extent in the industrial revolution of the late 1700s and early 1800s when industrial towns developed all over England and Europe. It's character hasn't altered considerably in the 20th century either, in that it remains commercial and residential rather than industrial.
Cork Library was founded in 1792 and in 1803 Rev. Thomas Dix Hincks was instrumental in setting up the Royal Cork Institution. A keen educationalist, he published many pamphlets on educational and religious subjects. In 1816 the Cork Philosophical and literary Society came into being, the precursor of the still-thriving Cork literary and Scientific Society. There were also many small literary clubs in the city, perhaps the most notable being 'The Anchorites'. Among the members or 'Anchorites' were J.J.Callanan who was one of the first to give adequate translations of Gaelic poems, and Wm. Maginn who founded 'Frasers Magazine' in London in 1830. This, the forerunner of 'Punch', became the leading English monthly. Maginn had many Cork men in his circle, included was Thomas Croker whose 'The Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland' ran into several editions and was translated into German by the brothers Grimm. This literary tradition has been maintained into the 20th and 21st centuries by writers like Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, and Patrick Galvin.
In the ten years after the Famine the city's population rose by 6% as destitute peasants streamed into the Marsh and Main Street areas. Slums sprouted in these places as the poor replaced the middle classes who moved out to the new suburbs of Montenotte and Tivoli. Between 1851 and 1891 the county's population fell by over 200,000 - a figure higher than the city's current population. This depletion of people contributed to the region's industrial decline. The last city slum was only cleared in 1968, as the corporation gradually erected housing for the poor beginning with Madden's Buildings in Blackpool. Public transport in the shape of railways and electric trams helped to extend the city's boundaries in all directions, particularly towards Glanmire, Blackrock and Douglas. The 1880s was a period of great rural instability with impoverished families being evicted in their thousands and the agitators committing vicious reprisals on extortionist Landlords and their agents. Eventually a leader emerged who inspired all of the Nationalist movements to work together in a peaceful pragmatic way -- his name was Charles Stewart Parnell.
Parnell was elected MP for Cork in 1880. There was a growing awareness amongst the urban, English-speaking populace of their cultural distinction from Britain. Parnell's Nationalist Party made significant progress towards achieving its goal of Home Rule for Ireland, but Parnell's own career was cut short by the famous Kitty O'Shea crisis and the fragmentation of the Nationalist movement began again.
When it appeared that Home Rule would be achieved, Unionists in Ulster formed a militia called the Ulster Volunteers to fight anyone who might try and coerce them into a democratic self-governed Ireland dominated by a Catholic majority. Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Fein as a monarchist party which envisaged a future for Ireland whereby an Irish parliament would have more power than mere Home Rule but would retain the British monarch as head of state.
The policies of Sinn Fein changed radically when men like Padraig Pearse joined, young members who wanted nothing less than an independent self-sufficient Gaelic state. It remained a fringe movement until after the 1916 rising when many of its members were executed by the British authorities. After the executions the dead leaders became National martyrs compared to the likes of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. In the general election of 1918, of 45,000 votes cast in Cork over 40,000 were for the two Sinn Fein candidates James Joseph Walsh and Liam de Roiste. The Sinn Fein MPs resolved to abstain from Westminster and instead form an Irish Parliament with its own government in Dublin. Violence ensued, and two murders in 1920 were a foreboding of even worse atrocities. In Cork the Lord Mayor Tomas MacCurtain was shot dead at home in Blackpool in front of his wife by a party of armed men, their faces blackened. Later, policemen arrived and tore the house apart in search of arms.
Tomas MacCurtain had been elected Lord Mayor the previous January when Sinn Fein won control of the city council in the municipal and urban elections. As well as being Lord Mayor, MacCurtain was also Commandant of the Mid-Cork Brigade of the IRA. The official police story was that MacCurtain had been killed by his own side, but the coroner's jury gave a different verdict. They found that he had been murdered by the Royal Irish Constabulary, officially directed by the British Government. MacCurtain's deputy Terence MacSwiney was made Mayor -- also a Commandant in the IRA he was arrested on August 20th 1920 by the crown forces for being in possession of a police cipher and two documents 'likely to cause offence to his Majesty'. He went on hunger strike in protest at the continuing arrest of democratically elected public representatives. MacSwiney was then transported to Brixton Gaol, where his hunger strike attracted world-wide attention. 300,000 Brazilian Catholics petitioned the Pope to intervene on his behalf. British newspapers and King George V pleaded for his release, but the Prime Minister Lloyd George refused.
MacSwiney's death was preceded by that of Michael Fitzgerald, one of the Cork Prison Ten. A few hours after MacSwiney a second of the Cork ten died, at which time the hunger strike was ended at the request of Arthur Griffith. MacSwiney had died after 74 days, and the day of his funeral was declared a national day of mourning by the Dail.
Less than two months after his death Cork was destroyed by the Black and Tans. The Black and Tans were a special force made up of young unemployed soldiers, who were stationed in Ireland to reinforce the police. On December 11th 1920, following an ambush by the IRA that resulted in the death of an English officer, the Black and Tans began burning the city. It began with two houses at Dillon's Cross being set alight and soon spread to the centre of town. Firemen had their horses slashed by the Auxiliaries, who refused to let the flames be fought. The Black and Tans got drunk and began to loot the city, some burnt down the City Hall and city library. Patrick Street was a wasteland, 21 shops were completely destroyed and another 44 were burned to the ground. The total damage was estimated to be £3,000,000. In Westminster, Cabinet Minister Sir Hammond Greenwood denied the fire was started by the police or their affiliates and suggested it was the people of Cork that had burned and looted. Soon later a British Labour Party Commision sent to the city to investigate the burning were arrested by Auxiliaries and threatened with shooting. The war soon ended as pressure mounted on Lloyd George; he eventually agreed to meet a Sinn Fein delegation and a Treaty was signed. Since independence, Cork has been a city renowned for the tolerance of its citizens, a city where people live in peace and mutual respect.
The Weather
|
Cork
|
Which American poet, translator and critic born in 1885 was indicted for treason for making Fascist radio broadcasts during World War Two?
|
Lifelong Learning Festival 2015 brochure by Cork City Learning Forum - issuu
issuu
anfhoghlama Chorc Féile Bu aí
Monday March 23rd to Sunday March 29th www.corkcity.ie/learningfestival • Tel 021 492 4527
FREE PROGRAMME
Monday March 23rd to Sunday March 29th www.corkcity.ie/learningfestival • Tel 021 492 4527
Welcome to the 12h Cork Lifelong Learning Festival.
Fáilte chuig an 12ú Féile Foghlamtha Feadh an tSaoil Chorcaí
The festival offers a great variety of events across the city, all free, and all highlighting and celebrating the hundreds of opportunities there are for learning, whatever your age, interest or ability.
Cuireann an fhéile réimse leathan imeachtaí ar fáil fud fad na cathrach, iad uile saor in aisce agus ag leagan béime agus ag déanamh ceiliúrtha ar na céadta deiseanna atá ann don fhoghlaim, beag beann ar d’aois, d’ábhar suime nó do chumas.
As well as its partnership with Féile an Phobail in Belfast & with the Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival, our festival is reaching out internationally.
Mar aon lena chomhpháirtíocht le Féile an Phobail i mBéal Feirste agus le Féile Foghlamtha Feadh an tSaoil Luimní, tá ár bhféile ag cothú naisc go hidirnáisiúnta.
In April last year Cork City Council voted to adopt the UNESCO Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities: Lifelong Learning for All: Promoting Inclusion, Prosperity and Sustainability in Cities - the first and, so far, the only city authority in Ireland to do so. Since then, Cork has been chosen by UNESCO as one of only three in Europe, and 15 worldwide, to be used as a case study for its new Global Network of Learning Cities. This happened because of Cork’s Lifelong Learning Festival - the first in Ireland, and the only one of its kind in Europe.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
We will be welcoming Raul Valdes Cotera, Director of the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning (UIL), to Cork for an event on Tuesday March 24, where he will be joined by other guests from overseas. They will hear from local representatives about a range of initiatives across Cork in Learning, Health, Environment, Economic Development & Social Inclusion which have contributed to its selection by UNESCO.
Developing Cork as a learning city is aimed at improving the lives of our citizens, by reducing inequality and social exclusion. It is also about encouraging investment into the city and its region, and therefore increasing employment. The festival could not happen without the support of the event organisers and generous sponsors, supported by a huge voluntary effort.
2
I mí Aibreáin anuraidh, vótáil Comhairle Chathair Chorcaí glacadh le Dearbhú Bhéising UNESCO um Thógáil Cathracha Foghlamtha: Foghlaim Feadh an tSaoil don Uile Dhuine: Cur Chun Cinn an Chuimsithe, an Rathúnais agus na hInbhuanaitheachta i gCathracha – an chéad údarás cathrach in Éirinn a rinne é seo, agus, go dtí seo, an chéad cheann san Eoraip. Ó shin, tá Corcaigh roghnaithe ag UNESCO mar cheann de thrí san Eoraip, agus 15 ar fud na cruinne, chun bheith páirteach i staidéar cáis ar mhaithe lena Ghréasán Domhanda um Chathracha Foghlamtha nua. Tharla sé seo mar thoradh ar Fhéile Foghlamtha Feadh an tSaoil Chorcaí- an chéad cheann in Éirinn, agus an t-aon cheann dá leithéid san Eoraip. Beimid ag cur fáilte roimh Raul Valdes Cotera, Stiúrthóir Institiúid UNESCO um Fhoghlaim Feadh an tSaoil (UIL), go Corcaigh le haghaidh imeachta ar an Mháirt, 24 Márta, agus aíonna eile ó thar lear ina theannta. Cloisfidh siad ó ionadaithe áitiúla faoi réimse tionscnamh i gCorcaigh atá bainteach leis an Fhoghlaim, an Comhshaol, an Fhorbairt Eacnamaíoch agus an Cuimsiú Sóisialta, tionscnaimh a chabhraigh le roghnú na cathrach ag UNESCO. Tá forbairt Chorcaí mar chathair fhoghlamtha dírithe ar shaol ár saoránach a fheabhsú, trí éagothroime agus eisiamh sóisialta a laghdú. Tá sí ag iarraidh freisin infheistiú a mhealladh isteach sa chathair agus a réigiún, agus cur le fostaíocht dá bharr sin. Ní fhéadfadh féile mar seo tarlú gan tacaíocht ó lucht eagraithe agus ó urraithe flaithiúla an imeachta, agus sár-iarracht dheonach ag tacú leo.
On behalf of the people of Cork, I wish to formally acknowledge the contribution made by every Thar cheann mhuintir Chorcaí, ba mhaith liom single person, every group and every organisation, aitheantas a thabhairt don saothar atá déanta ag year after year. gach uile dhuine, grúpa agus eagraíocht, bliain i ndiaidh bliana. Cllr Mary Shields Lord Mayor of Cork, Festival Patron An Comhairleoir Mary Shields Ard Mhéara Chorcaí, Éarlamh na Féile
A chairde,
A chairde,
It is with great pleasure and pride that I welcome you to this year’s Lifelong Learning Festival in Cork. It is the 12th since it began, and, as we have come to realise, this is a unique event, one that has captured the imagination of people both in the city and beyond and continues to grow and develop.
Is le pléisiúr agus bród a chuirim fáilte romhaibh chuig Féile Foghlamtha Feadh an tSaoil na bliana seo i gCorcaigh. Seo an 12ú féile ó thosaigh sí. Mar a thuigimid níos fearr anois, imeacht uathúil atá anseo, ceann atá dulta i bhfeidhm ar shamhlaíocht na ndaoine, sa chathair féin agus níos faide i gcéin. Leanann sí ag fás agus ag forbairt.
The recognition that the festival has gained for the city from international organisations including UNESCO and PASCAL is a particular source of pride, and we welcome honoured guests from these organisations to Cork again this year. Such recognition improves the prospects of our city to compete in a global economy and as a result to improve the employment and education opportunities for all our citizens and in particular our young people. In reflecting on these achievements it is important to acknowledge the role of Cork City Council, lead partners with the Cork ETB in the establishment and delivery of the festival since the outset. The festival is an expression of the commitment to becoming a Learning City. This has taken many forms over the years but can trace its origins to the City Development Plan of 2002, and in the past year included the formal adoption by Cork City Council of the UNESCO Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities – the first Irish city to do so. The festival has always prided itself on being inclusive, giving everyone involved in all forms of learning in the city the opportunity to celebrate and to showcase their activities, and to encourage others to take part and go further in their learning. I commend the festival for its focus on including those who may find themselves disconnected from learning and to encourage the continuation of efforts to do so – in particular through the Community Education Networks.
Tá an t-aitheantas atá bainte amach ag an bhféile ó eagraíochtaí idirnáisiúnta, UNESCO agus PASCAL san áireamh, mar chúis ar leith bróid, agus cuirimid fáilte arís i mbliana roimh aíonna clúiteacha ó na heagraíochtaí seo. Cabhraíonn aitheantas mar seo le hionchas ár gcathair dul san iomaíocht sa gheilleagar domhanda, agus, mar thoradh air sin, na deiseanna fostaíochta agus oideachais a fheabhsú d’ár saoránaigh uile, agus ár ndaoine óga, go háirithe. Agus muid ag déanamh machnaimh ar na héachtaí seo, ní mór ról Chomhairle Chathair Chorcaí a aithint, agus í mar chomhpháirtí tosaigh ón tús in éineacht le Bord Oiliúna agus Oideachais (ETB) Chorcaí i bhforbairt agus seachadadh na féile seo. Tá an fhéile mar léiriú ar an tiomantas Cathair Fhoghlamtha a bhaint amach. Tá sé seo léirithe i mbealaí éagsúla thar na blianta, ach is féidir a bhunús a lorg i bPlean Forbartha na Cathrach in 2002. Anuraidh, léiríodh é nuair a ghlac Comhairle Chathair Chorcaí go foirmiúil le Dearbhú Bhéising UNESCO um Thógáil Cathracha Foghlamtha- an chéad chathair Éireannach a rinne amhlaidh. Tá an cuimsiú ina chúis bhróid i gcónaí ag an bhféile, agus í ag cur deiseanna ar fáil do gach éinne sa chathair atá páirteach san fhoghlaim a ngníomhaíochtaí agus a éachtaí a cheiliúradh agus a léiriú, agus daoine eile a spreagadh chun páirt a ghlacadh agus cur lena bhfoghlaim. Molaim an fhéile as díriú orthusan atá dínasctha ón bhfoghlaim, agus molaim go leanfaí leis na hiarrachtaí seo - go háirithe trí na Gréasáin Oideachais Pobail.
We hope the festival will continue to encourage people of all ages to investigate the many opportunities available to them to make learning an integrated part of their everyday lives.
Tá súil againn go leanfaidh an fhéile ag spreagadh daoine ó gach aoisghrúpa scrúdú a dhéanamh ar an iliomad deiseanna atá ar fáil dóibh an fhoghlaim a chur isteach mar bhun chuid ina saol laethúil.
I want to thank the organising committee, in particular Willie McAuliffe, a founder member of the festival committee and chair since 2007, and all the people from the voluntary, community, state and private sectors who contribute to the ongoing success of the festival in so many ways.
Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an gcoiste eagraithe, go háirithe Willie McAuliffe, ball bunaidh de choiste na féile agus é mar chathaoirleach air ó 2007. Gabhaim buíochas freisin leis na daoine uile ó na hearnálacha deonach, pobail, stáit agus príobháideach a chabhraíonn i mórán slite le rath leanúnach na féile. Comhghairdeas.
Comhghairdeachas.
Ted Owens CEO, Cork Education & Training Board, and Chair of Cork City Learning Forum
Ted Owens Príomh Fheidhmeannach, Bord Oideachais agus Oiliúna Chorcaí agus Cathaoirleach Fhóram Foghlamtha Chathair Chorcaí
3
The festival promotes and celebrates learning in all its forms and encourages take up among all age groups, particularly those who may not usually participate in learning. Déanann an Fhéile seo foghlaim i ngach cruth a chothú agus a cheiliúradh agus spreagann sé rannpháirtíocht i ngach aoisghrúpa, go mór mhór iad san nach nglacann páirt go h-iondúil i ndeiseanna foghlaime
max
30
MAX symbol Maximum number indicated where spaces limited. Events listed by starting time. l Use the prefix 021 if phoning from outside the Cork area.
Get connected with Cork Lifelong Learning Festival online! Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Follow us on Twitter – www.twitter.com/learning_fest Like us on Facebook – www.facebook.com/corklifelongfestival Special thanks to Christine Nolan, Access Office, CIT, for managing the festival’s Social Media & providing other supports.
All details correct at time of going to press. The organisers cannot accept any responsibility for losses incurred due to cancellation or alteration of events. A contact phone number or email appears with each event to allow you to check or to book if requested to do so. You can also use it after the festival to enquire about learning opportunities year round.
4
A MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRPERSON Cork Lifelong Learning Festival started 12 years ago with humble beginnings with about 60 events taking place across the city over a two day period. Now over 500 events throughout the week will showcase examples of learning in a city that prides itself on voluntary effort. The fact that all events are free reflects the willingness of participants to share their passion for learning in all its forms. I would like to thank those organisations, community groups, schools and colleges who have supported the Festival over the years and hope they have gained from partaking in the festival as much as the organising committee have in co-ordinating events. I would also like to thank Tina Neylon who has been a dedicated and hard-working Co-ordinator since its inception. Cork is just one of three cities in Europe to form part of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities. This is a very exciting time for integration and strategic planning of learning in Cork. Cork has also been a member of PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE) since 2011, joining other learning cities world-wide, the first Irish city to do so. The Festival has managed to keep costs at a low base. However, the continued support of faithful sponsors has enabled the organising committee to deliver a quality festival for the people of Cork. I would also like to express my gratitude to the voluntary committee, drawn from all areas of learning in the city, who give of their time to regularly meet and organise each Festival despite busy schedules of their own. It is this spirit which manifests itself in the Festival, a spirit of passion, and willingness to share wonderful learning opportunities in Cork. Investigate, Participate and Celebrate learning throughout this year’s festival. William McAuliffe is Chairperson of the Festival Organising Committee & Co-chair with Pat Ledwidge, the Director of Strategic Planning & Economic Development at Cork City Council, of the recently established Steering Group, set up to advance the UNESCO Declaration on Building Learning Cities.
One Book One Community One Book, One Community is a Family Reading Project which promotes & encourages reading in DEIS schools in Cork City. Now in its sixth year, it involves over 1,500 families, with parents reading the chosen book along with their children. Activities associated with the book are organised by the Home/School/Community Liaison Co-ordinators (HSCL) & teachers in the schools & parents and the local community are encouraged to participate in them. Copies of the book chosen are bought by the HSCL Co-ordinators and distributed free to the children to take home to read with their families. Look out this week for activities organised as part of the One Book, One Community Initiative.
This year the books are: In Farranree: Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne – the theme is World War I. In Shandon/Cathedral/Blackpool: 2000 Leagues Under the Sea by French author Jules Verne. The book has great historic links to the North Mon. Clareman James Holland, the inventor of Verne’s nautical vessel, the submarine, was a brother at the school where he developed early prototypes. In Knocknaheeny/Hollyhill: Gangsta Granny by David Walliams, best known for Little Britain & Britain’s Got Talent. In Mayfield Irish Authors, One Community is this year’s theme, and the books read: Wilderness by Roddy Doyle, The Ark of Dun Ruah by Maire Burke, City of Fate by Nicola Pierce and Alice & Megan Forever by Judi Curtin.
5
Monday March 23 To Friday March 27
max
15
BUILDSKILLS WORKSHOPS FOR SCHOOLS & LEARNING GROUPS During the festival CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory (CIT BCO) in collaboration with Qualcomm is offering second level students in Cork City DEIS schools and learning groups in Cork City RAPID communities an opportunity to learn new engineering, physics, and electronics skills. Workshops can be booked between 9am – 5pm.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
BuildSkills is a two hour workshop where participants between the ages of 15 and 17 learn the skills required to build their own electronic circuit demonstrating key physical phenomena. During the workshop skilled instructors from CIT BCO and Qualcomm guide participants in assembling microcontroller based electronic circuits. This collaboration between Qualcomm & CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory offering free BuildSkills workshops runs for the week of the festival only.
6
Places are limited, so booking is essential. Maximum of 15 participants per workshop. (BuildSkills can be booked outside these times for a fee) CIT BCO can travel to a Cork City learning group or you can book your free BuildSkills workshop to take place at CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory. Contact: CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory Tel: 432 6120 Email: [email protected] www.bco.ie
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre All day
Curraheen Family Centre Exhibition Painting & Stitching, Arts & Crafts, featuring the work of artists from the Curraheen Family Centre. Display includes paintings in oils & watercolours, framed works of embroidery, tapestry & black work. Until end of March.
Rita Lynch Exhibition The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano. Tel: 492 4950
STUDENT EXHIBITIONS: PERCEPTIONS & INTO THE WOODS Perceptions is an exhibition of current work by Level 6 Art students. It showcases an exciting & original collection of ceramics, prints, paintings & mixed media work.
monday march 23
9am – 5pm Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd
Into the Woods is an exhibition of sculptural pieces, textile illustrations & mixed media work by Art 1 students at CSN. The display is a representation of the symbolism & metaphors in classic fairytales by the Grimm Brothers and others. The Art Department at CSN offers a wide range of FETAC Level 5 and 6 courses in Art & Design for the school leaver & adult learner, to facilitate portfolio preparation or develop new skills for employment. Many students progress to Third Level. Info, Email: [email protected] Both exhibitions continue until Friday.
10am – noon max Main Foyer, Coláiste 10 Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd 9am – 5pm CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory
BUILDSKILLS WORKSHOPS Daily until Friday – see previous pages for details.
POP UP PRINT WORKSHOP The public is invited to make a dry point print in a workshop hosted by Level 6 Print students. A lovely introduction to printmaking, allowing participants to take home an original print. Booking preferred. Contact Debbie Godsell Tel: 206 7641 Email [email protected]
7
Meet at the green on Connaught Avenue, Off Donovan’s Road, near UCC
8
CYCLE SKILLS FOR ADULTS
10am – Noon School of the Divine Child Lavanagh Centre,Ballintemple
MAKING THE MOST OF MULTIMEDIA Welcome to an art exhibition featuring classwork & individual art pieces prepared by students attending the school. It’s a once off exhibition, curated & guided by senior students. Park off site in Ballintemple, or take bus 202. Please do not park in school grounds. Booking necessary, call Pauline Meade Tel: 429 1804 to book your slot. Web: www.lavanagh.ie
For people who can cycle, but want to learn about the safest techniques in traffic & correct bad habits. It includes practising emergency stops, looking behind while keeping a straight line, etc. Takes place on roads with some traffic & covers topics including: positioning yourself on the road, where & when to look; how & when to signal; turning on & off main roads. It’s a shortened version of a course that takes 6 hours, delivered over three sessions. An all weather event (bar extreme weather). You need to bring your own bike (in good working order) & rain gear. Presented by Cork City Council/Cork Cycling Campaign/Cork Community Bikes. Info: [email protected] http://www.corkcyclingcampaign.com Event repeated on Thursday at 1.30pm Booking essential, call Miro Tel: 086 342 7823
Repeated Tuesday 10am
10am – 1pm & 2pm – 4pm Knocknaheeny Community Building Foyle Ave
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
EXHIBITION OF ART, PHOTOS, CRAFTS BY LOCALS Come & see work by talented local people. The display includes photographs, paintings, knitting & crochet, work produced through regular classes & the Community Craft Initiative. Organised by Cork City Partnership Knocknaheeny Outreach Office. Call Noreen O’Regan Tel: 087 196 2026 or Norma Kenny Tel: 439 9503 Continues today from 2pm – 4pm & daily until Friday.
10am – 3pm Mary Ryan Meeting Room,O’Rahilly Building, University College Cork
HOMELESSNESS & SOCIAL EXCLUSION: LESSONS FOR IRELAND This conference will be addressed by international policy & practitioner experts from Denmark, Scotland, England & Ireland. It will focus on key drivers of homelessness & housing exclusion, on the effectiveness of policies - prevention, emergency responses, accommodation and on responses to these drivers. Hosted by the School of Applied Social Studies UCC in association with ACE UCC and Cork ETB under the auspices of EcCoWell. Refreshments & light lunch provided. Please register your interest in attending by email to: [email protected]
8
The Lantern Community Project, 14 George’s Quay (red door)
20
Before 5 Family Centre, Churchfield
LITTLE ONES LEARN ABOUT FARMING
MEDITATION & WELLBEING WORKSHOP Sile O’Conor facilitates an interactive session exploring & experiencing the gift of meditation, leading to peace, harmony & joy of being. The first of a series of events presented by SHEP - the Social & Health Education Project - during the festival. Info from SHEP Tel: 466 6180 Email: [email protected] or the Lantern Project Tel: 086 023 6442 Email: [email protected]
Sandra Schmid visits the Before 5 Family Centre this morning, bringing her placid Clydesdale horse Henry & a lot of vintage farm equipment. Her visit is organised by the Churchfield Gurranabraher Community Education Network. Children attending local childcare facilities will enjoy interacting with Henry & learning about farming practices in the past. To book Sandra Schmid for your organisation, call 087 938 9867
dé luain martá 23
Info on this event, call June Hamill at Before 5 Family Centre 430 3561
Booking essential, places limited, call Geraldine Flanagan Tel: 466 6180
Noon – 1pm
SHEP is an Irish, not-forprofit, community based training & development organisation established more than 40 years ago.
CONVERSATIONAL IRISH
Eason’s Hill Community Centre, Shandon Welcome to a regular meeting where Seamus O Suilleabhain teaches a light hearted, informal class in conversational Irish. Light refreshments. The Centre is next to St Ann’s Shandon. Presented by HSE Health Action Zone. Info Martin Aherne: Tel: 086 787 2372 Email: [email protected] Noon – 3pm Bruac Eile, Good Shepherd Services, Redemption Road
OPEN DAY AT BRUAC EILE 11am – 12.30pm
max
St Luke’s Nursing Home, Castle Rd, Mahon
20
LEARN ABOUT MUSIC DURING WWII A volunteer at St Luke’s, Brian Lenihan (Lt Col ret’d), gives a presentation of music from the World War II era & its context within the period, from both an Allied & Axis perspective. The event would normally be for residents only, but it’s open to the public for the festival. Parking available. Booking necessary, Tel: 435 9444 Email: www.stlukeshome.ie
Minister Simon Coveney officially opens Bruac Eile’s new garden project. Staff & learners show visitors around; work by learners on display; staff available to answer questions & help potential learners fill out application forms. All welcome. Bruac Eile is a training and education unit for female early school leavers who need a supportive environment. It offers QQI (FETAC) modules including Communications, Childcare, Horticulture, Personal Development. An individual learning plan is put in place for each learner, setting goals & targets to meet her needs. Info Charlotte O’Donovan 439 7314 or 085 730 9380 email: codonovan@ gsscork.ie www.goodshepherdservices.ie
9
Family Resource Centre, Mahon
5
TRY MAKING JEWELLERY Come along to a regular class & learn how to make different types of jewellery. If you’re interested in joining, ask. Places limited this morning, booking necessary. Call Maeve or Elsa, Tel: 435 8866 or Email: [email protected]
1pm
2pm – 4pm The Lantern Community Project, 14 George’s Quay (red door)
max
8
CREATE A PAPER SCULPTURE Come to a fun, hands on workshop, making sculptures with paper & card, adding your own creations, painting or decorating them. No skills are needed & all material is provided. Unfortunately the building is not wheelchair accessible. Booking essential by March 20. Call Norma Roche Tel: 086 023 6442 Email: [email protected] Web: www.lanternproject.ie
Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd
OFFICIAL OPENING Official Opening of the exhibitions & events at the college during festival week.All welcome. 1pm – 2pm Foyer, Civic Offices, City Hall
LAUNCH OF ART BY YOUNG TRAVELLERS This Art Programme, organised by the Interagency Traveller Education Group, aims to raise the hopes & ambitions of young travellers. ‘I Dream in Colour’ features work by artist Leanne McDonagh with students from the following schools: Terence McSwiney, North Presentation Secondary, St. Aidan’s and Nagle Community College. Contact Leanne McDonagh at leannemcdonaghart@gmail .com
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
1.30pm Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Off George’s Quay
LUNCHTIME TALK From the Galerie to the Grand Magasin: a brief history of shopping in 19th century Paris, with Niamh Sweeney. All welcome. The first of a series of events here during festival week. Tel: 431 0677 Email: [email protected] Web: www.alliancefrancaisecork.com
SHOP & LEARN 2pm – 4.30pm Merchants Quay Shopping Centre
ALCOHOL INFO POD Come up to the stand & say hello, learn the myths & facts about alcohol, take part in a quiz. Organised by the Cork City Partnership Community Outreach Drug Awareness Project & the TVG Drug & Alcohol Support Project. If you’d like to book the stand for your group, call Mella Magee 087 196 2022 email: [email protected] Returns here Wednesday from 2pm.
10
Room 104, Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, College Road
2pm – 3pm
monday march 23
THE FREE UNIVERSITY: ACE AT UCC PUBLIC LECTURE PROGRAMME
DRAWING THE GEORGE BOOLE 200 TREE George Boole, Father of Computing, is the case study used for this lecture on how to create your family tree. Lorna Moloney, George Boole 200 project genealogist, details the finer points required to research, cross check & to ensure all information is correct as you prepare your own family tree. She provides strategies & useful advice on where to start, how to proceed, using both online sources & traditional searches. Booking essential, call number below. 3pm - 4pm
GEORGE BOOLE: FOOD & DINING IN VICTORIAN CORK Regina Sexton, Food Historian, explores the food & dining cultures of Cork City in the Victorian period as experienced by George Boole. He arrived in Cork in the late 1840s, just after the Great Famine, appointed as the first Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork – now UCC. His observations about the cultural mores of Cork in letters he wrote to his mother & sister, Maryann, provide us with glimpses of the city’s food & culinary culture. These letters together with a number of 19th century manuscript recipe collections from Cork serve as a backdrop to a discussion of culinary practices in the Victorian city. Booking essential, call number below. These are the first in a series of talks showcasing the activities of Adult Continuing Education at UCC with a sample of lectures from Diploma, Certificate & Short Courses, continuing until Thursday. For information email [email protected] www.ucc.ie/en/ study/ace Brookfield Health Sciences Complex is on College Road, just beyond the Bons Secours Hospital & before the Brookfield Leisure Centre. Bus 205 & 208 from city centre. Visitor parking at Perrott’s Avenue & Perrot’s Inch - http://www.ucc.ie/en/build/ commuting/maps/ As places limited, booking essential, call 490 4700
11
2.30pm
max
40 Cork City & County Archives Service, Seamus Murphy Building, 32 Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool LEARN ABOUT CORK’S HISTORY & HERITAGE Daily until Friday during festival week there’s a talk on an aspect of Cork’s local history & heritage by a distinguished scholar or local historian. The first today is Tom Spalding on Architecture & Buildings in Cork during the Great War Period. Booking preferred as places limited. Email: [email protected] Tel: 450 5876 Map on: www.corkarchives.ie/visitus
3pm – 4pm Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Off George’s Quay
BORDEAUX – A VIRTUAL VISIT Resident Bordelais tutor Matthieu Nivard takes you on a virtual guided tour through the highlights, the essential sites, and the curiosities off the beaten track of one of France’s most beautiful cities. Tel: 431 0677 Email [email protected]
3pm University College Cork
GEORGE BOOLE WALKING TOUR OF UCC
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
In 2015 UCC is celebrating the bicentenary of George Boole, forefather of the Information Age & first Professor of Mathematics at the university. Hear Boole explain why he came to Cork, talk about his time here & his impact on not only the university but also on the worldwide scientific community. The tour takes in a visit to the Aula Maxima, the Ogham Stone Corridor, the Honan Chapel & the Crawford Observatory. The tour is in English and lasts approximately 75 minutes. Tour runs all year, offered free during the festival. Meet at Visitors’ Centre, Main Quad. No need to book. Tel: 490 1876 Email: [email protected] Repeated daily until Friday at same time & at noon on Saturday.
12
Family Resource Centre, Mahon
5
LEARN TO MAKE JEWELLERY Join the regular class here & learn how to make different types of jewellery. Afterwards, if you wish to join the class, you may – subject to places. Parking available. Booking essential – call Maeve or Elsa, Tel: 435 8866 or Email: [email protected]
The Spanish Studies Centre, 19 St Patrick’s Hill
LEARN A LITTLE PORTUGUESE Join a class for beginners in Portuguese and also learn a little about the culture of Portugal. The Spanish Studies Centre Cork offers language courses throughout the year, daytime & evenings; part-time & intensive courses for adults, Junior/ Leaving Cert & Third Level, kids’ classes & DELE Exam preparation. As well as Spanish & Portuguese it also offers courses in Chinese, Russian & English. Classes are delivered by native, qualified teachers in a convivial atmosphere, ensuring students make progress quickly & easily.
6pm – 7pm The Music Room, Camden Palace Hotel, Community Arts Centre, Camden Quay
TRY A BRAZILIAN PERCUSSION CLASS
dé luain martá 23
5pm – 6.30pm
Learn some of the basics of Brazilian Percussion & how instruments intertwine in ensembles such as Bloco Rebeldia, an Afro-Brazilian percussion group based in Cork. They play rhythms from all over Brazil, with their main focus on Maracatu, Coco de Roda, Afoxe & Samba-Reggae. Bloco Rebeldia always welcome new members to learn, play & share their passion. They offer classes here every Monday - no musical experience necessary. Tel: 087 171 2394 Email: [email protected] Taster class repeated on Wednesday at 7pm.
6.30pm – 8pm
TRY A BEGINNER’S CLASS IN SPANISH Experience a class for beginners in Spanish & find out about all the courses available here.
7pm – 8pm
Booking advised for both classes, call Rosario Gomez Mendes, Tel: 086 311 1193 or Email: [email protected] Web: www.spanishstudiescentrecork.com
AN INTRODUCTION TO CAPOEIRA
The Dance Studio, Camden Palace Hotel
Try a different & fun way to get fit & learn mastery over your body. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian artform combining music, dance, acrobatics & martial arts. It was developed by the African slaves in Brazil. At this taster class you’ll be introduced to the music & learn some of the basic movements. Capoeira Camará Cork holds classes every Tuesday & Thursday at Flava Floors Hip-Hop Studio. Beginners at different fitness levels always welcome. Tel: 087 171 2394 Email: [email protected] Taster class repeated here on Wednesday at 6pm.
13
monday march 23
Cork College of Commerce, Morrison’s Island 7pm – 8pm 5pm – 6pm
EVENTS MADE EASY Get some tips on what it takes to run a successful event. David Tyrrell highlights the key issues that need to be addressed when organising any type of event. They include tips on how to plan, market, produce & evaluate a successful event. Organised specially for the festival.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING In this practical class, you will be given a hands-on introduction to programming, using VB.NET. As places limited, you must book by calling the number below. MAX 15
5pm – 6pm
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO PUBLIC RELATIONS
TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING AUTISM
Topics covered include an introduction to PR; the different types of PR programmes; the key decisions that PR practitioners make when creating plans; the most common tools used; and the importance of measuring results.
Helen Carey, teacher of Special Needs Assisting & Course Director of Level 6 in Childcare in the college, leads a discussion on developing an understanding of children with Autism.
max
7pm – 8.30pm 16 5pm – 6.30pm
LEARN ABOUT PHOTOSHOP CS Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
John Quinlan, who teaches in the college, gives an overview of Photoshop CS, explaining the document window & file browser interface. He shows how to work with images – resizing, cropping, rotating, retouching & repairing, as well as working with layers, selections and applying filters. Limited places, book by calling number below.
6pm – 7pm
INTERNET SAFETY
Parents, teachers & guardians are invited to an illustrated talk on Internet Safety, including online dangers, including cyber-bullying; simple & practical advice & safety tips; the Internet is not all bad - and who is Trend Micro? Plenty of time for questions. Volunteers from Trend Micro regularly give presentations in primary schools around Cork, as a way of giving back to the community. All welcome, no need to book.
SPRINGCLEAN YOUR FINANCES As Easter approaches it’s an ideal time to do some spring-cleaning of your finances. Find out the basics of budgeting & how to use your computer to get the best value out there, whether you are looking for insurance or electricity.
14
Tel: 422 2100 Email: [email protected] Web:www.corkcollegeofcommerce.ie
Alexander Technique Studio, The Lough
max
7pm – 8pm Canon Horgan Youth Centre, Ballinlough Rd
LEARN ABOUT THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE
KARATE KIDS: TRY A FREE CLASS
Are you creating your own tension? Join this regular Monday class where Véronique Druesne, Alexander Teacher, shows you how to sit, stand & move in a more co-ordinated & balanced way. Relieving some of day-to-day tension can free movement & improve posture & wellbeing. Booking essential as places limited. Call Véronique,
Children aged 5+ can join the regular class here & try Karate. Founded by Sensei Barry O'Regan (6th DAN JKA) the Rising Sun School of Karate helps children & adults learn the ancient art in a safe & nurturing environment. Building fitness levels and agility, Karate also gives children increased self-confidence & teaches them discipline while having fun. With regular gradings students gain a sense of achievement as they move from each level to the next on their way to the much coveted Black Belt. Free parking. The Youth Centre is next to the Tennis Club. Info Barry,
Tel: 087 976 1668 Email: [email protected] Web: www.alextechstudio.com
7pm Aula Maxima, University College Cork
PUBLIC SEMINAR ON GEORGE BOOLE Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr Mary Shields, Festival Patron, is special guest at this event about George Boole, whose life is being celebrated by UCC this year. He was a man who, against the odds, achieved great things which we all benefit from today. The event is introduced by Patrick Fitzpatrick, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, UCC, speaking about George Boole’s legacy in computing & in software & hardware. Olivia Frawley, Genealogy Project Manager for the George Boole 200 programme, delves into his remarkable life, providing a fascinating insight into his family’s accomplishments. This seminar is for anyone who likes to hear a good story about a complex man. Info Olivia Frawley, Tel: 490 3785 or 086 8318 218 Email: [email protected] Booking recommended by email [email protected] Parking available at Perrott’s Inch & Perrott’s Avenue.
monday march 23
7pm – 8pm
Tel: 086 722 2779 Email: [email protected] Web: www.risingsun.ie See free classes in different locations Tuesday to Friday this week.
7pm – 9pm Mahon Youth Centre, The Portacabins, Mahon Drive
OPEN ART STUDIO Members of Mahon Men’s Art Group open their studio & invite you to see a display of their work, and to find out about their activities, including their mural painting in Cork & Belfast. All welcome. Info Mahon CDP Tel: 435 9070 Repeated Tues, Wed & Thurs.
7.30pm Turner’s Cross Community Centre
GROWING UP IN THE MARSH Local historian Liam O hUigín gives an account of growing up in the Marsh Area of Cork in the 1940s, 50s & 60s. All welcome. Parking may be available. Check Facebook/ Twitter page (TurnersCrossCA) or call Joe on 086 259 1362. Event presented by Turner’s Cross Community Association. The Centre is opposite the funeral home, beside the Credit Union, close to the church.
15
The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano. Tel: 492 4950
Central Library, Grand Parade 1.30pm – 3pm
INTERNET SAFETY & PRIVACY Damien Mulley shows you how to stay safe online – see separate entry. Sponsored by Blacknight Solutions.
Frank O’Connor Library, Mayfield 11.30am – 12.30pm
ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY PROJECT CELEBRATION See separate entry – all welcome. 2pm – 3pm
3pm – 4pm
OPEN AFTERNOON
TRACING YOUR ANCESTORS
Literacy groups very welcome to visit & tour the library’s facilities. To book please phone, Tel: 492 4935
Find out how to research your family history, with Helen Sisk, a member of the Cork Genealogical Society – see separate entry. 7pm
OPEN HOUSE
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Cork City Library & Altrusa Literacy Scheme present Open House this evening. All welcome to listen to readings & music & to tour the library’s facilities. Free refreshments. Tel: 492 4900
Blackpool Library, Redforge Rd 10am - 1pm & 2pm - 5.30pm
EXHIBITION OF COMMUNITY ART Cork City Partnership Community Art Exhibition - displaying art pieces from communities across the northside of the city. Tel: 492 4933
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre 11am – 1pm
LEARN ABOUT THE VIKINGS
Presented by the Brook Day Centre, Brothers of Charity. See separate entry.
2pm
All day
CURRAHEEN FAMILY CENTRE EXHIBITION Painting & Stitching, Arts & Crafts. See Monday for details. Continues until end of March.
16
LEARN TO CROCHET Watch & learn to crochet with Ballyphehane/Togher Arts & Crafts Initiative. All welcome. Tel: 492 4934
Douglas Library, Douglas Village Shopping Centre 10am – 1pm Find out how to download books & magazines from Cork City Library’s website & to manage your library account online using the new Library App. Bring your device with you & staff will be available to help. Tel: 492 4932
9am – 5pm Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd
STUDENT EXHIBITIONS: PERCEPTIONS & INTO THE WOODS
9.30am – 11.30am Room 206 (Hairdressing Salon) , St. John’s Central College, Sawmill Street
HAIRDRESSING AS A CAREER
march 24
LAUNCH OF NEW LIBRARY APP
All welcome to a Question & Answer session, an opportunity to discuss the latest Hair & Beauty education available at St John’s. This is the first of a series of events at the college this week – see panel at 4pm today & others daily until Friday. St John’s offers full & part-time day & evening courses in a range of disciplines – see www.stjohnscollege.ie for details or call 425 5500. Last September the city centre college welcomed new Principal Mary Leahy.
Continue until Friday. See Monday for details. 9am – 5pm Foyer, Civic Offices, City Hall
ART BY YOUNG TRAVELLERS Continues all week – see Monday for details.
max 9am – 11am Room 119, Colaiste Stiofain Naofa
10
AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER NUMERIC CONTROL Join the Furniture Designer class at CSN for an introductory workshop with Fergus Somers in Computer Numeric Control, the technology that is transforming design & manufacture across the world. Students demonstrate the fabrication of furniture components & introduce the software that makes the whole process possible. Knowledge of CAD preferable but not required. Free parking at college. Booking essential as places limited – call Lucy Phelan Tel: 206 7641
17
dé máirt martá 24
9.30am - 1pm Triskel Christchurch
INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR & DISCUSSION FORUM GROWING LIFELONG LEARNING IN CORK An EcCoWeLL Cork initiative featuring the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning & PASCAL Learning Cities 2020 Network. Cork was recently selected by UNESCO as a case study City of Lifelong Learning, one of only three in Europe and 15 worldwide. This exciting development is a recognition of the work of the Lifelong Learning Festival & complements the range of projects across all sectors that are making Cork a better place in which to live & to learn. Come along & hear about a range of initiatives across Cork in Learning, Health, Environment, Economic Development & Social Inclusion that have contributed to its selection by UNESCO.
Tea/coffee on arrival. Light lunch after event. Info: Denis Barrett, Tel: 490 7100 Email: [email protected] Web: www.eccowellcork.com Participating organisations: Cork City Council, Cork Education & Training Board, HSE, Cork Environmental Forum, CIT, UCC, Cork Opera House. Please register by contacting: Christine Nolan, Access Office, CIT Tel: 433 5138 Email: [email protected]
iss ue fo ur -
by Yvonne Lane, Festival Co-ordinator
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Local representatives are joined by international guest speakers, who
20 14
include: • Raul Valdes Cotera, Director of the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning (UIL); • Norman Longworth, consultant to UIL & the Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC); • Mike Osborne, Co-Director of PASCAL & Professor of Lifelong Learning at Glasgow University – a member of the international EcCoWeLL Cities Network under the Learning Cities 2020 Network (LCN) initiative.
18
BUILDING A CULTURE OF LEARNING IN CORK Great news for Cork – the city has been chosen by UNESCO as one of only 15 worldwide to serve as a case study for its new Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC). It joins Cork’s twin city Swansea in Wales and Epsoo, Finland’s second city, in representing Europe on GNLC.
Cork City Council’s decision to work towards becoming a learning city, first expressed over a decade ago, is aimed at improving the lives of its citizens, by reducing inequality and social exclusion. It is also about encouraging investment into the city and its region, and therefore increasing employment.
This came about because Cork has been a pioneer in organising a festival devoted to Lifelong Learning - the first in Ireland, and the only one of its kind in Europe. It involves all levels and types of learning from pre-school to Third Level, formal and informal, and uniquely, participation from the State, community, voluntary and private sectors.
The Lifelong Learning Festival is inclusive, encouraging the involvement of those who may not usually participate in learning. They include those who live in the most disadvantaged areas of the city, or who belong to often marginalised communities - among them the disabled, Travellers, new communities – not only to participate by attending events but also to organise their own.
Back in 2002 Cork City Council adopted the Cork City Development Board’s Strategy Imagine Our Future, committing itself to work towards making Cork a City of Learning. The Lifelong Learning Festival has proved to be a powerful means of implementing that aspiration. On April 28 last Cork City Council took another important step when it voted to adopt the UNESCO Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities: Lifelong Learning for All: Promoting Inclusion, Prosperity and Sustainability in Cities the first and, so far, the only city authority in Ireland to do so. Councillor Lorraine Kingston, then Deputy Lord Mayor of Cork, and Tina Neylon, Co-ordinator of the Lifelong Learning Festival, had been guests of UNESCO at its first International Conference on Learning Cities in Beijing, China, in October 2013, where the Declaration was discussed and adopted. The Declaration affirms the vital importance of education for the future of all human communities. It concluded with a ‘Call to Action’ - urging UNESCO to establish a global network of learning cities to support and accelerate the practice of lifelong learning in the world’s communities.
Unlike many learning festivals elsewhere, it is not just about adults, it is about the lifelong experience – showcasing and celebrating learning opportunities from the cradle to the grave. It includes formal, informal and non-formal learning, all celebrated, recognised and presented equally. Any official designation as a Learning City is an acknowledgement of the work already done by many to develop a culture of lifelong learning in Cork and an encouragement to drive to develop it further. It also contributes to the positive profile of the city already achieved with the designation of Cork as a WHO Healthy City. Since becoming involved with EcCoWell, the approach to Cork becoming a Lifelong Learning City has broadened to become holistic, with the involvement of health, the environment, economic development, with all sectors working together towards greater equality, social inclusion and a better quality of life for everyone. The festival has challenged people’s own perceptions about learning. It has helped individuals and institutions to
www.corkcity.ie/learningfestival email: [email protected]
re-imagine the place of learning in diverse activities, in disparate organisations, and to reposition lifelong learning as a core activity, central to the human experience and central to life in the city. The Steering Group recently set up to advance the UNESCO Declaration on Building Learning Cities is co-chaired by William McAuliffe, Chair of the Festival Organising Committee, and Pat Ledwidge, the Director of Strategic Planning & Economic Development at Cork City Council. See http://learningcities.uil.unesco.org/home EcCoWell = Ecology & Economy; Community & Culture; Well-being & Lifelong Learning. See www.eccowellcork.com
What is a Learning City? The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning defines a learning city as follows:
A Learning City is a city which effectively mobilises its resources in every sector to: • promote inclusive learning from basic to higher education; • re-vitalise learning in families and communities; • facilitate learning for and in the workplace; • extend the use of modern learning technologies; • enhance quality and excellence in learning; and • foster a culture of learning throughout life. In so doing it will create and reinforce individual empowerment and social cohesion, economic and cultural prosperity, and sustainable development.
HELP FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
Citywide Network members: Active Pulse Theatre Group, Adult Guidance Service of Cork Education & Training Board, Altrusa Adult Literacy Service, The Carers Association, Cork City Libraries, Disability Education Network, Good Shepherd Services, NASC – The Irish Immigrant Support Centre, the Retired People’s Network, Simon Community, Social & Health Education Network, Sophia Housing, Welcome English Centre, The Lantern Community Project.
max 9.45am – 10.45am Yogaworx, East Village, Douglas
12
15
ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY INTER SCHOOLS QUIZ First Years in Terence MacSwiney Secondary school compete with 5th class students from local primary schools St Mary’s on the Hill, Scoil Padre Pio, Sunday’s Well BNS & GNS along with their parents in this Inter Schools Table Quiz. It’s based on the book Gangsta Granny, written by the increasingly popular children’s author David Walliams of Little Britain fame. Part of the annual One Book, One Community Family Reading Initiative in Knocknaheeny. Parking off Hollyhill Lane behind the PE Hall at the back of the school. Info Ann Neff Tel: 086 010 6412
martá 24
The Citywide Community Education Network has a stand in the dole office this morning & tomorrow morning, where you can talk to them about courses & other services available across the city. The Network is supported by the Cork Education & Training Board. Info: Eamonn Kirwan Tel: 492 4922
School Library, Terence MacSwiney Secondary School, Knocknaheeny
max
10am – 11am
9.30am – 12.30pm Social Protection Office, Hanover St
Organised by Home School Community Liaison in Terence MacSwiney Secondary School, St.Mary’s on the Hill Primary, Scoil Padre Pio Primary, Sunday’s Well BNS & GNS - members of the Knocknaheeny/ Hollyhill Community Education Network. Info Ann Neff Tel: 086 010 6412
TRY A GENTLE PILATES CLASS Experience all the benefits of Pilates by joining a regular class with Pilates People Cork: postural alignment, strength, flexibility, balance, relaxation. Booking essential, as places limited. Call Jaconel Janssen Tel: 085 161 3505 Email: [email protected] Web: www.pilatespeoplecork.com 10am Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING Workshop & demonstration on preventing food waste & composting food & garden waste at the Cork City Council Stop Food Waste demo site with trainer Donal O’Leary. This session for school groups, must book – call 494 1500 or email: lifetimelab@ corkcity.ie At noon there’s a session open to the public. Two sessions daily until Friday.
10am – 11am School of the Divine Child, Lavanagh Centre, Ballintemple
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE Students at the school demonstrate their skills, performing on a variety of technologies & instruments. The concert is a result of the collaboration between SoundOUT & Music Generation; three music tutors visit the School of the Divine Child every Tuesday. Park offsite in Ballintemple, or take bus 202. Book to attend by calling Pauline Meade Tel: 429 1804 www.lavanagh.ie
10am – Noon School of the Divine Child, Lavanagh Centre, Ballintemple
MAKING THE MOST OF MULTIMEDIA For details see Monday 10am. Booking necessary.
19
10am – 11.30am Meeting Room, 1st Floor, Student Centre, CIT
max
Community Building, Knocknaheeny
march 24
PRESENTATION & TOUR Come to an Information Session on the Higher Certificate in Business Studies for Mature Students in CIT. Learn about the course, how to apply, the supports available for mature students, hear the first-hand experience of a mature student at CIT. Tea/coffee served. Parking limited on campus, so allow extra time or use the bus.
FLOWER ARRANGING DEMONSTRATION Discover how easy flower arranging can be. Classes take place during the year. Info from Norma Kenny 439 9503 – call her to book your place this morning. Organised by Cork City Partnership Knocknaheeny Outreach Office.
Tel: 433 5138/433 5109 Email: [email protected] Web: www.cit.ie/maturestudent Places limited, book by emailing Christine Nolan [email protected]
max 10am – 1pm & 2pm –4pm Knocknaheeny Community Building
EXHIBITION OF ART, PHOTOS, CRAFTS BY LOCALS
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
See Monday for details. Continues until Friday.
10am – Noon Cork College of Commerce, Morrison’s Island
ENJOY A SHORT TREATMENT Meet with students in their classroom & avail of a short treatment in Reflexology or Back Massage. Book your slot, call Geraldine Kingston Tel: 422 38 44 Tel: 422 2100 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corkcollegeofcommerce.ie
10.30am – 2pm
50
North Presentation Secondary School, Farranree
LEARN ABOUT WORLD WAR TWO You are invited to a History Conference, a morning of talks on aspects of World War Two given by guest speaker Gerry White, North Presentation Adult Education students and the Transition Year group. Topics include: The Irishmen involved in D Day; The Battle of Stalingrad; female secret agents; other key figures involved. Come & join in what promises to be a fascinating look back. The event is hosted by the regular Tuesday Adult Education History group. Light refreshments at 10.30am. Limited parking in school car park, and on main road. Bus 203 stops outside school. Supported by North Presentation Secondary School & Home School Community Liasion. See also Thursday at 11am, continuing theme of North Pres Remembers World War Two. Please book your place, call Joanne Twomey Tel: 085 815 4328
20
11am – 1pm Bishopstown Library, Wilton
LEARN ABOUT THE VIKINGS
Noon
COMPUTERS FOR THE PETRIFIED Take the first steps towards becoming a silver surfer. Meet coach Michael O’Connor & you’ll see how easy it is. Find out about the other activities at this award-winning centre. Free refreshments. Call Roger Coughlan Tel: 434 8595 M 086 386 6975 Email: [email protected]. Repeated Wed & Thurs.
march 24
Join Jarls, Karls and Thralls as a group of actors re-enact a typical day in the life of a Viking. Exhibition of the Brook Day Centre service users’ research on Viking life. Free parking available in Wilton car park & free refreshments at 11am. Organised by the Brook Day Centre, Donnybrook, Douglas Tel: 489 1940 Email: CarolMcAuliffe- 27hotmail.com
Bishopstown Senior Social Centre, Wilton Park House
Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See 10am for details.
1pm Triskel
COMMUNITY EDUCATION PRIORITIES – DOCUMENT LAUNCH
Noon – 1pm Cork College of Commerce, Morrison’s Island
max
20
LEARN HOW TO COPE WITH STRESS Are you too busy? Never have enough time? Stressed out? Understand the psychology of stress & how to manage it. Places limited, book by calling 422 2100
Find out what are the priorities for Community Education over the next five years from those who organise & deliver it on the ground. Community Education in Cork City is vibrant & thriving with over 100 organisations delivering classes & programmes to learners in community settings. They are organised locally in 10 networks, each represented on the Cork City Community Education Network Forum. Today the Forum launches its new document setting out its priorities for the next five years. Info from Forum Chairperson Liz O’Halloran, Tel: 450 8528 Email: [email protected] The Community Education Networks, supported by Cork Education & Training Board (Cork ETB), are: Knocknaheeny, Churchfield/Gurranabraher, Farranree, Cathedral/Shandon/Blackpool, The Glen, Mayfield, Mahon, Ballyphehane/ Togher, Bishopstown/Glasheen, Traveller Education, Disability Education & Citycentre/Citywide.
21
Foyer, CIT Cork School of Music
Blackpool Library
LUNCHTIME CONCERT – TRADITIONAL MUSIC
EXHIBITION OF COMMUNITY ART
Solo & ensemble performances by CITCSM’s undergraduate & postgraduate students of Irish Traditional Music, lecturer Johnny McCarthy.
Display of work from Cork City Partnership supported Community Arts initiatives in Gurranabraher, Knocknaheeny, The Glen / Mayfield & Fairhill. Works include photographs, paintings, crafts & much more. Come along & view the broad range of work. Opportunities for people to get involved in these and similar community arts projects. Info Cork City Partnership 430 2310 or Margo Hayes 087 196 2023. Continues until 1pm Friday.
Some seating, wheelchair accessible, onstreet parking, Bistro on-site. Info Edel Sullivan 087 234 4669
2.15pm – 3pm 1.30pm – 3pm
LEARN HOW TO STAY SAFE ONLINE
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications, who teaches organisations how to communicate amongst themselves & with the world, shows you how to stay safe online when using websites & email, good browsers, how to stop spyware. He teaches you how to lock down your Facebook account to protect your privacy, and how to spot scam. Especially organised for the festival. Sponsored by Blacknight Solutions. Booking essential as spaces limited. Call 492 4900 Blacknight is a 100% Irish owned ICANN accredited domain registrar & hosting company, based in Carlow. Recipient of several awards for its revolutionary use of social media, it’s one of Europe’s cutting edge Internet companies, serving clients in 130 countries. In 2014 it opened its own eco-friendly datacentre.
Come to a talk by Sian Walsh about Lamh, the hand signing system for people with intellectual disabilities. Signing demonstration by Rita Murphy & Sandra Twomey. Organised by Cope Foundation, call Mary Keating 085 210 1646 email [email protected]
THE FREE UNIVERSITY: ACE AT UCC PUBLIC LECTURE PROGRAMME Boole 5, UCC
2pm – 3pm
IRELAND’S PART IN WORLD WAR I In August 1914 the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland declared war on Germany. There were already 16 regiments in the army proclaiming themselves Irish
22
Bishopstown Senior Social CentreWilton Park House
LEARN TO PLAY CARDS
martá 24
Join this regular session – and, if you’re a beginner, learn to play 45 with coach Haulie Lynch. Free refreshments. Discover other activities at this award-winning centre. Info Roger Coughlan, Tel: 434 8595 – 086 386 6975
dé máirt
2.30pm – 5pm & wearing either a harp or shamrock as their badge. In 1914 they were joined by tens of thousands of volunteers. The survivors returned to a country transforming in a new struggle. John Ware examines the war from Ireland’s perspective & tells the story of Irish soldiers: from the Indian veterans who hung up their red coats in 1914, to the young men in gas masks who fought on the most savage battlefields ever known. 3pm – 4pm
GLOBAL JUSTICE & HUMAN RIGHTS Mark Kernan explores the role of human rights in the global quest for social & economic justice. He asks what it means for a country or society to economically & socially develop. As an illustration he uses a brief case study of the potential negative impact of industrial globalisation on one particular country, community or society. He suggests how the combined concepts of global justice & human rights might work to both highlight the injustices caused & the remedies open to the marginalised. 4pm – 5pm
THE DRIVE FOR EQUALITY: WOMEN, FEMINISM & DEVELOPMENT Michael Blayney discusses how women went from being ‘equal’ members of hunter-gatherer societies to ‘secondary’ to men following the Neolithic Revolution. His illustrated talk looks at patriarchy & the rise of Feminist movements in the west that challenged its dominance. He examines modern matriarchal societies & their similarities & differences with Ireland & what the future holds for women’s drive for recognition and equality.
max 2.30pm
40
Cork City & County Archives Service, Seamus Murphy Building, 32 Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool
LEARN ABOUT CORK’S HISTORY & HERITAGE Second in series of talks during festival week is UCC historian Gabriel Doherty on Cork and the Death of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915: Newspaper Evidence. Booking preferred as places limited. Email: [email protected] Tel: 450 5876 Map on: www.corkarchives.ie/visitus
Bus 205 and 208. Visitor parking at Perrott’s Avenue and Perrot’s Inch http:// www.ucc.ie/en/build/commuting/maps/ To book your place, please ring 490 4700.
23
tuesday 2.30pm – 4pm Cork City Childcare, Dundanion House, Blackrock Road
OPEN AFTERNOON AT CORK CITY CHILDCARE
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Parents, childcare workers & childminders are invited to Cork City Childcare’s offices, to find out about childcare provision in Cork City & about government funded childcare schemes. There’s also a Careers in Childcare Information Service available to anyone interested in pursuing a rewarding career. Parking available. Travelling from the city on the main Blackrock Road, Dundanion House is second left after the Topaz Garage, opposite the junction with Church Rd. Contact: Ruth or Elizabeth Tel: 435 7500 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corkcitychildcare.ie
STARTING YOUR FAMILY TREE Hear from Helen Sisk of the Cork Genealogical Society how to start researching your family. All welcome. Cork Genealogical Society meets regularly, provides information on sources & a discussion forum for members, it costs only €15 to join for a year. See www.corkgenealogicalsociety.com Look for other sessions in your local library this week.
3pm – 3.45pm Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, off George’s Quay
LEARN ABOUT LORRAINE
3pm University College Cork
Hear from Clare Issartel about the historically fascinating & culturally diverse region of the Lorraine, located in the north-east of France bordering Belgium, Luxembourg & Germany. All welcome.
GEORGE BOOLE WALKING TOUR OF UCC
Tel: 431 0677 Email: [email protected]
See Monday for details.
3pm – 4pm Central Library, Grand Parade
tuesday
5pm – 6pm max Room 412, Main Building 24
3D PRINTING: AN INTRODUCTION
Sawmill Street
march april 8 24
Antonio Ianni, educator & designer, introduces you to 3D printing & 3D scanner technologies through a demonstration & an exhibition of 3D printed models. A special event for the festival. See www.stjohnscollege. ie/courses-2/art-and-design/design3d-print/ for courses available. Booking required, as places limited - call Antonio Tel: 087 983 3762 Email: [email protected]
St. John’s Central College
max 4pm
15
Boardroom/Lecture Hall
HEALTHY FAMILY NUTRITION Come to a short talk on healthy nutrition, looking at the effects of high sugar consumption. Are we eating food with zero nutritional value? What are processed foods doing to us? How can we make positive changes to improve our family’s long term health? Booking required, as places limited - Tel: 087 223 9557 or Email: [email protected]
5.45pm – 7.15pm Lecture Theatre
GOSPEL CHOIR OPEN REHEARSAL St. John’s Gospel Choir performs every Tuesday @ 5.45pm. It’s a fun, energetic choir, looking for new members! So come along & listen - you may want to join. Email: [email protected] See www.stjohnscollege.ie for courses, information & map, or call 425 5500
25
6pm – 7pm Room G05, Western Gateway Building, Western Rd, UCC
PUBLIC LECTURE: NEW FRONTIERS OF PHYSICS
march april24 8
As part of the George Boole 200 celebrations, UCC welcomes Professor Séamus Davis, the JG White Distinguished Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University, New York, for a lecture & discussion. He will introduce the most exciting & fundamental challenges Physics faces today & discuss the approaches being taken to solve these mysteries. 6pm-7pm
max
60
Tel: 420 5558 Email [email protected]
LEARN ABOUT PART-TIME BUSINESS COURSES Come to a presentation on the parttime courses offered at CIT’s School of Business, including undergraduate degree & Masters programmes in Business, Accounting & Human Resource Management. Plenty of time for questions. Free refreshments. Booking essential- Tel: 433 5900 or 433 5902 or Email: [email protected] Web: www.cit.ie/prospectus
6pm – 7pm Room 11, SMA Community Centre, Wilton
max
5
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
TAKE A QIGONG LESSON Master Mark van Dam has developed courses balancing Tai Chi, Chi Gung, Meditation, Yoga, the Alexander Method & other self-healing exercises. Drawing from over 25 years of experience, he combines them into a simple 15 minute routine. It’s good for your general health & for a number of conditions. Lesson for beginners here on Tuesdays – check www.markvandam.com for other venues in Cork City & County. Booking essential as places limited - Tel: 023 885 7370 or 086 159 1881
26
TRY ZUMBA
march april 8 24
Zumba is a combination of dance & aerobics & works intensely on parts of the body. It includes hip-hop, salsa, mambo and samba. If you’re thinking of getting on the fitness bandwagon, Zumba should be high on your priority list. It decreases stress, improves flexibility & is a fun way to lose weight. Join the regular class here and try it. If you want to join, you can. Parking available. Booking necessary as places limited. Call Maeve or Elsa 435 8866 or email [email protected]
6.30pm – 9pm The Lantern Community Project, 14 George’s Quay (red door)
max
18
PALESTINE - A DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION PERSPECTIVE SHEP guest speaker Dr Kathy GlavanisGrantham, retired lecturer in Sociology at UCC, examines the issue of the Palestine Question through the lens of Development Education. She taught in Palestine for 9 years at the Birzeit University near Ramallah.
6.30pm – 7.30pm LG51, Cavanagh Pharmacy Building, UCC
MURDER & ETHICS IN RECENT ITALIAN CRIME FICTION
Presented by the Social & Health Education Project in association with Irish Aid & the Lantern Community Project. Info SHEP 466 6180 or the Lantern Project 086 023 6442 Booking essential, as places limited. Call Geraldine Flanagan 466 6180
Dr Mark Chu, Senior Lecturer in Italian, UCC, continues his discussion of Italian crime fiction from previous festivals with two recent novels: Florentine writer Marco Vichi’s fifth Inspector Bordelli novel, Death in the Tuscan Hills (La forza del destino, 2011) & the latest in the Guido Guerrieri series by Gianrico Carofiglio, La regola dell’equilibrio (The Rule of Balance’). All welcome. Info: 490 2335/2486 email:[email protected] The venue is on the lower ground floor of the Cavanagh building – entrance opposite AIB on College Road.
27
St Anthony’s Sports Hall, Ballinlough
KARATE KIDS – TRY A FREE CLASS Children aged 5+ can join the regular class here & try Karate. See Monday for details. More free classes in different locations Wed, Thurs & Friday.
martá 24
dé máirt
7pm – 8pm 6pm – 7pm
iPAD – KNOW HOW? At this informal session Joseph Henchin, one of the college’s computer teachers, shows you how to get the most from your iPad. Event is for those not familiar with iPads or thinking of buying one. He’ll also answer questions on apps & accessories.
max
6pm – 7pm
30
HERBS FOR HOME REMEDIES Carol Neenan talks about herbs & how they can be used as home remedies & to improve health. She explains which herbs should be used for certain conditions, including colds & flu, wounds, sore throats, fatigue, recovery from illness, and many others. She’ll give out samples so hopes you will book, so she has enough to distribute. Call number below. 6.30pm – 7.30pm
TACKLING CHILDHOOD OBESITY
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Niamh Gaine, tutor in Childcare at the college & author of Child Health and Wellbeing, gives a short talk on childhood obesity. She explores the extent & causes of Ireland’s problem with it & offers practical tips & solutions.
Cork College of Commerce Morrison’s Island
6pm – 6.45pm
LEARN ABOUT THE STOCK EXCHANGE Interested in stocks & shares? Want to understand how the Stock Exchange works? This event is for you. The college offers An Introduction to the Stock Exchange short course each term.
28
6.30pm – 9pm
HOW TO START A SMALL BUSINESS Every thought of starting a business? Sit in on a class & experience this night course in small business set-up. The college offers the course in Autumn & Spring. If coming, please leave a message on 422 2100 so there’s a seat for you.
max
SOCIOLOGY – AN INTRODUCTION
25
OPEN ART STUDIO Members of Mahon Men’s Art Group invite you to see a display of their work. Details see Monday. Repeated Wed & Thurs.
7pm – 8pm
martá 24
Gain an insight into our interaction within society and how this is analysed through different methods of research, with this overview of Sociology/Social Studies. Places limited, book by calling number below.
Mahon Youth Centre, The Portacabins, Mahon Drive
dé máirt
7pm – 9pm 7pm – 8pm
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LAW Paul Cotter, a teacher at the college, gives a presentation designed to equip the lifelong learner with an understanding of what’s involved in the study of Law. An informal session, plenty of time for questions. 7pm – 8.30pm
INTERNET SAFETY – AN ILLUSTRATED TALK See Monday for details.
7pm – 9pm Camden Palace Hotel Community Arts Centre, Camden Quay
7pm – 9.30pm
A TASTE OF MARKETING & SALES Interested in Marketing & Sales? Take this opportunity to sit in on a class & learn what attending the course is like. Night course offered in Autumn & Spring. Please call number below, so there’s a seat for you.
LEARN ABOUT THE ARABIC LANGUAGE Enjoy an introduction to the history of the Arabic language with Mrs Omhanin Eltaib. You’ll also learn about the Arabic alphabet, the basics of its grammar, forming of words & sentences. With her you’ll take a brief look at the love poem in Arabic. Arabic lessons here every Tuesday. All welcome. Ethnic tea offered. Info Kamal Eltaib, Tel: 086 333 6847 Email: [email protected] or the Camden Palace Hotel Tel: 455 2383
Tel: 422 2100 Email:[email protected] Web: www.corkcollegeofcommerce.ie
29
COLOUR MADE EASY – A WORKSHOP
max
30
A fascinating exploration of Colour Theory, used as a critical tool by artists. The workshop with Visions School of Art begins with an introduction to the Colour Wheel; examines the difference between coloured light & materials or pigments & how they relate to one another; then explores how different hues work together. A taught workshop, with practical examples. This is part one of a two part workshop offered every few months. Visions School of Art also offers weekly Painting in Acrylics classes here. Info Andrew Carroll 087 149 9615 email and. [email protected] www.artclass.ie
7.30pm – 9pm Family Resource Centre, Mahon
7.30pm – 9pm Welcome English Centre, Convent Place, off Proby’s Quay
OPEN CHOIR REHEARSAL Come and join in an open rehearsal of the World as One Multicultural Choir. The choir was formed in 2008 & its repertoire is joyful & upbeat. Members come from different countries including Lithuania, Spain, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Poland, China, and of course Ireland! Come to listen & sing & you may be tempted to join. All welcome. The choir meets weekly here. Convent Place is off Proby’s Quay, turn right before La Dolce Vita restaurant. Info Ann Bracken, Tel: 087 238 5527 Email: [email protected]
max
6
TRY A YOGA CLASS Join the regular yoga class & learn its benefits. Yoga reduces stress, develops inner calm, increases strength, conditioning & overall energy, improves posture, helps your weight management, your sleep improves, so does your hormonal balance. After trying a class, you are welcome to join.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Booking essential, call Maeve or Elsa, Tel: 435 8866 Email: [email protected] See Thursday at 11.30am for daytime class.
8pm St Columba’s Hall, Douglas
SENIOR DANCING COMPETITION Take your partners for the Young at Heart Senior Dancing Competition – the eighth year of this event in association with the festival. Whether you dance as a couple or two ladies together, you’re very welcome, so get your dancing shoes out! You’ll be competing for the Douglas Village Perpetual Trophy, and for gold, silver and bronze medals. For information about this event & Young at Heart’s activities all year round, call Phil Goodman 087 298 7161
30
8pm – 9.30pm Groundfloor Concourse, CIT Cork School of Music
Enjoy an entertaining & eclectic mix of vocal & instrumental music, representing some of the many aspects of musical lifelong learning in Cork. •
The Cope Foundation (Hollyhill) Travelling Show presented by The Amazing Team – director Mary Keating
•
The Glen Flute Group (CITCSM Outreach Programme) & CAFÉ (Cork Adult Flute Ensemble) director Caoimhe Conlon
•
CIT (Bishopstown) Staff Choir – directed by Val Flannery
•
The Voices Choir – directed by Mary Pedder Daly
•
Cello Soloist – Ilse de Ziah
march 24
FESTIVAL CONCERT
Wheelchair accessible, on-street parking. No need to book but seating limited - so arrive a bit early as first come, first served. Info Edel Sullivan Tel: 087 234 4669 Organisations involved: CIT Cork School of Music & Bishopstown Campus; CAFÉ (Cork Adult Flute Ensemble) & Cope Foundation (Hollyhill)
Glen Flute Club
31
dé céadaoin martá 25
LEARN ABOUT THE VIKINGS Exhibition of research by service users at the Brook Day Centre. Until Friday, for details see Tuesday.
Tory Top Road Library, Ballyphehane Central Library, Grand Parade
10am
Join the Wednesday Library Painters & you could be tempted to join them - all welcome.
Singer songwriter Dave Burke launches his CD “Fulfil the Wish.” All welcome. Tel: 492 4900
2.15pm
LEARN SOME BEAD WORK The Library, Douglas Village Shopping Centre 11.30am - 12.30pm
All are welcome to an Introduction to Bead Work presented by Bead Wizards.Tel: 492 4934
STARTING YOUR FAMILY TREE
Blackpool Library, Redforge Rd
Hear from James Quain of the Cork Genealogical Society how to start researching your family. All welcome. Tel: 492 4932
10am
CELEBRATION OF ONE BOOK ONE COMMUNITY See separate entry.
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre 11.30am
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
THE BATTLE OF KINSALE Local historian Pat Gunn gives a talk about Spanish intervention in Ireland in 1601-2. All welcome.
2.30pm - 3.30pm
STARTING YOUR FAMILY TREE Hear from Ann Marie Coghlan of the Cork Genealogical Society how to start researching your family. All welcome. See www. corkgenealogicalsociety.com 10am - 1pm & 2pm - 5.30pm
All day
EXHIBITION OF COMMUNITY ART
CURRAHEEN FAMILY CENTRE EXHIBITION
A display of art from communities across the northside of the city. See separate entry. Tel: 492 4933
See Monday for details. Continues until end of March.
RITA LYNCH EXHIBITION
Frank O’Connor Library, Mayfield
The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano. Tel: 492 4950
10am - 1pm
A CELEBRATION OF LOCAL LEARNING See separate entry. All welcome. Tel: 492 4935
32
Continue until Friday - see Monday for details. 9am – 5pm Foyer, Civic Offices, City Hall Continues until Friday – see Monday for details.
9.30am – 11am St John’s Central College, Sawmill St
EXPERIENCE LEARNING IN THE MAYFIELD COMMUNITY – INVESTIGATE, PARTICIPATE CELEBRATE! The Mayfield Community Education Network hosts a morning of free participative workshops & displays from local community groups & schools. It’s a vibrant morning of dance performances such as Salsa, Irish, Ballroom etc, with the option of just watching - or maybe joining in! Displays of art, crafts, demonstrations of beauty & make-up, cross stitch & flower arranging also for you to enjoy, together with music, local choirs & schools performing. Refreshments provided free. All are welcome.
martá 25
Frank O’Connor Library, Old Youghal Rd, Mayfield
tuesday
STUDENT EXHIBITIONS: PERCEPTIONS & INTO THE WOODS
dé céadaoin
9am – 5pm Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd 10am – 1pm
HOLIDAY HELPDESK Students on the Tourism & e-Travel courses at St John’s provide a free service to people with queries about holidays. They source information, so you are well prepared before heading to a travel agent to book. Info email: [email protected] or visit www. stjohscollege.ie for details of courses or call 425 5500 .Repeated Thursday at 2pm. 9.30am – 12.30pm
The Mayfield Community Education Network (CEN) is a group of adult/ community education providers in the Mayfield area. The network brings together Mayfield Community Adult Learning Project, Mayfield Arts, Lotamore Family Resource Centre, Home School Community Liaison teachers from Mayfield Community School, St. Patrick’s Schools, Scoil Mhuire Banrion & St. John the Apostle B.N.S., Health Action Zone & Mayfield Write-On Adult Basic Education Service.
Social Protection Office, Hanover St
HELP FOR THE UNEMPLOYED The Citywide Community Education Network has a stand in the dole office this morning & tomorrow morning, where you can talk to them about courses & other services available across the city. The Network is supported by the Cork Education & Training Board. Info: Eamonn Kirwan 492 4922 For more details see Tuesday. 10am
Further information about the event or the network, call 450 8562
10am – 1pm & 2pm – 4pm Knocknaheeny Community Building
EXHIBITION OF ART, PHOTOS, CRAFTS BY LOCALS See Monday for details.
Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See Tuesday for details.
33
ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY A CELEBRATION
EXHIBITION OF COMMUNITY ART
Join students from Blarney Street CBS, North Presentation Primary, St Vincent’s Primary, Scoil Muire Fatima & North Monastery Secondary schools, as they celebrate their involvement in the One Book, One Community project, which encourages reading at both school & at home.
Until Friday, see Tuesday for details.
This year’s chosen book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, the science fiction classic, inspired the artwork on display. Pupils are also performing Event organised by the Shandon/ Cathedral/Blackpool Community Education Network
10.30am – 12.30pm Knocknaheeny Community Building
COOKERY DEMONSTRATION Learn some quick & easy nutritional dishes to make in your own kitchen. Regular classes here on Tuesday mornings. Organised by Cork City Partnership Knocknaheeny Outreach Office. Places limited, to book call Norma Kenny, Tel: 439 9503
Info Liam Buckley, Blarney St CBS Tel: 086 263 0078
10am – 5pm NLN Training Centre, Hollymount Industrial Estate, Hollyhill (across the road from Apple) 10am – 4.30pm 1st Floor, CCAD Sullivan’s Quay Campus (old tax office)
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
TRAIN IN CREATIVITY & CHANGE Creativity & Change training is for those involved in youth work, adult education & community development. Today’s training will help to develop creative skills & tools to engage participants/ learners with ideas around participation, global citizenship & change. A day of creativity & reflection that will stimulate & motivate. Training delivered by CIT Crawford College of Art & Design in conjunction with the Lantern Project with support from EcCoWell. Booking essential, please book your place by Thurs March 19 to avoid disappointment.
34
Contact Norma Roche Tel: 086 023 6442 Email [email protected] Web: www.lanternproject.ie
10am – 3pm
OPEN DAY WITH ACTIVITIES Find out about the full time certified training programmes on offer at the National Learning Network (NLN) training centres here at Hollyhill & at Model Farm Road. The employment & developmental programmes cater for adults who need additional supports & different approaches because of a health condition, injury, illness, mild or specific learning difficulty, mental health problem etc. NLN aims to provide students with the skills & aptitudes to progress on to employment, further training or education or other outcomes appropriate to each individual. Short briefings at 10am, 11am, Noon, 1pm & 2pm - or come at any time today to meet instructors & students & learn about the programmes at FETAC levels 3 to 5.
10.30am – Noon & 1.30pm – 3pm
INTRODUCTION TO CAPACITAR WELLNESS PRACTICES
TAKE A WALK ON THE WILDSIDE
Noon – 1pm
AN INTRODUCTION TO IRISH SIGN LANGUAGE Learn basic phrases in Irish Sign Language (ISL), to spell your name etc.
CRAFT WORKSHOPS 11am – 12.30pm
BASIC MONOPRINTING Using photocopying or hand drawn images, create an original & surprisingly effective print. 1.30pm – 3pm
BASIC HAND BUILDING POTTERY Have fun using a variety of possible techniques like coil building, pinch pots & slab building to make pieces in clay that you can take home later. 11.30am – 1pm
CAKE DECORATING WORKSHOP Watch a demonstration on cake decorating & then decorate your own cupcakes using a variety of tools & techniques. Places limited at workshops, book yours in advance.
The Exotic Animal Roadshow showcases learning about environmental issues. Today the focus is on wildlife, both domestic & foreign. There’s a static display/ mini zoo, paint on animal tattoos plus wild art & crafts. Booking only required for groups. 11am – 12.30pm
INTRODUCTION TO WRAP The Wellness Recovery Action Plan, or WRAP, is an evidence based practice used world-wide by people who are dealing with mental health challenges as well as medical conditions. Diabetes, weight gain, pain management, addictions, smoking, redundancy, significant transitions & trauma are some of the many challenges that can benefit. This introduction shows how WRAP works & how simple it is. Places limited, book yours.
march 25
NLN instructor Bernadette Nolan delivers two sessions on Capacitar Wellness Practices. Capacitar means to empower & to encourage. Training teaches simple healing practices that restore balance in the energy system, developing skills to manage stress, anxiety & trauma. Places limited, book yours.
2.30pm – 5pm
LIFE AFTER LEAVING CERT FOR STUDENTS WITH ASD Psychologist Seamus Feehan, Kieran Kennedy of Shine, a representative from Aspect, and others, outline what’s there now, what the deficits are & what might be coming on stream in the next 2-4 years for students leaving school. Representatives from organisations providing services to school leavers on the Autistic Spectrum also on hand to chat to individuals. A valuable session for parents, teachers, guidance councillors & others interested in students with ASD who will soon be leaving second level education. Booking not required but preferred. Organisations involved today: National Learning Network, The Animal Roadshow, Aspect, Shine. Parking available on site, tea/coffee/scones provided, 202 bus stops outside centre, top of Harbour View Road, across from Apple. Booking only required for groups, except where places are limited. Maximum number for group visit is 20. To book: phone Alice or Maria 434 1028 or Kay 430 0144 or email [email protected] or [email protected].
35
Curraheen Family Centre, Meeting Room, Church of the Real Presence, Curraheen Rd
Douglas Community School
CORK HARBOUR THROUGH TIME - ILLUSTRATED TALK Local historian Councillor Kieran McCarthy will take you on a fascinating journey, through the medium of postcards from 100 years ago, to give a now and then look at Cork Harbour, the second largest natural harbour in the world. All welcome. Free refreshments served. Queries: Irene Higgins Tel 454 1583
INTERGENERATIONAL QUIZ Members of Young at Heart & students from Douglas Community School join forces to pitch their skills & knowledge against each other. Each team is made up of two seniors & two students, and they compete to win the Douglas Credit Union Perpetual Trophy. All welcome. For information about Young at Heart’s activities & the quiz call Phil Goodman 087 298 7161.
The Curraheen Family Centre is a social & education centre, founded 26 years ago & run by a voluntary committee. It’s a place where people can meet in a friendly atmosphere & provides classes & activities. It enjoys the support of the Cork Education & Training Board through some tutor hours, plus one Community Employment placement. New members always welcome. The Curraheen Family Centre is a member of the Bishopstown Glasheen Community Education Network. It’s on bus routes 205 & 208. 11am – noon ICA Hall, Douglas
max
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
James Barry Exhibition Centre, CIT
MY EDUCATION, MY FUTURE EXHIBITION LAUNCH The CIT Access Service together with the CIT Arts Office invited students from Access Linked Schools to take part in this year’s competition where aspiring young artists submit an art piece on the theme of My Education, My Future. All art work submitted from participating schools is on display in the James Barry Exhibition Centre in Cork Institute of Technology during the festival. This morning the student artists are invited with their families, friends, teachers and principals to a formal Exhibition Launch. For Information contact the CIT Access Service: Tel: 433 5138 or Email: [email protected] Exhibition continues 9am - 6pm until Friday.
36
Come along to the regular Wednesday morning class in chair-based Pilates for older adults with Pilates People Cork. Experience all the benefits of a regular Pilates class: postural alignment, strength, flexibility, balance, relaxation. The ICA Hall is opposite the community park in Douglas, near St Columba’s Church. Booking essential, as places limited. Call Jaconel Janssen, Tel: 085 161 3505 Email: [email protected] Web: www.pilatespeoplecork.com
dé céadaoin
Cork Opera House
martá 25
MUSIC GENERATION CORK CITY CONCERT PARTY Join the music & fun at the annual Music Generation Cork City Concert. It features performances by some of the children & young people who are learning & creating music throughout the city, and celebrates Music Generation Cork City’s partnerships with musicians & music organisations year round. Music Generation Cork City is part of Ireland’s national music education programme, initiated by Music Network, co-funded by U2, The Ireland Funds & The Department of Education, in partnership with Cork City Council, Cork ETB, the HSE, CIT, UCC and Cork City Partnership. For information on Music Generation Cork City, Tel: 4907186 or Email: [email protected] Organisations participating: Music Generation Cork City, SoundOUT, Cork Academy of Music, Barrack Street Band, ARTlifeCULTURE, Creative Tradition, MIC / Music in Community, Ballyphehane Youth Project, Club Ceoil, Cork Community Project / Voices of Cork, GMC Beats Workshops, Youth Work Ireland Cork (The Hut) Limited number of free seats (50) for the concert available for the public. To book call Cork Opera House Box Office 427 0022 or email Box Office Manager: Heather Murphy hmurphy@ corkoperahouse.ie or Irene Harte iharte@ corkoperahouse.ie
11am – 3pm Meelagh CDP for Travellers, Next to St Michael’s FC, Mahon
LAUNCH OF TRAVELLER ART PROJECT Join the Meelagh Young Traveller Girls Group as they launch their art project exploring issues around body image, entitled “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.” It’s the result of a collaboration between them, artist Leanne McDonagh & Rebecca Loveridge, support worker. Meelagh Young Traveller Girls meet her every Wednesday from 6pm-8pm, and it’s open to all young female Travellers. Event organised by Cork Traveller Women’s Network. For more information call the Meelagh Centre 451 5187 or Mary Hogan 087 953 8507 email: [email protected] The project is supported by the Healthy Minds Mental Health Project of the HSE, The Traveller Health Unit at the HSE & Cork City Council.
11.15am – 12.30pm PE Hall, Cope Foundation, Hollyhill
MY OWN TWO HANDS All welcome to an exhibition of artwork on theme of citizenship. Lamh signing. Talk by Sile Divane & Sian Walsh. Signing & posters by the literacy group. Dance "My own two hands" performed by the Sunny Oak Dance Ensemble, director Mary Keating. Info 085 210 1646 Email: [email protected]
37
Frank O Connor Library, Mayfield
Bishopstown Senior Social Centre, Wilton Park House
march 25
COMMUNITY READING PROJECT CLOSING CEREMONY Irish Authors, One Community is the theme of this year’s community reading project. Schools in the Mayfield community read the following books at school and in the home: Wilderness by Roddy Doyle, The Ark of Dun Ruah by Maire Burke, City of Fate by Nicola Pierce and Alice & Megan Forever by Judi Curtin. The closing ceremony celebrates by launching a booklet which outlines how the students & their families engaged with the reading project. Also Gary from GMC Beats will be present to give students the opportunity to use the stories from the books to develop song writing skills to create songs & raps based on what they have read.
1.10pm – 2pm Foyer, CIT Cork School of Music
LUNCHTIME CONCERT - MUSIC TECHNOLOGY
The Community Reading Project is organised by Home School Community Liaison Coordinators involving: Mayfield Community School; St. Patrick’s G.N.S./B.N.S./Infants; St Patrick’s College; Scoil Mhuire Banrion; St John the Apostle B.N.S; St. Brendan’s G.N.S; St. Mark’s B.N.S. Members of the Mayfield Community Education Network. All welcome – especially parents & family members of the students involved. For more information, Email: [email protected]
2pm – 2.45pm
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
See Tuesday for details.
Come hear the timbres & textures being created by the Music Technology students of CITCSM under the guidance of lecturer Hugh McCarthy. CITCSM offers a Masters Programme in Music Technology & a range of undergraduate modules on their B.Mus and BA in Popular Music courses. Some seating, wheelchair accessible, on-street parking, Bistro on-site. Info Edel Sullivan 087 234 4669
11.30am – 12.30pm
Celebration of the collaboration between Greenmount school & clients of John Bermingham Centre at Cope Foundation with a one off performance for pre-school & Junior Infants. It’s inspired by Squash & Squeeze, the book chosen by the Greenmount Cope Book Project. To attend, book by calling Principal, Tel: 464 3503 Noon Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See Tuesday for details.
38
COMPUTERS FOR THE PETRIFIED
Youth Development Project, Togher Opposite Togher Church
LEARN ABOUT COMPOSTING Watch demonstrations by three trained Master Composters on site. Learn about various methods of composting, food waste prevention - and how to save water. See the garden, which is being developed by local Foroige Youth Projects in conjunction with Cork City Council’s Community Warden. A special event for the festival organised by TACT Project in conjunction with Geraldine Sutton, Cork City Council’s Community Warden. Booking not essential but appreciated. Contact Pat Conway Foroige 087 941 6995 email: pat.conway@ foroige.ie or Geraldine Sutton 086 796 8944 email: geraldine_sutton@corkcity. ieRepeated at 3.15pm today.
max 2pm – 3pm Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd
14
WORKSHOP IN DIGITAL MEDIA
2pm – 4pm
Spend an hour with the Digital Media Course in Room 221 at CSN & create a 3D model of your own head! Bring a digital camera or camera phone. Workshop facilitated by Andrea and John Halpin. Email: a.halpin @csn.ie
‘SIZE MATTERS’ ALCOHOL AWARENESS Come up to the stand & say hello, learn the myths & facts about alcohol, take part in a quiz. Organised by the Cork City Partnership Community Outreach Drug Awareness Project & the TVG Drug & Alcohol Support Project. If you’d like to book the stand for your group, call Mella Magee Tel: 087 196 2022 Email: [email protected] Returns here Wednesday from 2pm.
march 25
Booking essential as places limited. Call Andrea to book 087 797 2586
Main Shopping Mall, Blackpool Shopping Centre
2pm – 4.30pm Merchants Quay Shopping Centre
ALCOHOL INFO POD See Monday for details.
2pm – 4pm The Darkroom, Camden Palace Hotel Community Arts Centre, Camden Quay
EXPERIENCE THE CREATIVE DARKROOM 2pm – 3pm 8 Knockrea Drive, Ballinlough
max
8
LEARN ABOUT THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE Rosemary Moone, Alexander teacher for over 21 years, talks about how the Alexander Technique is a most effective way of making the changes that enhance your life. She will share some tips that participants can put into practice immediately. This is a regular weekly class. See www.alexanderteacher.ie Park on street, on bus route 215.
Drop in & spend half an hour making photograms, the perfect introduction to this traditional craft. No photographic experience required. Grab a hot drink at the Camden Café & browse the photobook library. The Darkroom has regular screenings, events & workshops - check www.darkroomcork.com Please book your slot, call Naomi Tel: 086 024 1947 or Email [email protected] Repeated Thursday.
Booking necessary, as places limited. Call Rosemary 431 1411
39
dé céadaoin martá 25
2pm – 4pm Education & Rights Resource Centre, 5 Churchfield Ave
OPEN DAY AT EDUCATION CENTRE Cork Anti Poverty Resource Network Ltd. hosts an Open Day showcasing the work of: Write Together Adult Literacy Scheme; Women Supporting Women Project; Cork City North Mature Women’s Group; Páisti @ No. 3 Childcare Facility. Also Write Together presents a collection of stories from learners participating in adult learning groups. Parking available. Refreshments served. All welcome. Info Catherine O’Brien, Tel: 430 7969 2pm – 5pm
max
20
ADVOCACY - HOW DOES IT WORK?
THE FREE UNIVERSITY: ACE AT UCC PUBLIC LECTURE PROGRAMME Room G04, Brookfield Health Sciences Complex 2pm – 3pm
MIND READING & CONTROL: DO WE THINK LIKE WE THINK WE DO? In this dynamic & interactive presentation, UCC doctoral researcher & mind reader, Scotty Walsh, demonstrates the subtleties of perception & persuasion, explores the fragility & power of the human memory, and helps you unlock the vast potential of the human mind.
Advocacy can be defined in many ways - from speaking up for ourselves to lobbying on behalf of marginalised groups or communities. Deirdre Lillis, Advocacy Development Worker with SHEP leads this interactive workshop. Participants explore different models of advocacy & learn how it can make a difference. Info from the Social & Health Education Project email: [email protected] www. socialandhealth.com
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Booking essential, call Geraldine Flanagan 466 6180
3pm – 4pm
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION & INTEGRATION IN IRELAND Ciara Burke focuses on women’s migratory journeys & experiences of the asylum system in Ireland in this illustrated lecture. She discusses the issues that migrant women are faced within their home countries, their reasons for leaving & how life in direct provision affects their daily lives. Their integration into Irish society is also explored.
40
Dr Séamus Ó Tuama looks at some of the recent history of road bowling in the Cork region, highlighting some of its main characters, events & developments. His illustrated presentation includes some references to the international aspects of road bowling today.
max 2.30pm
INFORMATION ON THE PHARMACY ASSISTANT COURSE
martá 25
Brookfield Health Sciences Complex is on College Road, just beyond the Bons Secours Hospital & before the Brookfield Leisure Centre. Bus 205 and 208. Visitor parking at Perrott’s Avenue & Perrot’s Inch http://www.ucc.ie/en/build/commuting/ maps/ As places limited, booking essential, call 490 4700
Room 415, St John’s Central College, Sawmill St
dé céadaoin
3.45pm – 4.30pm
max 25 ROAD BOWLING: A CORK TRADITION 4pm – 5pm
Hear about the course structure, modules, work placement, followed by a Q & A session. Email: [email protected] Web: www.stjohnscollege.ie
40
Cork City & County Archives Service, Seamus Murphy Building, 32 Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool
LEARN ABOUT CORK’S HISTORY & HERITAGE Third in series of talks during festival week is Dr David Butler of UCC on Freemasonry in Cork City & County: its Halls, Artefacts & Heritage. Booking preferred as places limited. Email [email protected] or call 450 5876 Map on www.corkarchives.ie/visitus
5.30pm Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Off George’s Quay
IMPROVE YOUR FRENCH PRONUNCIATION Preparing for exams at second or third level? Or just want to work on your accent? Valérie David will take you through key techniques & give you tips to improve your pronunciation in French. Tel: 431 0677 Email: [email protected]
3pm University College Cork
GEORGE BOOLE WALKING TOUR OF UCC For details see Monday. 3.15pm – 4pm Youth Development Project, Togher Opposite Togher Church
LEARN ABOUT COMPOSTING For details see 2pm today.
41
Cork City Childcare, Dundanion House, Blackrock Road
The Music Room, Camden Palace Hotel Community Arts Centre
DISCOVER THE ASSOCIATION OF CHILDHOOD PROFESSIONALS
TRY A BRAZILIAN PERCUSSION CLASS For details see Monday at 6pm.
The Association of Childhood Professionals is the body representing workers in Early Years Care & Education and School Age Childcare. Find out more about the importance of early childhood care and education & the work of the childhood professional in supporting children & families at the foundation stage of development. Parking available. Further info Marian Quinn 086 272 4013 email: info@ acpireland.com www.acpireland.com 6pm – 7pm GAA Club, Douglas
KARATE KIDS - TRY A FREE CLASS Children aged 5+ can join the regular class here & try Karate. See Monday for details. More free classes in different locations Thurs & Friday.
7pm – 8.30pm
School Hall, Scoil Aiséirí Chríost, Farranree
The Spanish Studies Centre, 19, St Patrick’s Hill
TRY A SPANISH CLASS Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Join the class for beginners in Spanish, which includes a lecture on Spanish culture. See 5pm Monday for more information about the Centre. Booking advised call Rosario Gomez Mendes 086 311 1193 or email spanishstudiescork@ gmail.com www.spanishstudiescentrecork. com 6pm – 7pm The Dance Studio, Camden Palace Hotel Community Arts Centre, Camden Quay
AN INTRODUCTION TO CAPOEIRA For details see Monday at 7pm
42
CELEBRATION OF ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY READING PROJECT Parents & others from the local community are welcome to join pupils from Scoil Aiséirí Chríost, Scoil Iosagáin & North Presentation Secondary as the celebrate their participation in this year’s One Book, One Community project. The book they’ve read is Stay Where You Are & Then Leave by John Boyne, an account of a boy & his father during World War I. It includes an exhibition of artworks by the pupils. Organised by Farranree Community Education Network. Info Avril Donoghue 421 0677
7pm – 9pm Togher Community Centre
YOUTH CAFÉS – A DISPLAY & PERFORMANCE
march 25
All welcome to see a display of artwork produced by young people from Youth Cafés across the city, with Rapping performances from them to entertain you. Refreshments, tea, coffee nibbles served. Organised by the Youth Café Network Cork City. Info: Yvonne Quilligan, Cork City Partnership Ltd 430 2310 7pm – 9pm Mahon Youth Centre, The Portacabins, Mahon Drive
OPEN ART STUDIO Members of Mahon Men’s Art Group invite you to see a display of their work. Details see Monday. Repeated Thurs. 7.30pm Gresham Metropole Hotel, McCurtain St
TRY TANGO Experience the passion of Tango in an introductory class taught by Argentinian teachers, Hernan Tarilla Catvin & Enrique Lora Ringa. No need to book.The Cork Argentine Tango Society offers classes here every Wednesday: Beginners at 7.30pm; Intermediate & Advanced at 8.30pm & 9.30pm.
7pm – 9.30pm St Patrick’s National School, Gardiner’s Hill
Tel: 087 262 7887 Email: [email protected] Web:www.corktango.com See Sunday for another free class.
JOIN A COMMUNITY CHOIR
7.30pm – 8.30pm
All welcome to a rehearsal & performance by Voices of Cork, the community based choir celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It meets here every Wednesday. Join in & learn some new songs. Over the last year the choir participated in key events in Cork, including: the Lord Mayor’s Christmas & Heritage concerts, the Choral & Fringe festivals, and it supported the Harlem Gospel Choir at the Everyman Palace. Info Carol McAuliffe 087 687 0006
Cork City College, The Arch, Drinan St, Off Sullivan’s Quay
LEARN A LITTLE SPANISH Join Cork Spanish Circle’s regular class for beginners & hear how much students have progressed in a few months. No need to book, all welcome. To learn about classes & other activities of Cork Spanish Circle, Call: 496 3828 Email: corkspanishcirclegmail.com
43
7.30pm Turner’s Cross Community Centre
5pm – 5.45pm
MINDFULNESS & POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY – AN INTRODUCTION
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING
Enjoy an introductory workshop on Mindfulness & Positive Psychology, given by Judy Phelan. Mindfulness is a spiritual or psychological faculty that, according to the teaching of the Buddha, is considered to be of great importance in the path to enlightenment. All welcome. Parking may be available. Check Facebook/Twitter page (TurnersCrossCA) or call Joe on 086 259 1362. Event presented by Turner’s Cross Community Association. The Centre is opposite the funeral home, beside the Credit Union, close to the church.
Katie O’Driscoll, tutor in Digital Marketing, explores the following: Social Media for business (LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest); Cyber Celebrities – examining the online personalities who have reached cult status online (YouTube & Word Press); Online advertising & why not to be afraid; Etools: their strengths & weaknesses. The FETAC Level 5 course in Digital Marketing is available at the college in September. 5pm – 6pm
WORKPLACE HEALTH & SAFETY Ray Barrett & Denis Scully, Safety Reps at the college, give a brief talk on Health & Safety in the workplace.
Cork College of Commerce Morrison’s Island
5pm – 5.45pm
USE FREE RESOURCES TO IMPROVE ENGLISH
max
20
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
College teacher Ann-Marie Murphy shows how to use free language resources on the internet to improve skills in English. Participants get the opportunity to try websites in one of the college’s language laboratories. As places limited, please book by calling number below.
6pm – 7pm
PERSONAL SAFETY FOR WOMEN Ben Coy, a retired Garda & teacher in the college, leads an informal discussion on personal safety for women. Take this opportunity to ask questions. 7pm – 8.30pm
INTERNET SAFETY – AN ILLUSTRATED TALK See Monday for details.
Tel:422 2100 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corkcollegeofcommerce.ie
44
CURRAHEEN FAMILY CENTRE EXHIBITION Painting & Stitching, Arts & Crafts. See Monday for details. Continues until end of March.
Central Library, Grand Parade 10.15am – Noon
WRITE A SONG Enjoy an introduction to song-writing with singer/songwriter Dave Burke. Booking essential, call 492 4900
Noon
LEARN ABOUT THE VIKINGS Exhibition of research by service users at the Brook Day Centre. Until Friday, for details see Tuesday.
déardaoin martá 26
All day
CORK NON-FICTION WRITERS
Liam Ronayne, Cork City Librarian, launches “Collected Works”, a booklet published by the Cork Non-Fiction Writers Group (CNFWG) in conjunction with the Cercle d’Ecriture of Alliance Française. The CNFWG also encourages you to participate in a small-scale writing competition, taking place today at 2.30pm in the library as part of the festival. This is your opportunity to register on the spot, write your item in 20 minutes & read it to the group (or have someone else read it). The jury will select a winner today. The best entries will be posted on the CNFWG blog & on the Writing Room website of Cork City Library. All participants get a small prize. Tel: 492 4900
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre 6.30pm
CAINT IS COMHRÁ:OICHE FAILTE
RITA LYNCH EXHIBITION The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano. Tel: 492 4950
Blackpool Library, Redforge Rd 10am – 1pm
IN STITCHES OPEN MORNING Take this opportunity to drop in & see the beautiful work done by this crochet group, which meets here every week. All welcome. 10am – 1pm & 2pm – 5.30pm
EXHIBITION OF COMMUNITY ART A display of art from communities across the northside of the city. See separate entry. Tel: 492 4933
Buail isteach agus bain trail as do chuid Ghaeilge. Failte roimh cách
45
10.30am
march 26
THE ART OF QUILTING Drop in to watch & learn the art of quilting with the Tory Top Quilting Group. All welcome. Tel: 492 4946
9am – 5pm Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd
STUDENT EXHIBITIONS: PERCEPTIONS & INTO THE WOODS Continue until Friday. See Monday for details. 9am – 5pm Foyer, Civic Offices, City Hall
ART BY YOUNG TRAVELLERS Continues all week – see Monday for details. 9am – 6pm James Barry Exhibition Centre, CIT
MY EDUCATION, MY FUTURE EXHIBITION Until Friday, see Wednesday for details.
Douglas Library, Douglas Village Shopping Centre 7pm – 9.30pm
VERNON MOUNT LECTURE
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Grange Frankfield Partnership in association with Douglas Library presents the Fourth of the Vernon Mount Lecture series. Dr Finola O’Kane, architect & author, speaks on ‘The influence of the Irish Big House and its demesne on perceptions of landscape and beauty in the 18th and 19th centuries.’ Doors open at 6:30pm. Tel: 492 4932
max 9am – 2pm
6
Colaiste Stiofain Naofa, Tramore Rd
JOIN A DRAWING CLASS You are invited to join students on the Art, Craft & Design Level 5 course at their regular Thursday morning drawing class. Some provided, but bring basic drawing materials. Free parking at college. Places very limited, so booking essential. Call Lucy Phelan, Course Director, 206 7641 or email:[email protected]
46
10am Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING
9.30am – 2pm Cork Institute of Technology
See Tuesday for details.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CIT STUDENT
Free refreshments. Booking essential as places limited. Contact Louise O’Callaghan or Elaine Dennehy, Tel: 433 5138 Email: [email protected] Web: www.cit.ie 10am – 1pm
max
16
The Lantern Community Project, 14 George’s Quay (red door)
DEALING WITH STRESS IN OUR DAILY LIVES Noreen Leahy, one of SHEP’s Community Tutors, leads this interactive workshop. Stress is a leading cause of ill health, widespread in these times of recession. Participants learn how to be pro-active in reducing its effects. Presented by the Social & Health Education Project (SHEP) & the Lantern Community Project. Info from SHEP 466 6180 or Norma at the Lantern 086 023 6442 Booking essential, call Geraldine 466 6180
FEAST OF MUSIC, SONG & DANCE All welcome to a celebration of talent with plenty of performances of music, song & dance by a variety of local groups & schools.
march 26
This event is aimed at second level students from Cork City & County who are interested in finding out what life as a CIT is like. They will experience a lecture, tour the campus & get to quiz students about CIT life. Pupils can speak with the Access Team about any queries or concerns they have about admission & other aspects of study in CIT.
10am – noon Knocknaheeny Hollyhill Youth Project, Hollyhill Shopping Centre
Among them performances by Sunday’s Well Boys’ School Band & children aged 9-13 from Sunday’s Well Girls’ School playing various instruments – both schools are involved with Music Generation Cork City, which provides music lessons across the city. Also features the Sunny Oak Dance Ensemble from Cope Foundation, Hollyhill, with My Own Two Hands & Lucia O’Neill & Charmaine Mabunda with Past the Point of Rescue; director Mary Keating. Morning organised by Cllr Tony Fitzgerald, Secretary, Knocknaheeny Youth Project 087 654 7142 or 430 3902 email: [email protected] 10am – 1pm & 2pm –4pm Knocknaheeny Community Building
EXHIBITION OF ART, PHOTOS, CRAFTS BY LOCALS See Monday for details. Continues until Friday
10am Mahon Community Centre
TAKE A WALK Join the local Walking Group this morning for a stroll in the area. The group meets here every week - new members are always welcome. Afterwards, join them for a tea or coffee. Info Mahon CDP 435 9070
47
QDS Cope Foundation, Vicars Rd
6pm – 6.45pm
TOGHER/BALLYPHEHANE COMMUNITY EDUCATION NETWORK CELEBRATES THE INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF LIGHT All welcome to an Open Morning with performances, demonstrations, information talks, activities & information/ exhibition stands. As 2015 is the International Year of Light Togher Ballyphehane Community Education Network chose light as their theme for this year’s festival. The Network is delighted to be joined by CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory for its event today. The Star Dome Portable Planetarium is its outreach astronomy tool & is available for groups to visit.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Community education provides many “lightbulb” moments, which are explored today. Light Entertainment is provided by local school & community groups. Workshops take light as their focus & include Lantern Making & Silhoutte/ Shadow Puppetry. Light Refreshments are available. Groups of 35 can be accommodated in the Star Dome. A limited amount of slots for visiting the Dome are available to groups outside the Togher/Ballyphehane Community Education Network, but bookings must be made in advance. For Star Dome Bookings call Siobhán, Tel: 431 9085 Email: [email protected]
48
Togher Ballyphehane Community Education Network has members from Home School Community Links in Maria Assumpta NS, Morning Star NS & Gaelscoil an Teaglaigh Naofa, Greenmount NS & St Marie’s of the Isle NS, Togher Girls NS, QDS- Cope Foundation, Read Write Now Adult Basic Education Service, Togher Family Centre, Ballyphehane Togher Community Development Project. Contact: Siobhán O’Dowd Network Chair, Tel: 431 9085 Email: [email protected] The Network acknowledges the support of CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory this year.
Curraheen Family Centre, Meeting Room, Church of the Real Presence, Curraheen Rd
DISPLAY OF NEEDLEWORK Join the busy needle workers at the Centre as they demonstrate & display the many strands of needlecraft they enjoy. They’ll happily share their talents in embroidery, tapestry, black work, quilting, knitting, crochet & others. All welcome. Free refreshments. New members always welcome. Info: Irene Higgins Tel: 454 1583 10.30am – 11.45am Knocknaheeny Community Building, Foyle Ave
AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTAINER PLANTING
Learn about small scale growing & planting, using containers. Classes take place during the year, organised by Cork City Partnership Outreach Office. Booking necessary for this morning’s event, call Norma Kenny 439 9503
The Curraheen Family Centre is a member of the Bishopstown Glasheen Community Education Network.
déardaoin martá 26
10.30am
11am – 1pm CityNorth College of Further Education, Hollyhill, Knocknaheeny
OPEN MORNING CityNorth College invites interested students to an Open Morning, where they’ll find out about the courses offered & be given a tour of the college. All welcome. The college is opposite the church & Hollyhill shopping centre Info: Neil Creedon 439 1782 or 086 048 8601 email [email protected] www.citynorthcollege.ie
10.30am - Noon
Bishopstown Senior Social Centre Wilton Park House
Terence MacSwiney Community College, Knocknaheeny
LEARN ABOUT MEN’S SHEDS
OPEN DAY
Come along & meet the men already involved in Bishopstown Senior Social Centre Men’s Shed, at their weekly woodworking class. New members always welcome.
Visit the college following its recent refurbishment. See the new Home Economics Room & new Lecture Theatre. There’s also a new Hairdressing Salon in CityNorth College of Further Education on the same campus.
The Men’s Sheds movement started in Australia & has become popular in Ireland & worldwide. It provides a friendly environment where men, from all walks of life, meet & take part in projects which benefit their community. A group drawn from the Bishopstown Senior Social Centre is currently involved in enhancing the neighbourhood by cleaning up the Glasheen River & making benches for use nearby. Come along to find out more. Info Roger 086 386 6975
Tel: 439 7740 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corketb.ie & search under Schools
49
Parish Family Centre, Church of the Resurrection, Farranree
60
march 26
AND EVERYONE SANG Enjoy a morning of songs, stories & poems, remembering the Big Band Era, the great female singers of the 1940s & 1950s, plus the female writers of the era. Event part of the local Secondary School’s overall theme for lifelong learning: North Pres Remembers World War Two. Guest musician Liam Hutchinson will be accompanied by Adult Education students from the English literature classes. It will have you humming and jitterbugging! Light refreshments available 10.30am – 10.45am. Limited parking on road. Bus 203 stops across road from church. The Family Centre is behind church. Booking essential – call Joanne Twomey 085 815 4328 or Margaret Cahill at Family Centre, mornings only, 430 1030.
11.30am – 12.30pm Traveller Culture Exhibit, Cork Public Museum, Fitzgerald's Park
LAUNCH OF DOCUMENTARIES ON TRAVELLER CULTURE Everyone is welcome to the launch of documentaries on Traveller Culture to be screened at the museum during 2015. The Traveller Culture Exhibit is a permanent exhibition developed between Cork Traveller Women's Network (CTWN) & Cork Public Museum. It celebrates the culture & heritage of the Irish Traveller community & includes a full sized barrel top wagon, copper craft, quilts, and old & contemporary photographs. The new audio visual display was developed through CTWN in partnership with Cork Public Museum & funded through a Cork City Council Heritage Grant. Tel: 086 385 0136 Email: [email protected] 11.30am – 1pm
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Glen Resource and Sports Centre, The Glen
LEARN HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH max
12 11.30am – 12.30pm Family Resource Centre, Mahon
TRY A YOGA CLASS Join the regular yoga class & learn its benefits. See Tuesday 7.30pm for more details. After trying a class, you are welcome to join. Booking essential, call Maeve or Elsa Tel: 435 8866 Email: [email protected]
50
Enjoy a taster workshop with Brenda Ratcliffe, Dip Holistic dietetics, Dip Ki Massage, M.I.H.C.A. in healthy eating, gentle exercise, stress management techniques, relaxation & yoga. This is an on-going course which participants can register for afterwards. Info & to book, call Linda McKernan Tel: 087 196 2025 or Email: [email protected] Organised by Cork City Partnership.
Noon Terence MacSwiney Community College, Knocknaheeny
DANCE PERFORMANCE
march 26
Enjoy watching students from Colaiste Stiofain Naofa’s Performing Arts Dance course. All welcome. You are promised a wonderful show from the talented students, performing under the direction of Jane Kellaghan. Info 439 7740 or email: [email protected] Noon Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See Tuesday for details. Noon – 12.30pm Room 312, CIT Cork School of Music, Union Quay
CORK COMMUNITY MUSIC NETWORK – INFO SESSION Learn about Cork Community Music Network (CCMN), whose members are involved in a variety of activities including Music Education, Music in Health & Social Care settings, Community Choirs & Orchestras, Music for specific groups (eg Early Years & Tots, youth groups, the elderly, people with disabilities). Hear about the new Community Music Ireland website, featuring profiles of organisations & individual musicians, and the Facebook group, open to all. Call Paul Facey Hunter, Tel: 466 3103 or 086 175 5917 Email: [email protected]
Noon – 1pm
15
Assistive Technology Service, Ground Floor, Student Centre, CIT
ASSISTANCE & SUPPORT FOR CIT STUDENTS The Learning Support Officer & the Assistive Technology Officer explain their roles with students, focusing on study skills & techniques that promote a lifelong learning culture plus technologies that enhance this process. Useful for all students & parents, not only those with learning differences; gain an understanding how learning needs are met through Learning Support & Assistive Technology. More info 432 6744 Places limited, book by March 23, only by email: [email protected] When booking ask about parking. Noon – 2pm Family Resource Centre, Mahon
max
5
FELTING WORKSHOP Noon Central Library, Grand Parade
LAUNCH - COLLECTED WORKS Liam Ronayne, Cork City Librarian, launches a booklet called Collected Works, published by the Cork Non-Fiction Writers Group in conjunction with the Cercle d’Ecriture of the Alliance Française of Cork. Info 431 0677 email [email protected]
Felting is an age-old craft. The technique is basic, requires very little experience or tools, and “mistakes” may well lead to interesting results. You work from the fiber (most often sheep’s wool) to make a felted fabric or product using soap & water; there is no spinning, knitting, crocheting or weaving involved. This is a regular Textiles class here on Monday mornings. After attending this workshop, you are welcome to join the class. Parking available. Booking necessary, as places limited, call Maeve or Elsa 435 8866 or e-mail: [email protected]
51
Bishopstown Senior Social Centre, Wilton Park House
St Mark’s Boys’ National School, The Glen
COMPUTERS FOR THE PETRIFIED Details see Tuesday. 12.30pm – 2pm
1pm – 2pm
CONCERT BY CORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC
St. Brendan’s Girls’ National School, The Glen
The students & members of the Cork Academy of Music showcase their music & singing in a concert suitable for people of all ages. All welcome. Find out about courses offered by Cork Academy of Music.
12.30pm – 2pm Welcome English Language Centre, Convent Place, off Proby’s Quay, Crosses Green
LEARN FROM OTHER CULTURES Come to the Welcome English Language Centre to meet some of its students & teachers. Learn about the culture, food, music of some faraway places, including an exhibition & food tasting from the countries featured.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
All welcome to see a display of crafts, an exhibition of science projects & to enjoy performances of mime and song. No need to book. Organised in association with the HSE Health Action Zone. Info 450 6225
Cork Vision Centre @ St Peter’s, North Main St
Info from Vision Centre, Tel: 427 9925 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corkvisioncentre.co
Welcome English is a voluntary community organisation, co-ordinated by the Sisters of Mercy. It was set up to provide English classes for those seeking asylum & for refugees, who come from over 50 different countries worldwide. This is a regular festival event, enjoyed by many. All welcome. Turn right off Proby’s Quay, before La Dolce Vita Restaurant. Tel: 431 6537 Email: [email protected] Web: www.welcomeenglish.ie
52
ST MARK’S - TALENTS & GIFTS
max
50
CONCERT BY SCHOOL BAND All the students from 3rd to 6th class at St. Brendan’s School are in its band. Once a week normal schoolwork is put aside for music lessons with a variety of tutors. The students receive tuition in recorder, flute, trumpet, guitar & percussion & regularly perform in various locations around the city. Once finished in primary school the students are each given a place in an after school programme to continue with their music lessons, an option many of the students choose to take through secondary school & college. Event presented by St Brendan’s NS/CIT Cork School of Music. Please book your place, call Caoimhe Conlon 086 3209442 Email: [email protected]
max
8
Meet at the green on Connaught Avenue, Off Donovan’s Road, near UCC
CYCLE SKILLS FOR ADULTS See Monday at 10am for details. 1.30pm – 4.30pm CityNorth College of Further Education, Hollyhill, Knocknaheeny 1pm – 5pm The Teaching Rooms, Sidney Place, Wellington Rd
max
106
INTRODUCTION TO SHIATSU This practical workshop introduces you to the basic techniques of this unique bodywork form. Learn to give a simple, relaxing treatment to family & friends. Also includes are acupoints for First Aid, stretching & relaxation techniques to develop your energy using Qi kung & Do-in. This is a stand alone class, but can be the start of further training. Parking is 2 hour disc on street. Tea/coffee available. Bring loose, comfortable clothing to change into. Booking essential as places limited. Call Mirabel 087 674 3954. Workshop repeated on Sunday morning. 1.10pm – 2pm
OPEN AFTERNOON & WORKSHOP All welcome to a presentation on free part-time courses at CityNorth College; an opportunity to get information on the Back to Education Initiative. The presentation starts at 1.30pm. At 2.30pm there’s a workshop called Photo Manipulation the Basics. Learn the tricks to combine elements of different photographs & how to enhance them & leave with the essential skills to start creating your own digital art using free software. Spaces are limited for the workshop, so booking is advised.
déardaoin martá 26
1.30pm– 4.30pm
Tel: 439 1782 or 086 108 9899 Email: [email protected] Web: www.citynorthcollege.ie CityNorth is opposite the church/Hollyhill Shopping Centre.
Foyer, CIT Cork School of Music
LUNCHTIME CONCERT GUITAR PLUS Guitars Plus is a 12 member orchestra of classical guitarists, senior students & graduates of the CIT Cork School of Music. Their director is Jerry Creedon & their programme promises a real feast of great music. Some seating, wheelchair accessible, park on street, Bistro on site. Info Edel Sullivan 087 234 4669
53
25
Coláiste Chríost Rí, Capwell Rd, Turner’s Cross
LEARN ABOUT A SCHOOL HORTICULTURE PROJECT Staff & pupils involved in the Coláiste Chríost Rí Horticulture Project take you on a tour of their garden & describe associated activities. They’ll explain how the project has developed as a crosscurricular learning activity. Marking 2015 UN International Year of Soils, you’ll hear from Jan van Soest on the importance of healthy soils in growing healthy food. Event organised by Coláiste Chríost Rí Secondary School & Cork Food Policy Council.
2pm – 4pm Room 106, Colaiste Stiofain Naofa, Tramore Rd
max
10
PET PRINT WORKSHOP You are invited to a pop up pet print workshop hosted by the college’s community arts practice students. Bring along a photo of your pet & make an original dry point print. Participants will learn this simple & exciting technique & take home a fabulous portrait of their beloved pet. Booking preferred, as places limited. Tel: 206 7641 Email: [email protected]
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Booking essential – call Bernie Connolly 023 883 9700 or 083 146 8064 or email: [email protected] School is behind Christ the King Church. Park in school grounds; enter by lower gate on Capwell Road - drive slowly! 2pm – 3.30pm St John’s Central College, Sawmill St
2pm – 2.45pm
Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Off George’s Quay
See Wednesday at 9.30am for details.
TRY A BEGINNER’S FRENCH CLASS Brush up on the basics or try French for the first time with Marie José O’Sullivan at this taster class. Info 431 0677 email info@ alliancefrancaisecork.com
54
THE FREE UNIVERSITY: ACE AT UCC PUBLIC LECTURE PROGRAMME
max
march 26
Room 102, Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, UCC
THE FEMINISATION OF POVERTY IN IRELAND Liz Madden’s presentation looks at the growing trend of poverty amongst female-led households. In Ireland single mothers are increasingly affected by poverty, with one-parent families experiencing the highest deprivation rates (56%). Welfare dependency, low-levels of education & lack of childcare all contribute towards the feminisation of poverty. Invisible factors like stigmatisation & ingrained attitudes have a huge impact on the lives of single mothers, causing women to experience low confidence, which prevents them from accessing opportunities. 3pm – 4pm
FEAR OF CRIME: THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA “Fearful people are more dependant, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures…they may accept and welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities and other anxieties.” Reiner. Clíodhna O’Callaghan examines the link between various criminological theories and the fear of crime. It focuses on the role played by the media, for example: Is the media increasing the instance of crime? Does the media influence the opinion of the public & politicians on criminal justice issues? 4pm – 5pm
FROM SLAVERY TO PRESIDENCY: AMERICA’S BATTLE WITH RACISM Anthony Angelini explores the issue of race through the prism of the antislavery movement in America in the 19th century. He also discusses the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s & the election & re-election of Barack Obama. He looks at the social situation & the impact of literature, art & film in breaking down the barriers between black and white.
For details of venue & parking see Monday. Booking essential, call 490 4700 For more information email [email protected] www.ucc.ie/en/study/ace
55
Cork City & County Archives Service, Seamus Murphy Building, 32 Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool
40
The Spanish Studies Centre 19 St Patrick’s Hill
LEARN ABOUT CORK’S HISTORY & HERITAGE An Illustrated History of Cork is the title of today’s talk by Liam Ó hUigín, continuing the series during festival week. Places limited, booking preferred. Email [email protected] Tel: 450 5876 Map on www.corkarchives.ie/visitus 2pm – 3.30pm
LEARN ABOUT A SCHOOL HORTICULTURE PROJECT
LEARN A LITTLE RUSSIAN Try a class for beginners in Russian & also gain an insight into Russian culture. For more details see Monday. Booking advised, call Elena Morets Tel: 086 311 1193 Email: [email protected] Web: www.spanishstudiescentrecork.com 6pm – 8pm Beer Garden, The Franciscan Well, North Mall
COMIC WORKSHOP/ DRINK & DRAW
Are you interested in learning how to write & draw a comic & meet lots of like-minded creative folks from around Cork? Come to this free workshop hosted by both Cork 3pm Comic Creators & Cork Drink & Draw. Explore the aspects of creating comic University College Cork books, from writing, character design & GEORGE BOOLE to inking & lettering. You’ll get WALKING TOUR OF UCC storytelling insights from professional comic artists & For details see Monday. writers, and afterwards hang out & scribble max & doodle with other artists at the Drink & Draw. Bring your own art supplies. No skill 4pm - 4.30pm & 4.30pm - 5pm 16 level required, everyone over 18 welcome. The Glen Resource & Sports Centre Contact: [email protected] Change email for bookings – from info@ cef.ie to [email protected]
TRY SNOW TUBING
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Sit in an inflatable Snow Tube and slide down Munster’s only Ski Slope. Great for families; suitable for adults and children over 4. www.skicork.ie
Cork Comic Creators meet monthly on a Monday - see Facebook corkcomiccreators. Cork Drink & Draw meet at Franciscan Well twice a month see Facebook drinkdrawcork.
Booking essential – max 16 per half hour session. Call 455 0511
6.45pm – 7.45pm St Anthony’s Sports Hall, Ballinlough
KARATE KIDS – TRY A FREE CLASS Children aged 5+ can join the regular class here & try Karate. See Monday for details. Free class in Carrigaline on Friday.
56
7pm – 8pm
THE HONAN CHAPEL & ITS MOSAIC FLOOR Enjoy a guided talk with James Cronin, School of History & Adult Continuing Education at UCC. He discusses the artists Lehmann James Oppenheimer (1868-1916) & his son, Eric Newton (1893-1965), the designers of the mosaic floor in the Honan Chapel built between May 1915 and November 1916, at the zenith of the Irish Arts & Crafts Movement. He describes the Honan commission as an artistic experiment in which a new Irish identity was forged through engagement with an imagined Celtic past on the eve of national independence.
déardaoin martá 26
7pm – 9pm Honan Chapel, University College Cork
8pm – 9pm
CÓR CÚIL AODHA - A PERFORMANCE The famous Cór Cúil Aodha, founded by Seán Ó Riada, sings in the Honan Chapel. This is the first visit by this all men’s choir to UCC’s historic chapel. These two events are part of the showcasing of Adult Continuing Education at UCC (ACE) during the festival. Tel: 490 4700 Email: [email protected] Web: www.ucc.ie/study/ace
7pm – 9pm Mahon Youth Centre, The Portacabins, Mahon Drive
OPEN ART STUDIO Members of Mahon Men’s Art Group invite you to see a display of their work. Details see Monday.
57
Curtis Auditorium, CIT Cork School of Music, Union Quay
Bowen Room, Gresham Metropole Hotel, MacCurtain St
SENIOR RECITAL COMPETITION FINAL
JAMES CONNOLLY - LECTURE & DISCUSSION
The Final of the Senior Recital Competition showcases some of the most talented students at CIT Cork School of Music. It features 4-5 students aged under 19 who each perform a programme 20-25 minutes long. Expect to hear a variety of instruments. The finalists were chosen during the preliminary rounds last weekend. All welcome, no need to book. Info Noranne Elliott, Tel: 480 7310 Email: [email protected]
On 8th April 1916, just before the Easter Rising, the Irish Citizen Army raised the green flag over Liberty Hall. Connolly declared: "The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.” In his lecture Diarmaid Ó Cadhla of thefuture Initiative argues that Connolly was proud to raise the green flag of Ireland & that today, dogmatists & sham socialists criticise Connolly, they deny a common national interest & claim that there are only class interests. Booking appreciated. Thefuture Initiative is an association of individuals investigating topics of Irish history & contemporary developments, producing analysis of current affairs & politics. The association is non-party political, it facilitates discussion on major issues in modern Ireland. Tel: 242 8310 or 086 3805005 Email: [email protected]
7.30pm Turner’s Cross Community Centre
max
15
LEARN TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Grainne O’Driscoll & Martin Forest discuss the importance of taking care of ourselves, exploring the practical tools such as movement, meditation & breathing work. Book by calling Grainne 087 900 8654. Parking may be available. Check Facebook/Twitter page (TurnersCrossCA) or call Joe on 086 259 1362. Event presented by Turner’s Cross Community Association. The Centre is opposite the funeral home, beside the Credit Union, close to the church. 8pm - midnight Beer Garden, The Franciscan Well, North Mall
DRINK & DRAW 58
Tory Top Rd Library, Ballyphehane 11am
STARTING YOUR FAMILY TREE
2pm
march 27
Hear from Olive Coleman of the Cork Genealogical Society how to start researching your family. All welcome.
DOWN MEMORY LANE
10.30am
CATERPILLAR INTERACTIVE SHOW
Take a nostalgic trip down “Pana” in the 1950s & 1960s with local historian Liam OhUigin. All welcome. Tel: 492 4934
See separate entry. 11am – noon
Frank O’Connor Library, Mayfield
GRAMOPHONE RECITAL
All welcome to a recital with Willie Hennessy. 11.30am – 1pm
ESERVICES INFORMATION SESSION Learn how to download books and magazines from Cork City Library’s website and manage your library account online using the new library App. Bring your device and staff will be available to help you. Tel: 492 4900
Douglas Library, Douglas Village Shopping Centre
2.30pm
STARTING YOUR FAMILY TREE Learn from Ann Marie Coughlan, a member of Cork Genealogical Society, how to start researching your family’s past.
Blackpool Library, Redforge Rd 10am – Noon
COMMUNITY ART Last chance to see the Cork City Partnership Community Art Exhibition - displaying work from communities across the northside of the city. See Tuesday for details. Tel: 492 4933
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre
11.30am – 1pm
DID YOU KNOW?
CURRAHEEN FAMILY CENTRE EXHIBITION
Helen Roche of the Citizens Information Outreach Service gives a talk & information session covering pensions, wills & succession, entitlements.
Painting & Stitching, Arts & Crafts. See Monday for details. Continues until end of March.
Includes a questions & answers session.Tel: 4024932
The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano.
RITA LYNCH EXHIBITION Tel: 492 4950
LEARN ABOUT THE VIKINGS Exhibition of research by service users at the Brook Day Centre. Ends today, for details see Tuesday.
59
friday martá 27 dé april 11 hAoine
9am – 5pm 9am – Noon Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, Tramore Rd Room 412, St John’s Central College,
STUDENT EXHIBITIONS: PERCEPTIONS & INTO THE WOODS Ends today. See Monday for details.
SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY All are welcome to an Information Session about the course in Sustainable Technology available at St John’s. Enquiries email: [email protected] Visit the website www.stjohnscollege.ie to see all the courses & to apply online or call 425 5500
9am – 5pm Foyer, Civic Offices, City Hall
ART BY YOUNG TRAVELLERS See Monday for details.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
10am – Noon Family Resource Centre, Mahon
max
12
LEARN ABOUT AROMATHERAPY At this class, specially organised for the festival, you’ll learn how to use aromatic plant extracts & essential oils for healing & cosmetic purposes. They enhance the mood & feeling of wellbeing; reduce pain; encourage restful sleep; improve digestion & circulation. If you enjoy it, you can join the regular Monday morning class. Parking available. Please book, as places limited. Call Maeve or Elsa, Tel: 435 8866 or Email: [email protected] 10am – 1pm & 2pm –4pm Knocknaheeny Community Building
9am – 6pm
EXHIBITION OF ART, PHOTOS, CRAFTS BY LOCALS
James Barry Exhibition Centre, CIT
Ends today, see Monday for details.
MY EDUCATION, MY FUTURE EXHIBITION
10am
Ends today, see Wednesday for details.
Lifetime Lab, Lee Rd
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See Tuesday for details.
60
LEARN ABOUT FOOD WASTE & COMPOSTING See Tuesday for details. 12.30pm – 2.30pm
max
LEARN TO MAKE BREAD max
Central Library, Grand Parade
75
CATERPILLAR SHOW FOR TODDLERS This show is for the under fours, with their parents or childminders, and presented by Cork City Childcare. The Caterpillar Show is about a little boy who is fascinated by the way caterpillars transform into butterflies. He goes on a journey of learning that change is good throughout life when handled with patience, courage and acceptance. During the interactive show, children will learn about acceptance, collaboration, patience & the courage to be themselves. It’s brought to Cork by the Abracadabra School for Creative Kids, which tours the country - see www. abracadabracreativeschool.net or call Irina Negrila 085 1890191 Booking essential for this morning’s show. Call Ruth, Cork City Childcare, Tel: 435 7500 or Email [email protected] Show for 4-9 year olds at 3pm Saturday. 10.30am Curraheen Family Centre, Meeting Room, Church of the Real Presence, Curraheen Rd
SILK PAINTING WORKSHOP Gifted artist & dress designer Ann Kearns leads a workshop in silk painting & demonstrates this very accessible art form, showing you how to create your own silk scarf, wall hanging or picture. All welcome. Free refreshments. Irene Higgins Tel: 454 1583 The Curraheen Family Centre is a member of the Bishopstown Glasheen Community Education Network.
Learn to make different types of bread, by experiencing a regular class held 5 weeks at a time throughout the year. If you are interested in joining the class, you are welcome. Parking available. Places limited, booking necessary, call Maeve or Elsa 435 8866 e-mail: [email protected] 1pm – 2pm Cork Vision Centre @ St Peter’s , North Main Street
martá 27
max
30
LEARN SOME BASIC PHOTOGRAPHY John Finn, member of the Cork Camera Group, gives a talk & demonstration of basic photography, coinciding with the group’s exhibition on show here during March. Booking recommended - Call Finola Horgan Tel: 427 9925 or Email: [email protected] 1.10pm – 2pm Foyer, CIT Cork School of Music, Union Quay
LUNCHTIME CONCERT - SONGS ON THE QUAY Enjoy a showcase of original songs by students of the CITCSM BA in Popular Music & B.Mus degrees, songwriting lecturer Chris Ahern. Some seating, wheelchair accessible, park on street, Bistro on site. Info Edel Sullivan 087 234 4669
61
3pm University College Cork
GEORGE BOOLE WALKING TOUR OF UCC march 27
See Monday for details. Final tour tomorrow at noon. 3pm – 4pm Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Off George’s Quay
BEAUTIFUL VENICE max
2pm – 4pm The Lantern Project, Georges Quay (corner of Dunbar Street)
THE GAP GREENER LIVING PROGRAMME
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Come to this interactive overview of the GAP Greener Living Programme – waste, water, energy, transport & consumerism. It’s an opportunity to examine some of the products & appliances which conserve resources in your home. Bring along your old magazines to make a bowl or a coaster. Cork Environmental Forum regularly runs Global Action Plan Greener Living programmes; this event allows you to get an overview of the training & create a useful item. Booking necessary. Contact Bernie Connolly, Tel: 023 8839700 or 083 1468064 Email: [email protected]
max 2.30pm
40
Cork City & County Archives Service, Seamus Murphy Building, 32 Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool
LEARN ABOUT CORK’S HISTORY & HERITAGE The last in the series of talks here during festival week is Stories from the Archives: Cork in the 1920s & 1930s by Councillor & local historian Kieran McCarthy. Places limited, booking preferred. Tel: 450 5876 Email: [email protected] Map on www.corkarchives.ie/visitus
62
Cultural co-ordinator and native Venetian, Susanna Fabris, takes you on a fascinating virtual tour of one of the most famous cities in the world - Bella Venezia! All welcome. Tel: 431 0677 Email: [email protected]
3.30pm – 4.30pm Knocknaheeny Community Building, Foyle Ave
GUITAR CLASS PERFORMS Enjoy a performance by up & coming musicians who attend the weekly guitar class here. Organised by Cork City Partnership Knocknaheeny Outreach Office. Booking necessary, call Norma Kenny 439 9503
6.30pm – 9.30pm CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory
MOON WATCH
6.30pm – 8pm The Spanish Studies Centre, 19 St Patrick’s Hill
TRY A SPANISH CLASS Join a class for beginners in Spanish & also enjoy an introduction to the culture of Spain. A variety of courses in Portuguese, Chinese, Russian & English are also available here. For details see Monday. Booking advised, call Rosario Gomez Mendes 086 311 1193
march 27
Join astronomers from CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory & Cork Astronomy Club in the courtyard at Blackrock Castle for a guided observing evening under the First Quarter Moon. The moon is a spectacular sight when seen through a telescope. Dark, flat plains called maria, deep craters & bright rays of ejected material pepper the rugged surface. Although we see the moon all the time, many of us do not take time to consider our planet’s only satellite. All welcome, no need to book. Note that this event is weather dependant! Info: CIT BCO 432 6120 Email: [email protected]
7pm-9pm The Learning Room, Camden Palace Hotel
VISIT THE SEWING CLUB
max
16 6.30pm – 9pm The Granary, Bessboro, Blackrock
Welcome to the weekly meeting of the Sewing Club, organised by Anthemcorset Couture. It’s a place to share ideas & skills. Come along with your sewing project to finish it in good company; bring your own fabric/thread & tools. Email: [email protected] or call Camden Palace Tel: 455 2383
WORKSHOP FOR PARENTS Tutors from SHEP, the Social & Health Education Project, Margaret Whelan & Margaret Bray, lead this interactive workshop on Family Communication. Topics covered will include: the ‘good enough’ parent, listening, self-esteem, setting limits, concerns related to Social Media & bullying. Info: 466 6180 or Email: [email protected] Booking essential, call Geraldine Flanagan 466 6180
63
friday martá 27 dé april 11 hAoine
7.30 –9.30pm Spailpín Fánach, South Main St , Opposite Beamish & Crawford
SCRIBES Writers read from their works & discuss what inspired them in an event inspired by Féile an Phobail, our festival partner. Chaired by Seamus Hosey. Seamus Hosey retired after 30 years as a Producer in the Features & Arts Department at RTE Radio 1, where he produced many programmes including The Arts Show, The Poetry Programme, The Book on One, Speaking Volumes. He also organised & produced the annual Francis MacManus Short Story Competition which continues to provide a platform for emerging Irish writers. He chronicled tours by the Abbey & Gate Theatres to Broadway, Russia & Israel in a series of acclaimed documentaries. He is a member of the Literary Advisory Committee for Listowel Writers Week.
Seamus Hosey
Danny Morrison is a writer who lives in West Belfast. He’s secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust & until last year was chairperson of Féile an Phobail. He was the national director of publicity for Sinn Fein in the 1980s, served time as an IRA prisoner, and is a wellknown political commentator in newspapers, on TV & radio. Since the mid 90s he has concentrated on writing & reviewing. Among his books are the novels On the Back of the Swallow, The Wrong Man; All the Dead Voices, a memoir, & Rebel Columns, a collection of articles. Rudi: in the Shadow of Knulp, inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1915 novel, was published last year.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Twenty-five years ago Mercier Press, Cork, published Danny’s first novel, West Belfast. However, the writer never actually got to formally launch it until 2015 because he was arrested & sentenced to eight years in jail shortly after the release of the book.
Danny Morrison
Now re-issued (including new re-writes) the novel tells the story of the nationalist community, alienated & resentful, and covers the struggle for civil rights, the emergence of the IRA after the Belfast pogroms in August 1969 & the arguments within the O’Neill family over the IRA campaign when their son John becomes involved. Cónal Creedon is a novelist, playwright and documentary film-maker. Cónal’s work has been translated into German, Bulgarian, Italian and Chinese. His books include: Pancho & Lefty Ride Out [1995], Passion Play [1999], Second City Trilogy [2007] and his latest The Immortal Deed of Michael O’Leary [2015].
64
Cónal Creedon
friday april 11 dé hAoine martá 27
His stage plays include The Trial of Jesus [2000]. Glory Be To the Father [2001], & the Second City Trilogy [2005] – After Luke[2005], When I was God [2005], The Cure [2005] – produced at home & internationally; receiving high critical acclaim in China during World Expo 2010, in Smart Shanghai Magazine, Shanghai Today magazine and the Shanghai Daily newspaper. The production was also well received in the US by reviewers at the New York Times, The Village Magazine & Metro Media. Creedon’s stage plays picked up a number of awards at the 2009 & 2013 New York Theatre Awards, including: Nominated Best Playwright [2013], Awarded Best Director [2009] and Best Actor [2013]. Cónal’s film documentaries have been screened by RTE TV, and have had numerous public screenings, including at the Irish Pavilion in Shanghai China, during World Expo 2010. Cónal has written over 60 hours of radio drama, his work has been broadcast on RTÉ, BBC, Radio 4 & The World Service. Martina Devlin is an Omagh-born author & journalist. Her literary prizes include a Hennessy Literary Award & the Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchett Prize. A current affairs commentator for the Irish Independent, she has been named columnist of the year by the National Newspapers of Ireland. Her books include Ship of Dreams about the Titanic disaster, while her latest novel is The House Where It Happened, a ghost story inspired by Ireland’s only mass witchcraft trial in 1711. She is a director of the Irish Writers Centre.
Martina Devlin Leanne O’Sullivan comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork and has published three collections with Bloodaxe Books: Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010, and The Mining Road (2013). She was given the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2009 and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2011, and received a UCC Alumni Award in 2012. She is currenty Writer-in-Residence at UCC. Cross border & cross community initiatives are supported by the festival, Féile an Phobail, Co-operation Ireland’s Cork branch & Cork City Council. All welcome. Info: Tina 086 603 5552
Leanne O’Sullivan
friday april 11 martá 28 sé sathairn
11am – 1pm CIT GAA Stadium, behind Leisureworld, Bishopstown
TRAIN WITH YOUR SPORTING HEROES
Central Library, Grand Parade 3pm
CATERPILLAR INTERACTIVE SHOW See separate entry.
Bishopstown Library, Wilton Shopping Centre 2pm
MINDFULNESS WORKSHOP To enquire about this workshop with Bernard Crowley call 492 4950.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
max
200
Fergal Desmond and Darragh Broderick, Douglas CIT’s Access Service and Marketing Unit together with the GAA Officer, Athletics, Soccer & Rugby Clubs in CIT, host a sports event for young people. Cork’s Sporting Heroes will be on hand to train & teach youngsters skills in a range of sports which include hurling/camogie, football, athletics, soccer and rugby.
All day
CURRAHEEN FAMILY CENTRE EXHIBITION Painting & Stitching, Arts & Crafts. See Monday for details. Continues until end of March. All day
RITA LYNCH EXHIBITION The life & times of the Macroom-born soprano. Tel: 492 4950
66
Grace Nagle, Mallow, Maeve O'Leary, Douglas and Lily Carey-Murphy, Ballincollig with Jimmy Barrry Murphy For age group – 8 to 12 year olds. Bring hurleys, helmets, gumshields on the day if possible. Tracksuits/shorts/runners/boots essential! Bookings on first come, first served basis. Book by logging on to www.events.cit.ie Groups please email [email protected]
Coisceim Counselling Centre, 23 South Bank, Crosses Green
max
8
LEARN TO DEAL WITH LOSS & CHANGE
Colin McCarthy, Miles Rothwell, Jane O'Callaghan, Cathal McCarthy, Dylan Twomey, Michael O'Callaghan, Darragh Broderick, Shane Lynch, Zach Lynch, Tom McGrath
Kay O’Mahony, tutor with the Social & Health Education Project (SHEP), leads this interactive workshop for people experiencing loss & change, through bereavement, separation, ill health, redundancy, or other cause, in a safe space where issues can be explored. Booking essential, as places limited. Call Geraldine at SHEP 466 6180 & ask for directions to venue.
friday sé sathairn martá 28
10am – 1pm
11am Meet at the Monument, Grand Parade
CORK WALK - CITY CENTRE ISLAND
Marian Heffernan with Robbie Walsh, Ballincollig, Sean Lyons, Ballincollig, Laura O'Flynn, Carrigaline, Liam Lyons, Ballinora and Daniel O'Flynn, Carrigaline
Author of books about Cork, Antoin O’Callaghan guides you on this walk which traces the development of the city centre island following the in-filling of river channels that ran between a series of marshy islands. Along the way you’ll see many buildings of interest & the bridges spanning the north & south channels of the River Lee, all playing crucial roles in Cork’s story. Info: Tina 086 603 5552 Self-guided walks were introduced by Cork City Council in recent years – this is the orange route, you can enjoy Shandon (red) & South Parish (blue) on Sunday.
11am – 12.30pm The Spanish Studies Centre, 19 St Patrick’s Hill
TRY A CHINESE CLASS Sean Horgan, Fairhill, Alan Nagle, Churchfield, Jack Lynch, Gurranbraher, Darragh Clarke, Shanakiel and PJ Lee Reynolds
Join a class for beginners in Chinese & also enjoy an introduction to the culture of China. A variety of courses in Portuguese, Spanish, Russian & English also available here. For details see Monday. Booking advised, call Cheery Lim 086 311 1193
67
friday march 28april 11 saturday
Noon University College Cork
GEORGE BOOLE WALKING TOUR OF UCC For details see Monday.
max
15
2pm – 3.30pm The Learning Room, Camden Palace Hotel, Camden Quay
LEARN TO FACEPAINT Ever been stuck for your kid’s birthday party or Hallowe’en? Anyone can facepaint. Learn how in this workshop with Niamh Leonard, with easy, amazing tips. For adults & accompanied children. No paints required. Booking essential as places limited. Call Niamh 087 756 8530 or email [email protected]
11.30am – 2.30pm Shandon Community Green Garden, Shandon St
VISIT NEW SHANDON COMMUNITY GREEN GARDEN
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
The Shandon Community Green Garden is a new urban green space for locals to get involved in, to learn from, to showcase sustainability, and to promote community pride & development. Today’s event includes a guided tour & discussion, nature talk & information table & an opportunity for the public to get involved by ‘planting in’ a new veggie bed & flowers. If anyone would like to contribute seeds, plants, shrubs, berry bushes, please bring them along - they’ll find a home! All welcome. Child friendly. Parking on-street only. Garden is on the original site of St Anne’s Shandon, its gate is on the right of the Post Office on Shandon Street. The garden is behind the car park of the Pope’s Quay Court apartments. Those involved aim to meet weekly but can be weather & volunteer dependent. They communicate opening times via email, txt & Facebook. Contact Shandon Area Renewal Association, Tel: 086 204 6357 Email: [email protected] Web: www.facebook.com/shandonarea
68
2pm – 6pm
max
6 Room 101 Radio Studio, Camden Palace Hotel LEARN TO HOST ON LIVE RADIO Alex, broadcaster on Room 101 Radio, invites you to discover how programmes are made on a Community Station. Try yourself behind the microphone – live! Book your slot as only 6 places per hour. Call Alex, Tel: 086 215 1117 or Email: [email protected] MAX 6 per hour
3pm
Blackpool Community Centre & Environs, Next to Blackpool Church
Central Library, Grand Parade
75
OPEN AFTERNOON AT BLACKPOOL COMMUNITY CENTRE
Presented by Cork City Childcare, today’s show is for children aged 4 - 9 with their parents & childminders. The Caterpillar Show is performed by Abracadabra School for Creative Kids, which tours the country see www.abracadabracreativeschool.net Booking essential - call Ruth, Cork City Childcare at 435 7500 or email [email protected] For more details of the show see Friday at 10.30am
march 28
All welcome to an Open Afternoon at the Centre, to learn about all the courses being run here, including Introduction to Computers & Digital Photography. Contributions from local groups celebrate the artistic & creative energy of the locality - including the Butter Exchange Band performing at Blackpool Plaza during the afternoon. Also there’s a Local History presentation on the origins of Blackpool. Teas/coffees & biscuits served. Organisations involved include Blackpool Community Centre, Butter Exchange Band & Artlink.
THE CATERPILLAR INTERACTIVE SHOW
Tel: 450 1787 Email: [email protected]
max
2.30pm – 3.15pm
Alliance Française de Cork, Enterprise House, 36 Mary St, Off George’s Quay
FRENCH FOR KIDS Introduce your children to French at this fun introductory class with Alliance Française tutor Hélène Bouvier. Booking necessary, as places very limited, call 431 0677 or email info@alliancefrancaisecork. com 7.30pm – 10pm Vertigo Suite, County Hall
EARTH HOUR
2.30pm & 3.30pm Cork Butter Museum, Shandon
TOUR CORK’S BUTTER MUSEUM Free admission & guided tour of this unique museum, which tells the story of Ireland’s most important food export & the world’s largest butter market. Come early. Tel: 430 0600 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corkbutter.museum More tours Sunday morning.
Join Cork Environmental Forum, CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory, Cork Astronomy Club & the Nimbus Centre to celebrate the global EarthHour event & the International Year of Light 2015. Event includes the screening of Losing the Light, a short film; speakers on the theme of light pollution; an exploration of alternative light sources. See the lights of Cork City from this amazing vantage point. Event supported by Cork County Council. Booking essential only through Cork Environmental Forum’s website www.cef.ie Eventbrite booking is under What’s New Section on Home Page.
69
friday march 29april 11 sunday
11am Meet at Car Park next to Blackrock Castle
DISCOVER THE MURALS ON THE BLACKROCK WALKWAY Join a guided stroll along the Blackrock Walkway to see the murals created by Mahon CDP’s Men’s Art Group working under the guidance of visiting mural artists from Belfast. It’s one of the cross-border & crosscommunity projects which are the result of the twinning of Cork Lifelong Learning Festival with Féile an Phobail in Belfast. You’ll hear from the young men involved in the project about the other murals they have created in Cork and Belfast, and what their participation has meant to them. Later this year Belfast mural artist Frank Quigley returns to work with them again. Contact Mr Viv Sadd at Mahon CDP Tel: 435 9070 The Mural Project is supported by Cooperation Ireland’s Cork branch & Cork City Council.
11am – 4pm The Teaching Rooms, Sidney Place, Wellington Rd
max
10 6
INTRODUCTION TO SHIATSU This practical workshop introduces you to the basic techniques of this unique bodywork form. For more details see Thursday at 1pm. Tea/coffee available, bring lunch if you wish. Booking essential as places limited. Call Diana Tel: 487 2324 or 087 2070132 Email: [email protected]
11am & Noon Cork Butter Museum, Shandon
TOUR CORK’S BUTTER MUSEUM For details see Saturday
Noon Meet outside Ford’s Pub, South Gate Bridge
CORK WALKS - EXPLORE SOUTH PARISH Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Local historian Ronnie Herlihy guides you through South Parish, one of the oldest & historically significant parts of Cork. The walk shows the development of the city from watery beginnings to industry, including mills & breweries. Info: Tina 086 603 5552 Self-guided Cork Walks were introduced in recent years by Cork City Council - you can enjoy the Shandon (red) route at 2.30pm.
70
dé domhnaigh martá 29
2.30pm Meet Daunt’s Square, St Patrick’s St
CORK WALKS - EXPLORE SHANDON Peter Foynes, Curator of the Cork Butter Museum, brings you on an historical journey through Shandon, using the City Council’s red walking tour. Walk the streets of what was once the centre of international trading in this city of merchants. The political history of Cork is revealed through the naming & renaming of its streets. Info: Tina 086 603 5552
7pm Montenotte Hotel, St Luke’s
2.15pm – 4.45pm
TRY TANGO
Fitzgeralds Park, The Mardyke
Experience Tango in an introductory class taught by members of Cork Argentine Tango Society. Come and experience the dance, the music & the passion! Try it for yourself or just observe. Class followed by regular Milonga. Classes every Wednesday at the Gresham Metropole.
FAMILY FUN IN FITZGERALD’S PARK Bring the family to Fitzgerald’s Park for an afternoon of fun. It’s a great way to bring the festival week to a close. Enjoy all the park has to offer after its magnificent makeover, with lots of entertainment. In the natural surroundings listen to music provided by the renowned Barrack Street Band and friends, and sample family entertainment, with surprise attractions. Boat rides on the river with Meitheal Mara (weather permitting). Why not bring a picnic?
Tel: 087 2627887 Email: [email protected] Web: www.corktango.com
Info: Billy O’Callaghan 086 8378367
71
FRINGE EVENTS TUESDAY APRIL 8 2pm – 4.30pm
max
16
SHEP Project Centre, Above the Library, Ballincollig
CELEBRATING THE OLDER ADULT Join Rose Crowley & Dolores McCashin, SHEP facilitators, to explore some of the challenges & opportunities faced when getting older in Ireland today. This interactive workshop, which aims to be both informative & fun, may be of special interest to the over 55s but all ages are welcome. SHEP is an Irish, not-for-profit, community based training & development organisation established more than 40 years ago. Booking essential as places limited. Call Geraldine Flanagan 466 6180 email: socialandhealth@eircom net Ask for directions to venue.
TUESDAY MARCH 24 11am – 1pm Ballincollig Family Resource Centre, Village Centre, Station Rd, Ballincollig
ADULT & COMMUNITY EDUCATION INFORMATION MORNING All providers of adult and community education in the area have information stands on the various courses and programmes they deliver throughout Ballincollig in the Family Resource Centre this morning. All welcome, do drop in. Tea/coffee provided. Info 487 6295
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
The Family Resource Centre is next to the Ballincollig Library
72
6pm – 7pm Carrigaline Court Hotel
East Cork Music Project, 12-14 Ballinacurra Business Park, Whitegate Road, Midleton
MUSIC WORKSHOPS & PERFORMANCES All welcome to an Open Morning at East Cork Music Project. Information stalls, interactive workshops, performances by participants. Info Clare Seymour 087 2626110 email: [email protected]
KARATE KIDS – TRY A FREE CLASS Children aged 5+ can join the regular class here & try Karate. Founded by Sensei Barry O’Regan (6th DAN JKA) the Rising Sun School of Karate helps children & adults learn the ancient art in a safe & nurturing environment. Building fitness levels and agility, Karate also gives children increased self-confidence & teaches them discipline while having fun. With regular gradings students gain a sense of achievement as they move from each level to the next on their way to the much coveted Black Belt. Free parking. Info Barry 086 722 2779 Email: [email protected] www.risingsun.ie
73
Thanks to our sponsors, without whose support the festival could not take place.
Chair: William McAuliffe, National Association of Principals & Deputy Principals
Cork Education & Training Board Cork City Council Health Service Executive Cork Institute of Technology University College Cork Adult Continuing Education, UCC National Association of Principals & Deputy Principals Higher Education Authority – Access Office Ballyphehane Credit Union Blacknight Internet Solutions Co-operation Ireland – Cork branch The River Lee Hotel City Councillors: Tim Brosnan, Henry Cremin, Mick Finn, Nicholas O’Keeffe who have contributed from their Ward Funds.
Féile Buanfhoghlama Chorcaí
Media Sponsors: The Evening Echo & 96fm Partner: Féile an Phobail Friends: Hume City Council & Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival
74
Denis Barrett, Community Education Facilitator, Cork Education & Training Board Peggy Barrett, Executive Librarian, Cork City Libraries Sandra Brett, Traveller Adult & Community Education, Cork ETB Deirdre Creedon, Access Officer, Cork Institute of Technology Brendan Goggin, Former Registrar, Cork Institute of Technology Con O’Donnell, Cork City Development Board Ann O’Sullivan, Former CEO, Cork City Partnership Patricia O’Hare, Primary Education sector Seamus O’Tuama, Acting Director, Adult Continuing Education, UCC Marcela Whelan Kelly, Development Worker, Cork City Learning Forum Festival Co-ordinator: Tina Neylon
MIX YOUR MODE Attending a festival event? Why not consider walking, cycling, catching a bus or taking the train. Mix Your Mode, a Transport and Mobility Forum Cork initiative, aims to promote more sustainable ways of travel by encouraging people to mix their method of transport during festival week, and all year round. Why not use a combination of options such as the Park & Ride, the Bike Rental Scheme or hiring a GoCar? Make getting around to festival activities a more positive & healthier experience. By using more sustainable modes of travel you will help to reduce CO2 and make Cork a cleaner city with less traffic congestion. More information at www. transportandmobilityforum.com
75
|
i don't know
|
In 1938 at the age of 19, which jockey became the youngest ever winner of the Grand National?
|
Facts & Figures
Facts & Figures
It is illegal for anyone aged under 18 to gamble
Facts & Figures
Records
The first race was held in 1839, but it started in inauspicious circumstances, going off two hours late after confusion over weighing procedures. The aptly named, and 5-1 favourite, Lottery came home first.
The 1929 National featured the most starters in the race when 66 horses lined up.
The smallest field was in 1883 when just 10 faced the starter.
The fastest ever time is the 8 minutes 47.8 seconds Mr Frisk recorded in taking victory in 1990.
The slowest time is the 14m 53s it took Lottery to win the first National in 1839.
The smallest number of finishers was in 1928 when Tipperary Tim, a 100-1 outsider, was the first of two past the post.
The greatest number of horses to finish was 23 in 1984. Hallo Dandy, ridden by Neale Doughty, was the winner. 17 completed last season.
The 1997 Grand National, which was won by Lord Gyllene, was the 150th running of the race at Aintree and Sir Peter O'Sullevan's 50th and final commentary for the BBC.
2013 saw the first screening of the race by Channel 4.
The shortest price winner was Poethlyn at 11-4 in 1919.
The Course
The first five Grand National's included one jump that was a stone wall. It was situated where the water jump now stands.
Becher's Brook earned its name when a top jockey, Captain Martin Becher, took shelter in the brook after being unseated. "Water tastes disgusting without the benefits of whisky" he reflected.
The Chair is the tallest fence at 5ft 2ins, and the broadest. The fence got its name as it was once alongside the seat used by the distance judge.
The fences at Aintree are made up of spruce from the Lake District. The cost of the building work is tens of thousands of pounds and takes a month to complete.
As well as horse racing, Aintree has also hosted a European and five British Grand Prix. Stirling Moss won his first Grand Prix in Liverpool in 1955.
The change seemed to work in 2014 as no horse lost his jockey until the Canal Turn, although there were plenty of early casualties last year.
Horses
Red Rum is the most successful horse, having won the Grand National three times: 1973, 1974 and 1977.
The oldest winning horse is Peter Simple, aged 15 (1853); the youngest winning horses were Alcibiade (1865), Regal (1876), Austerlitz (1877), Empress (1880), Lutteur III (1909), all aged 5.
Abd-El-Kader was the first horse to win back-to-back Nationals, in 1850 and 1851. The Colonel, (1869 & 1870), Reynoldstown (1935 & 1936) and Red Rum (1973 & 1974) have also retained the crown. Can Many Clouds join this elite club this year?
Moiffa won in 1904 - having disappeared a year earlier. On a trip to Liverpool from New Zealand, Moiffa's ship was shipwrecked. The horse was presumed lost at sea before turning up on an outcrop south of Ireland.
The legendary Golden Miller won in 1934 and became the only horse to complete the Cheltenham Gold Cup-Grand National double in the same season. Garrison Savannah narrowly failed to emulate the feat in 1991.
Manifesto has run in more races than any other horse. Between 1895 and 1904, he ran in eight races, winning two and coming third on three occasions. He only failed to finish once.
Two Russian horses, Reljef and Grifel, competed in the 1961 Grand National, but neither finished. Horses from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Norway have also run in previous Grand Nationals, although all with similarly disappointing results. Hungarian chaser Buszke was pulled up in 1868, while Gyi Lovam, the first Czechoslovakian challenger in 1931, came to grief at Becher�s, was remounted but fell again four fences later. The Czech-trained Essex, Fraze and Quirinus all carried automatic top-weight in the 1980s and 1990s but failed to complete. The 2000 renewal saw the first Norwegian-trained runner in the shape of Trinitro, but he got no further than the first fence where he fell.
Japanese thoroughbred, Fujino-O captured four consecutive renewals of the prestigious Nakayama Daishogai in his homeland before being sent to Britain to be prepared for Aintree by trainer Fulke Walwyn. The seven year-old was given the automatic top-weight of 12st and failed to get competitive under his welter burden in 1966, eventually refusing under Jeff King.
Five winners were bred in France � Alcibiade (1865), Reugny (1874), Lutteur III (1909), Mon Mome (2009) and Neptune Collonges (2012). Mely Moss, who was runner-up to Papillon in the 2000 Grand National and the 1996 and 2015 runners-up Encore Un Peu and Saint Are, were also French breds.
In 1998, Earth Summit, owned by a six-strong partnership, became the first winner of the Grand National who was also successful in both the Scottish and Welsh Grand Nationals.
Only three greys have won the Grand National - The Lamb (1868 and 1871), Nicolaus Silver (1961) and Neptune Collonges (2012). Suny Bay finished second to Lord Gyllene in 1997 and filled the same spot behind Earth Summit in 1998. King Johns Castle was second in 2008.
Thirteen mares have won the Grand National, but the most recent was Nickel Coin back in 1951. Since then, the mares Gentle Moya (2nd 1956), Tiberetta (3rd 1957 and 2nd 1958), Miss Hunter (3rd 1970), Eyecatcher (3rd 1976 and 1977), Auntie Dot (3rd 1991), Ebony Jane (4th 1994) and Dubacilla (4th 1995) have all finished in the first four.
The complete list of winning mares is: Charity (1841), Miss Mowbray (1852), Anatis (1860), Jealousy (1861), Emblem (1863), Emblematic (1864), Casse Tete (1872), Empress (1880), Zoedone (1883), Frigate (1889), Shannon Lass (1902), Sheila's Cottage (1948) and Nickel Coin (1951).
In 1923, Sergeant Murphy became the first US bred horse to win the race. He is also the joint-second oldest horse to win, at age 13, alongside Why Not (1884). The US bred Battleship, son of the famous Man o' War, became the first (and so far only) horse to have won both the Grand National (in 1938) and the American Grand National (which he won four years earlier).
1991 was the seventh and final year that the Grand National was sponsored by Seagram. Aptly, the race was won by a horse named Seagram, bred in New Zealand. 1997 saw another New Zealand-bred winner in Lord Gyllene.
Jockeys
Tony McCoy is the most experienced jockey in the history of the National - his final ride in 2015 was his 20th National. McCoy won his only National on Don't Push It in 2010. He took the record from Tom Olliver who rode in 19 Nationals - winning three - despite spending time behind bars in a debtor's prison. In 2016 Richard Johnson will ride in the National for the 20th consecutive year since Celtic Abbey became his first mount in 1997 (unseating him at The Chair). Johnson has twice been runner-up, on What's Up Boys (2002) and Balthazar King two years ago, but is yet to win.
George Stevens is the most successful jockey in the history of the National with five wins. His final triumph came in 1870 on The Colonel. Stevens died three months after finishing sixth in the 1871 race.
Together with the Lincoln Handicap run on the Flat at Doncaster, the Grand National forms leg two of the �Spring Double�. The only jockey to have won both contests is Dave Dick, who captured the Lincoln on Gloaming in 1941 and the Grand National on E.S.B. in 1956.
Bruce Hobbs is the youngest jockey to have ever won the race. The 17-year-old triumphed aboard Battleship in 1938.
The late Dick Saunders is the oldest ever winner of the Grand National, partnering Grittar to victory in 1982. Saunders was 48 at the time. He was the first member of the Jockey Club to partner a Grand National winner.
Brian Fletcher (1968 Red Alligator, 1973 and 1974 Red Rum) shares a 20th century record with the legendary Jack Anthony (1911 Glenside, 1915 Ally Sloper, 1920 Troytown), both jockeys having ridden three National winners.
Plenty of riders have won the Grand National on their first attempt. The most recent are Ryan Mania (2013 Auroras Encore), Liam Treadwell (2009 Mon Mome), Niall �Slippers� Madden (2006 Numbersixvalverde), Ruby Walsh (2000 Papillon), Jason Titley (1995 Royal Athlete), Nigel Hawke (1991 Seagram), Jimmy Frost (1989 Littler Polveir), Dick Saunders (1982 Grittar) and Maurice Barnes (1979 Rubstic).
Ruby Walsh holds the best record of current jockeys, having won the Grand National twice, on Papillon in 2000 and Hedgehunter in 2005.
Jockey William Watkinson recorded the first riding success for Australia in 1926. He was killed at Bogside, Scotland, less than three weeks after winning the Grand National.
Prince Karl Kinsky, an Austro-Hungarian nobleman, was the first jockey from outside Britain and Ireland to ride when he made a winning debut on board his own mare Zoedone in 1883.
Tsuyoshi Tanaka, the son of a champion boxer, became the first Japanese jockey to ride in the Grand National in 1995, although his taste of the Aintree experience proved to be brief as he fell at the first fence on The Committee.
American amateur Tim Durant was 68 when 15th on Highlandie in 1968 (although he remounted at Becher�s second time).
In 2012, Richard Johnson beat the record for the most rides in the National without a win. He has now ridden in the race 19 times without bettering the runner up spot in 2002 on What�s Up Boys. There are 12 other riders who have never won (or have not as yet won) the National, despite having had more than 12 rides in the race. They are:
David Casey (1997-2015): finished third once in 15 attempts;
Jeff King (1964�1980): finished third once in 15 attempts;
Robert Thornton (1997�to date): never in first three in 14 attempts;
Bill Parvin (1926�1939): finished second once in 14 attempts;
Tom Scudamore (2001-2015): never in first three in 14 attempts;
Graham Bradley (1983�1999): finished second once in 14 attempts;
Chris Grant (1980�1994): finished second three times in 13 attempts;
Stan Mellor (1956�1971): finished second once in 13 attempts;
David Nicholson (1957�1973): never in first three in 13 attempts;
George Waddington (1861�1882): finished second once in 13 attempts;
Walter White (1854�1869): finished second once in 13 attempts;
Andrew Thornton (1996-2013): never in first three in 13 attempts.
Peter Scudamore technically lined up for thirteen Grand Nationals without winning but the last of those was the void race of 1993, which meant that he officially competed in twelve Nationals.
Many other well-known jockeys have failed to win the Grand National. These include champion jockeys such as Terry Biddlecombe, John Francome, Josh Gifford, Stan Mellor, Jonjo O'Neill (who never finished the race) and Fred Rimell.
Three jockeys who led over the last fence in the National but lost the race on the run-in ended up as television commentators: Lord Oaksey (on Carrickbeg in 1963), Norman Williamson (on Mely Moss in 2000), and Richard Pitman (on Crisp in 1973). Pitman's son Mark also led over the last fence, only to be pipped at the post when riding Garrison Savannah in 1991.
Female Jockeys
Since Charlotte Brew became the first in 1977, female jockeys have participated in 19 Grand National's. Brew attracted huge media attention when partnering her own horse Barony Fort. She was a guest on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show and the Daily Mirror arranged a day-trip on Concorde to Washington. She was also unseated in the 1982 race.
Geraldine Rees became the first to complete the course (albeit in last place) in 1982. She fell at the first a year later and went on to train for 12 years in Lancashire, before retiring in 2010.
In 2012 Katie Walsh (sister of two-time winner Ruby Walsh) achieved the best placing by a woman to date - 3rd place on Seabass. In 2013, she rode that same horse when he was sent off as favourite, but he could only finish 13th. She also led up Papillon, when trained by her father and ridden by Ruby to win in 2000.
National winning trainer, Venetia Williams, also rode in the race, falling at Becher�s first time when riding 200-1 chance Marcolo in 1988.
Nina Carberry, now assistant to trainer Noel Meade, is the most experienced female rider, having finished on four of her five starts.
Gee Armytage had to pull up her aptly-named mount, Gee-A, in 1988. A dual Cheltenham Festival-winning rider, she is the sister of Marcus Armytage - rider of the 1990 winner Mr Frisk - and became personal assistant to multiple champion jump jockey A P McCoy.
Rosemary Henderson finished fifth when aged 51 on her own 100/1 shot Fiddlers Pike in 1994. She subsequently wrote a book, �Road To The National�, about her exploits.
There was huge media interest in Carrie Ford when she finished fifth in 2005 on Forest Gunner, trained by her husband Richard. Ford, then 33, had given birth to her daughter Hannah 10 weeks earlier.
Here is the complete record of lady jockeys to date:
Year
|
Bruce Hobbs
|
"According to Tobias Smollet, who was ""the great cham (ruler) of literature""?"
|
Bruce Hobbs - Telegraph
Bruce Hobbs
12:02AM GMT 23 Nov 2005
Bruce Hobbs, who died yesterday aged 84, became the youngest jockey ever to ride the winner of the Grand National when successful on Battleship in 1938; three months after his 17th birthday, he forced up the 40-1 outsider on the post to beat Royal Danieli by a head.
Trained by his father Reg Hobbs for the American millionairess Marion du Pont Scott, Battleship (the last entire to win the race) was the smallest horse in the field, while as well as being the youngest rider, Hobbs was also the tallest.
Bruce Robertson Hobbs was born on December 27 1920 on Long Island, New York, where his father was Master of the Horse to the sewing-machine heir Ambrose Clark. In that capacity Reg Hobbs was responsible for the making and breaking of hunters, show horses and polo ponies. Two years later, Reg Hobbs took charge of the hunters kept by Ambrose Clark at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.
Captain Tom Hobbs, grandfather of Bruce Hobbs, was also well known in equestrian circles. A highly respected dealer, he had a large repository of hunters at Great Bowden in Leicestershire.
As a result of intense and demanding tuition by his father, Bruce became a most polished rider in boyhood, winning championships on his white pony Lady Marvel.
After giving up hunting in 1931, Ambrose Clark established Reg Hobbs as a trainer of steeplechasers in the Ronehurst yard at Lambourn in Berkshire. Soon after his 14th birthday Bruce, already 6 ft 1½ in in his socks, became the stable's amateur, riding his first winner at Wolverhampton in 1935.
On Boxing Day 1936, 24 hours before his 16th birthday, Bruce went to Wolverhampton to ride Circourt, Abbot's Glance and Cakewalker. Having won on the first two, he was going out to mount Cakewalker when an official called him back to tell him he had just ridden his 10th winner, and could not ride again until he had received an official permit or turned professional.
Obtaining a professional's licence by telegram, Hobbs carried on where had left off as an amateur by completing another double, on his next two mounts Baccharis and Eliza, at Wolverhampton on the next day's racing.
Two weeks after winning the Grand National on Battleship, Hobbs won the Welsh Grand National on Timber Wolf. At the end of that season of 1937-38, during which he had ridden 35 winners, Hobbs went to the United States, where he made history by becoming the first jockey to win three Grand Nationals in one year, being successful in Long Island's Cedarhurst version.
Early in the season of 1938-39 Hobbs took a crashing fall on Pharnace in a selling hurdle, the lowest grade of race, at Cheltenham. With his spine broken, he was paralysed down the left side of his body. For almost three months he lay on his back in hospital, and just after his 18th birthday was told he would be crippled for life and would never ride again.
Hobbs defied that gloomy prognosis, though he was to suffer periodic spasms of pain for the rest of his life, and was walking again by April before resuming race riding as war approached in August. On April 26 he rode Poor Duke, the first winner trained by Fulke Walwyn, at Buckfastleigh.
In the war Hobbs served with the Queen's Own Yorkshire Dragoons, reaching the rank of captain, in the North African campaign. For his part in the assault on a strongly defended German position near Tunis in May 1943 he was awarded the Military Cross.
The citation stated: "This officer crawled to the top of a hill occupied on the reverse side by the enemy in order to direct mortar fire and observe for tanks… He had to go so close to the enemy that it was not safe to speak on a telephone. He therefore climbed up and down all day to pass messages over his wireless at the bottom of the hill. Through his efforts and skill, effective fire was brought to bear on a party of enemy tanks which could not be seen from any other position."
Weighing 14 st 7 lb on demobilisation, Hobbs wasted drastically to 11 st 7 lb, only to be thwarted in his determination to ride just one more winner. Having no capital, he was unable to open his own training stable, and at the age of 25 became private trainer to John Rogerson and his wife Eileen, daughter of the diamond magnate Solly Joel, at the Dunston Lodge yard, near Wantage.
With only a dozen horses in his care, he won a number of good races, notably the Grand Sefton Chase with War Risk at Aintree in November 1946. All the same, a small jumping stable was unviable. On the closure of Dunston Lodge, Hobbs was in considerable difficulties, being homeless, unemployed and newly wed.
His problems were partially solved by his becoming assistant to the trainer George Beeby at Compton, Berkshire, in 1951. Two years later he joined the Queen's trainer Captain (later Sir) Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, who had the Freemason Lodge Stable at Newmarket, in the same capacity.
As he approached his 40th birthday in 1960, Hobbs's prospects again looked bleak. Boyd-Rochfort, then 73, showed no inclination to retire, which would have allowed Hobbs to take over at Freemason Lodge. Accordingly, Hobbs quit racing to become a travelling salesman for Gibson's, the Newmarket saddlers.
Within a year, however, he yearned to be back in the stableyard. He returned as assistant to Major Jack Clayton in the Bedford Lodge stable at Newmarket in 1962, and after two years was appointed private trainer to the television magnate David (later Sir David) Robinson, who had 40 horses at Newmarket's Carlburg Stable.
After so many vicissitudes, Hobbs finally reached a position in which he could enjoy a great deal of independence in the exercise of his talent. At the end of 1965 four leading owners - Tom Blackwell, Jocelyn Hambro, Jim Philipps and David Wills - formed a company to establish him in the Palace House stable at Newmarket.
Among other owners to join the stable were Hobbs's post-war patrons John and Eileen Rogerson, George Cambanis (the Greek shipping owner), Lord Rosebery, the bookmaker William Hill and Julian Wilson, then racing correspondent of the BBC.
For George Cambanis, Hobbs won the Duke of York Stakes at York and the King George Stakes at Goodwood with the fast filly Stilvi. She became dam of four of the most important horses to be trained by Hobbs: Tachypous, winner of the Middle Park Stakes in 1976 and runner-up in the 2,000 Guineas; Tromos, winner of the Dewhurst Stakes in 1978; Tyrnavos, who became Hobbs's only Classic winner by taking the Irish Derby in 1980; and Tolmi, successful in the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot after being second in the 1,000 Guineas in 1981.
Other important races won by Hobbs during 20 years at Palace House included the Goodwood Cup with Richmond Fair in 1969; the Stewards' Cup with Touch Paper in 1972; the Nassau Stakes with Catherine Wheel in 1971, Vielle in 1980 and Acclimatise in 1983; the Cheveley Park Stakes with Jacinth in 1972, and Cry of Truth in 1974; the Magnet Cup with Take a Reef in 1974; the Northumberland Plate with Tom Cribb in 1973; and the Gimcrack Stakes with Tumbledownwind in 1977.
Hobbs was not a gambling trainer. His biggest bet was £25 on a horse he had running at Brighton. After it had obliged by only a short head, Hobbs - shaking like a leaf - vowed that he would never have another bet.
He retired at the end of the season of 1985, and was elected to the Jockey Club.
In order to run his stable with maximum efficiency and ensure that slackness never prejudiced the welfare of the horses, Hobbs was a strict disciplinarian of the old school, but always completely fair to his staff. Away from the stable yard, he was a pleasant, companionable man whose sense of humour could never allow him to indulge in conceit.
Bruce Hobbs married, in 1945, Betty Jean, step-daughter of the late LG Winder. They had a daughter. The marriage broke up soon after he gave up training, and he is survived by his second wife, Vicki.
|
i don't know
|
Who is the Roman goddess of the hearth?
|
HESTIA - Greek Goddess of Hearth & Home (Roman Vesta)
Hestia
Hestia, Athenian red-figure kylix C5th B.C., National Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia
HESTIA was the virgin goddess of the hearth (both private and municipal) and the home. As the goddess of the family hearth she also presided over the cooking of bread and the preparation of the family meal. Hestia was also the goddess of the sacrificial flame and received a share of every sacrifice to the gods. The cooking of the communal feast of sacrificial meat was naturally a part of her domain.
In myth Hestia was the first born child of Kronos (Cronus) and Rhea who was swallowed by her father at birth. Zeus later forced the old Titan to disgorge Hestia and her siblings. As the first to be swallowed she was also the last to be disgorged, and so was named as both the eldest and youngest of the six Kronides. When the gods Apollon and Poseidon sought for her hand in marriage, Hestia refused and asked Zeus to let her remain an eternal virgin. He agreed and she took her place at his royal hearth.
Hestia was depicted in Athenian vase painting as a modestly veiled woman sometimes holding a flowered branch (perhaps a chaste-tree). In classical sculpture she was also veiled, with a kettle as her attribute.
FAMILY OF HESTIA
PARENTS
[1.1] KRONOS & RHEA (Hesiod Theogony 453, Apollodorus 1.4, Diodorus Sicululs 1.4. Hyginus Preface, Ovid Fasti 6.285)
[1.2] KRONOS (Homeric Hymns 18 & 24)
[1.3] RHEA (Pindar Nemean Ode 11)
OFFSPRING
NONE (She was a virgin goddess.)
ENCYCLOPEDIA
HE′STIA (Hestia, Ion. Histiê), the goddess of the hearth, or rather the fire burning on the hearth, was regarded as one of the twelve great gods, and accordingly as a daughter of Cronus and Rhea. According to the common tradition, she was the first-born daughter of Rhea, and was therefore the first of the children that was swallowed by Cronus. (Hes. Theog. 453, &c.; Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 22; Apollod. i. 1. § 5.) She was, like Artemis and Athena, a maiden divinity, and when Apollo and Poseidon sued for her hand, she swore by the head of Zeus to remain a virgin for ever (Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 24, &c.), and in this character it was that her sacrifices consisted of cows which were only one year old. The connection between Hestia and Apollo and Poseidon, which is thus alluded to in the legend, appears also in the temple of Delphi, where the three divinities were worshipped in common, and Hestia and Poseidon appeared together also at Olympia. (Paus. v. 26. § 26, x. 5. § 3; Hom. Hymn. xxxi. 2.) As the hearth was looked upon as the sacred centre of domestic life, so Hestia was the goddess of domestic life and the giver of all domestic happiness and blessings, and as such she was believed to dwell in the inner part of every house (Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 30; Callim. Hymn. in Del. 325, in Cer. 129), and to have invented the art of building houses. (Diod. v. 68; Eustath. ad Hom. p. 735.) In this respect she appears often together with Hermes, who was likewise a deus penetralis, as protecting the works of man. (Hom. Hymn. xxxii. 10: Paus. x. 11. § 3.) As the hearth of a house is at the same time the altar on which sacrifices are offered to the domestic gods (hestiouchoi or ephestioi), Hestia was looked upon as presiding at all sacrifices, and, as the goddess of the sacred fire of the altar, she had a share in the sacrifices in all the temples of the gods. (Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 31.) Hence when sacrifices were offered, she was invoked first, and the first part of the sacrifice was offered to her. (Hom. Hymn. xxxii. 5; Pind. Nem. xi. 5; Plat. Cratyl. p. 401, d. ; Paus. v. 14. § 5; Schol. ad Aristoph. Vesp. 842 ; Hesych. s. v. aph hestias archomenos.) Solemn oaths were sworn by the goddess of the hearth, and the hearth itself was the sacred asylum where suppliants implored the protection of the inhabitants of the house. (Hom. Od. xiv. 159; Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1579.) A town or city is only an extended family, and therefore had likewise its sacred hearth, the symbol of an harmonious community of citizens and of a common worship. This public hearth usually existed in the prytaneium of a town, where the goddess had her especial sanctuary (thalamos), under the name of Prutanitis, with a statue and the sacred hearth. There the prytanes offered sacrifices to her, on entering upon their office, and there, as at a private hearth, Hestia protected the suppliants. As this public hearth was the sacred asylum in every town, the state usually received its guests and foreign ambassadors there, and the prytanes had to act the part of hosts. When a colony was sent out, the emigrants took the fire which was to burn on the hearth of their new home from that of the mother town. (Pind. Nem. xi. 1, &c., with the Scholiast; Parthen. Erot. 18; Dion. Hal. ii. 65.) If ever the fire of her hearth became extinct, it was not allowed to be lighted again with ordinary fire, but either by fire produced by friction, or by burning glasses drawing fire from the sun. The mystical speculations of later times proceeded from tile simple ideas of the ancients, and assumed a sacred hearth not only in the centre of the earth, but even in that of the universe, and confounded Hestia in various ways with other divinities, such as Cybele, Gaea, Demeter, Persephone, and Artemis. (Orph. Hymn. 83; Plut. de Plac. Philos. 3, 11, Numa, 11.) There were but few special temples of Hestia in Greece, as in reality every prytaneum was a sanctuary of the goddess, and as a portion of the sacrifices, to whatever divinity they were offered, belonged to her. There was, however, a separate temple of Hestia at Hermione, though it contained no image of her, but only an altar. (Paus. ii. 35. § 2.) Her sacrifices consisted of the primitiae of fruit, water, oil, wine, and cows of one year old. (Hesych. l. c. ; Hom. Hymn. xxxi. 3, xxxii. 6; Pind. Nem. xi. 6.) The Romans worshipped the same goddess, or rather the same ideas embodied in her, under the name of Vesta, which is in reality identical with Hestia; but as the Roman worship of Vesta differed in several points from that of Hestia in Greece.
Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
ALTERNATE NAME SPELLINGS
Zeus, Ganymedes and Hestia, Athenian red-figure kylix C6th B.C., National Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia
Hesiod, Theogony 453 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"But Rhea was subject in love to Kronos (Cronus) and bare splendid children, Hestia, Demeter, and gold-shod Hera and strong Haides . . . and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker [Poseidon], and wise Zeus . . . These great Kronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees . . . Therefore he kept no blind outlook, but watched and swallowed down his children . . . As the years rolled on, great Kronos the wily was beguiled by the deep suggestions of Gaia (Gaea, the Earth), and brought up again his offspring, vanquished by the arts and might of his own son, and he vomited up first the stone which he had swallowed last."
Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite 18 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"Nor yet does the pure maiden Histia (Hestia) love Aphrodite's works. She was the first-born child of wily Kronos (Cronus) and youngest too, by will of Zeus who holds the aigis,--a queenly maid whom both Poseidon and Apollon sought to wed. But she was wholly unwilling, nay, stubbornly refused; and touching the head of father Zeus who holds the aigis, she, that fair goddess, sware a great oath which has in truth been fulfilled, that she would be a maiden all her days. So Zeus the Father gave her a high honour instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the richest portion. In all the temples of the gods she has a share of honour, and among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses. Of these three Aphrodite cannot bend or ensnare the hearts."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 4 - 7 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"He [Kronos (Cronus)] then married his sister Rhea. Because both Ge (Gaea, Earth) and Ouranos (Uranus, Heaven) had given him prophetic warning that his rule would be overthrown by a son of his own, he took to swallowing his children at birth. He swallowed his first-born daughter Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, and Poseidon and Haides . . . When Zeus was grown, he engaged Okeanos' (Oceanus') daughter Metis as a colleague. She gave Kronos a drug, by which he was forced to vomit forth first the stone and then the children he had swallowed. With them Zeus fought a war against Kronos and the Titanes (Titans)."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 68. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"To Kronos (Cronus) and Rhea, we are told, were born Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and Zeus, Poseidon, and Haides."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 70. 1 :
"There was delivered to Kronos (Cronus) an oracle regarding the birth of Zeus which stated that the son who would be born to him would wrest the kingship from him by force. Consequently Kronos time and again did away with the children whom he begot; but Rhea, grieved as she was, and yet lacking the power to change her husband's purpose, when she had given birth to Zeus, concealed him in Ide (Ida)."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Preface (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"From Saturnus [Kronos (Cronus)] and Ops [Rhea]: Vesta [Hestia], Ceres [Demeter], Juno [Hera], Juppiter [Zeus], Pluto [Haides], Neptunus [Poseidon]."
Ovid, Fasti 6. 285 ff (trans.Boyle) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"Juno [Hera] and Ceres [Demeter], they recount, were born from Ops [Rhea] by Saturnus' [Kronos' (Cronus')] seed. Vesta [Hestia] was the third. The first two married, both gave birth, it's reported; one of the three stayed ignorant of men."
HESTIA & THE GOD PRIAPUS
Ovid, Fasti 6. 319 ff (trans.Boyle) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"Should I omit or recount your shame, red Priapus? It is a very playful, tiny tale. Coroneted Cybele [Rhea], with her crow of turrets, invites the eternal gods to her feast. She invites, too, Satyri (Satyrs) and Nymphae (Nymphs), Rural-Spirits (Rustica Numina); Silenus is present, uninvited. It's not allowed and too long to narrate the gods' banquet: night was consumed with much wine. Some blindly stroll shadowy Ida's dells, or lie down and rest their bodies in the soft grass. Others play or are clasped by sleep; or link their arms and thump the green earth in triple quick step. Vesta [Hestia] lies down and takes a quiet, carefree nap, just as she was, her head pillowed by turf. But the red saviour of gardens [Priapos] prowls for Nymphai and goddesses, and wanders back and forth. He spots Vesta. It's unclear if he thought she was a Nympha or knew it was Vesta. He claims ignorance. He conceives a vile hope and tires to steal upon her, walking on tiptoe, as his heart flutters. By chance old Silenus had left the donkey he came on by a gently burbling stream. The long Hellespont's god was getting started, when it bellowed an untimely bray. The goddess stars up, frightened by the noise. The whole crowd fly to her; the god flees through hostile hands."
N.B. An almost identical story is told by Ovid of Priapos and the Nymphe Lotis .
HYMNS TO HESTIA
Hestia and Demeter, Athenian red-figure kylix C5th B.C., Antikensammlung Berlin
Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"Hestia, in the high dwellings of all, both deathless gods and men who walk on earth, you ahve gained an everlasting abode and highest honour: glorious is your portion and your right. For without you mortals hold no banquet,--where one does not duly pour sweet wine in offering to Hestia both first and last. And you, Argeiphontes [Hermes], son of Zeus and Maia, . . . be favourable and help us, you and Hestia, the worshipful and dear. Come and dwell in this glorious house in friendship together; for you two, well knowing the noble actions of men, aid on their wisdom and their strength. Hail, Daughter of Kronos (Cronus), and you also, Hermes."
Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia :
"Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollon, the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho, with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house, come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise--draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song."
Orphic Hymn 84 to Hestia (trans. Taylor) (Greek hymns C3rd B.C. to 2nd A.D.) :
"To Hestia, Fumigation from Aromatics. Daughter of Kronos (Cronus), venerable dame, who dwellest amidst great fire's eternal flame; in sacred rites these ministers are thine, mystics much blessed, holy and divine. In thee the Gods have fixed their dwelling place, strong, stable basis of the mortal race. Eternal, much formed, ever florid queen, laughing and blessed, and of lovely mien; accept these rites, accord each just desire, and gentle health and needful good inspire."
HESTIA GODDESS OF HEARTH, HOME & ALTAR
Hestia was the goddess of hearth and home. As the goddess of the hearth-fire, Hestia also presided over the altar flame and the sacrificial feast. The central hearth of a state also belonged to her--the fire kept alight in the civic hall.
Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite 18 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"Zeus the Father gave her [Hestia] a high honour instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the richest portion. In all the temples of the gods she has a share of honour, and among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses."
Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia :
"Hestia, in the high dwellings of all, both deathless gods and men who walk on earth, you have gained an everlasting abode and highest honour: glorious is your portion and your right. For without you mortals hold no banquet,--where one does not duly pour sweet wine in offering to Hestia both first and last . . . Hestia, you who tend the holy house [temple] of the lord Apollon."
Pindar, Nemean Ode 11. 1 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Daughter of Rhea, guardian of parliaments, Hestia, sister of all-highest Zeus, and of Hera who shares his throne, welcome with goodwill to your sacred hall."
Bacchylides, Fragment 148 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"[Invocation to Hestia, as the goddess of the public hearth in the town of Larissa :] Gold-throned Hestia, you who increase the great prosperity of the glorious Agathokleadai (Agathocleadae), those men of wealth, as you sit in mid-city by the fragrant Peneios (Peneus) in the glens of sheep-rearing Thessalia (Thessaly)."
Plato, Cratylus 400d - 401b (trans. Fowler) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"[Plato invents philosophical etymologies to explain the names of the gods :]
Sokrates (Socrates) : Let us inquire what thought men had in giving them [the gods] their names . . . The first men who gave names [to the gods] were no ordinary persons, but high thinkers and great talkers . . . Shall we, then, begin with Hestia, according to custom? . . . Then what would you say the man had in mind who gave Hestia her name? . . . Take that which we call ousia (reality, essence); some people call it essia, and still others ôsia. First, then, in connection with the second of these forms, it is reasonable that the essence of things be called Hestia; and moreover, because we ourselves say of that which partakes of reality ‘it is’ (estin), the name Hestia would be correct in this connection also; for apparently we also called ousia (reality) essia in ancient times. And besides, if you consider it in connection with sacrifices, you would come to the conclusion that those who established them understood the name in that way; for those who called the essence of things essia would naturally sacrifice to Hestia first of all the gods. Those on the other hand, who say ôsia would agree, well enough with Herakleitos that all things move and nothing remains still. So they would say the cause and ruler of things was the pushing power (ôthoun), wherefore it had been rightly named ôsia."
Plato, Laws 745b (trans. Bury) :
"[Plato describes the founding of his ideal city :] He must divide off twelve portions of land,--when he has first set apart a sacred glebe for Hestia, Zeus and Athena, to which he shall give the name akropolis and circle it round with a ring-wall; starting from this he must divide up both the city itself and all the country into the twelve portions."
[N.B. Zeus receives central place as king of the goddess, Athena as city-protector, and Hestia as goddess of the civic hearth.]
Plato, Phaedrus 246 (trans. Jowett) :
"Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demigods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 68. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"To Kronos (Cronus) and Rhea, we are told, were born Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and Zeus, Poseidon, and Haides. Of these, they say, Hestia discovered how to build houses, and because of this benefaction of hers practically all men have established her shrine in every home, according her honours and sacrifices."
Orphic Hymn 84 to Hestia (trans. Taylor) (Greek hymns C3rd B.C. to 2nd A.D.) :
"Hestia . . . who dwellest amidst great fire's eternal flame; in sacred rites these ministers are thine, mystics much blessed, holy and divine. In thee the Gods have fixed their dwelling place, strong, stable basis of the mortal race."
Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2. 27 (trans. Rackham) (Roman rhetorician C1st B.C.) :
"The goddess whom they call Hestia. Her power extends over altars and hearths, and therefore all prayers and all sacrifices end with this goddess, because she is the guardian of the innermost things."
Suidas s.v. Ges agalma (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek Lexicon C10th A.D.) :
"Ges agalma (A statue of the earth): They model Hestia as a woman, like the earth, holding up a kettledrum, since the earth encloses the winds below herself."
CULT OF HESTIA
"Hestia Giustiniani", Greco-Roman marble statue, Villa Albani Museum
GENERAL CULT
Hestia had few significant temples or shrines dedicated to her. Rather she presided over the hearth at the centre of each home, the altars of all the gods, and the public earth of the city.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2. 27 (trans. Rackham) (Roman rhetorician C1st B.C.) :
"The name Vesta comes from the Greeks, for she is the goddess whom they call Hestia. Her power extends over altars and hearths, and therefore all prayers and all sacrifices end with this goddess, because she is the guardian of the innermost things. Closely related to this function are the Penates or household gods [of the Romans]."
I. ATHENS (ATHENAI) Main City of Attica (Attika) (Southern Greece)
Aristophanes, Birds 846 ff (trans. O'Neill) (Greek comedy C5th to 4th B.C.) :
"[A character steals the pig-trough of Hestia's holy swine--perhaps connected with the Thesmophoria festival in which swine were sacrificed :]
Bdelykleon (Bdelycleon) : What is this?
Philokleon (Philocleon) : The pig-trough of the swine dedicated to Hestia.
Bdelykleon : Did you steal it from a shrine?
Philokleon : No, no, by addressing Hestia first, I might, thanks to her, crush an adversary [in the courts]. But put an end to delay by calling up the case. My verdict is already settled."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 18. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"Hard by is the Prytaneon (Prytaneum) [the town-hall of Athens] . . . and figures are placed of the goddesses Eirene (Irene, Peace) and Hestia."
II. OROPUS (OROPOS) Town in Attica (Southern Greece)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 34. 3 :
"[The temple of Amphiaraus in Oropos (Oropus) in Attika :] The altar shows parts. One part is to Herakles (Heracles), Zeus, and Apollon Paion (Paeon, Healer) . . . the third is to Hestia and Hermes and [the hero] Amphiaraus and the children of Amphilokhos (Amphilochus)."
III. HERMIONE Town in Argolis (Southern Greece)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 2. 35. 1 :
"[At Hermione in Argolis :] Passing into the sanctuary of Hestia, we see no image, but only an altar, and they sacrifice to Hestia upon it."
IV. SPARTA Main City of Lacedaemonia (Southern Greece)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 3. 11. 11 :
"The Lakedaimonians (Lacedaemonians) also have a sanctuary of Hestia [at Sparta]."
V. OLYMPIA Sanctuary in Elis (Southern Greece)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 5. 14. 4 :
"The order in which the Eleans are wont to sacrifice on the altars [at Olympia]. They sacrifice to Hestia first, secondly to Zeus Olympios (Olympian), going to the altar within the temple, thirdly to Zeus Laoitas and to Poseidon Laoitas . . . Fourthly and fifthly they sacrifice to Artemis and to Athena."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 5. 11. 8 :
"[Images on the throne in the temple of Zeus at Olympia :] On the pedestal supporting the throne and Zeus with all his adornments are works in gold . . . and close to Hermes Hestia."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 5. 26. 2 - 3 :
"The offerings of Mikythos (Micythus) I found [at Olympia] were numerous and not together . . . [statues of] Amphitrite, Poseidon and Hestia."
VI. LARISSA Main City of Lapithae in Thessaly (Northern Greece)
Bacchylides, Fragment 148 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"[Invocation to Hestia as the goddess of the public hearth in the town of Larissa :] Gold-throned Hestia [goddess of the hearth, here the public hearth in Larissa], you who increase the great prosperity of the glorious Agathokleadai (Agathocleadae), those men of wealth, as you sit in mid-city by the fragrant Peneios (Peneus) in the glens of sheep-rearing Thessalia (Thessaly)."
VII. TENEDOS Island (Greek Aegean)
Pindar, Nemean Ode 11. 1 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Daughter of Rhea, guardian of parliaments, Hestia, sister of all-highest Zeus, and of Hera who shares his throne, welcome with goodwill to your sacred hall Aristagoras, and his fellows with goodwill, beneath your glorious sceptre. For they in honouring you keep watch and ward on Tenedos island and secure her weal. First of all other gods they worship you with many a gift of wine and many a victim, and the lure sounds for you, and song. And at their well-spread tables, never bare, the rites of Zeus, the hospitable father, receive their due."
VIII. NAXOS Island (Greek Aegean)
Parthenius, Love Romances 18 (trans. Gaselee) (Greek poet C1st B.C.) :
"Neaira, in fear of Hypsikreon (Hypsicreon), journeyed to Naxos; and, when her husband came to fetch her, took up suppliant's position at the altar-hearth (hestia) of the Prytaneion (Prytaneum, Town Hall). When Hypsikreon asked the Naxians to bive her up, they refused."
ANCIENT GREEK & ROMAN ART
|
S.V. Vesta
|
Who rules in the form of government known as 'Stratocracy'?
|
Hestia • Facts and Information on Greek Goddess Hestia
Hestia
Greek Goddess of the Hearth and Domestic Life
Hestia was the goddess of the hearth, home, architecture, domesticity, family, and the state. She was one of only three virgin goddesses, next to Athena and Artemis . Although both Poseidon and Apollo wanted to marry her, Hestia made an oath to Zeus that she would remain forever pure and undefiled, never entering into a union with a man.
She is a goddess of the Olympian generation, daughter of Cronus and Rhea and sister to Zeus, Poseidon, Hades , Demeter and Hera . When Cronus swallowed his children for fear one would dethrone him, Hestia was the eldest and thus swallowed first.
After Zeus forced his father to disgorge his children, Hestia was the last to be yielded up, making her both the oldest and the youngest daughter.
As the goddess of the hearth she personified the fire burning in the hearth of every home in Greece. Hestia receiving the first offering at every sacrifice in the household with families pouring sweet wine in her name and dedicating the richest portion of food to her.
The hearth fire in the household was not allowed to go out by any family unless it was ritually distinguished. Though Hestia did not have a public cult, she was worshipped at any temple, regardless of the god the temple was dedicated to. Hestia is described as a kind, forgiving and discreet goddess with a passive, non-confrontational nature.
Hestia was the eldest daughter of Cronos and Rhea.
As with the rest of his children, Cronos ate her but eventually regurgitated her.
She was a sibling to Demeter, Hades, Poseidon, Hera, and Zeus.
She was primarily known the Goddess of the Hearth.
Of all the gods and goddesses, she was considered the gentlest and mildest. Others, critically, have called her colorless because there is little information provided in regard to her character.
Although Hestia appeared in a few stories, she was not overly significant in Greek mythology.
Hestia is completely omitted from the works of Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Poets such as Apollodorous, Hesiod, and Ovid allude to her in their works.
Each city had a public hearth that was sacred to Hestia; the fire kindled there was never allowed to go out.
New colonies took fire from the hearth in the prytaneion (also known as the town hall) and kept the fires going in those new locations.
Every meal began and ended with an offering to Hestia.
Like Athena and Artemis, Hestia was referred to as a virgin goddess.
Although Apollo and Poseidon proposed marriage to Hestia, she requested of Zeus to remain a maiden forever.
Domestic life was her dominion in spite of her desire to remain a virgin.
She was one of only twelve Olympian deities.
Her name literally means “hearth”; appropriately, her priorities were family and community.
Children were accepted into the family by being presented at Hestia’s hearth. This observed first step ensured the goddess’s blessing on the new addition.
Vesta was the Roman equivalent to Hestia.
Public and private worship of Hestia was widespread.
She represented communal security and personal happiness.
Because Hestia remained a virgin, it follows that she had no children.
Link/cite this page
If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content.
<a href="https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/goddesses/hestia/">Hestia: https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net</a> - Greek Gods & Goddesses, September 19, 2014
Link will appear as Hestia: https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net - Greek Gods & Goddesses, September 19, 2014
Hestia, Greek Goddess of the Hearth and Domestic Life
HESTIA FACTS
|
i don't know
|
Which US President is featured on a $5.00 bill?
|
1900-Present
1900-Present
Page Content
March 14, 1900 - The Gold Standard Act officially placed the United States on the gold standard.
September 6, 1901 - President William McKinley was shot twice in Buffalo, New York by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition. McKinley’s death led to the Secret Service permanently protecting the president. McKinley died of his wounds on September 14, 1901 after appearing to be recovering for several days.
April 18, 1906 - A massive earthquake, one so powerful it could be felt south of Los Angeles, as far north as Oregon and as far west as Nevada, was centered in San Francisco. The earthquake and the fire it spawned destroyed at least 50 percent of the city before being stopped. The San Francisco Mint remarkably escaped damage from the earthquake and became a refuge center. The mint was damaged by the fire, but efforts by firemen and workers prevented large scale damage.
March 13, 1907 - A financial panic began as the stock market began to fall. The market reached a low point on November 15, 1907 when the average was 39% lower than on March 13.
February 18, 1908 - Postage stamp coils were issued for the first time by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
May 18, 1908 - Congress required “In God We Trust” be placed on all coins starting in 1909.
May 30, 1908 - The Aldrich-Vreeland Act created the National Monetary Commission. The commission studied banking in Europe and North America the reports it made led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
February 9, 1909 - Congress passed the Opium Enforcement Act, prohibiting the use or possession of opium for non-medicinal purposes. Medicinal opiates remained unregulated until 1914.
August 2, 1909 -The Lincoln one-cent coin was issued to replace the Indian Head penny. It was the first circulating coin to feature a real person and the first to feature a President of the United States.
June 25, 1910 - An Act of Congress established the Postal Savings Depositories. The Act allowed the Post Office to function as a bank and was intended to coax money out of hiding from people who didn’t trust banks.
February 25, 1913 - The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing federal income tax, was ratified.
October 3, 1913 - The federal income tax on individuals and corporations went into effect.
December 23, 1913 - President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, creating a new central bank.
February 14, 1914 - The Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s new building at the end of 14th Street was completed at a cost of almost $3 million dollars.
November 10, 1914 - The National City Bank of New York opened a branch in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was the first foreign branch opened by a nationally chartered U.S. bank.
November 16, 1914 - The Federal Reserve Banks opened.
December 17, 1914 -The Harrison Narcotics Act was passed. Among other things, it required opium producers to pay taxes and register with the Internal Revenue Service.
January 28, 1915 - The U.S. Coast Guard was created by Congress with the merger of the Revenue Cutter Service and U.S. Life-Saving Service. It was designated to operate as part of the Navy in time of war.
July 24, 1915 - Frank Burke, a member of the United States Secret Service working in New York City, stole a briefcase that contained all records of German espionage in the United States up to that point of World War I.
April 24, 1917 - The First Liberty Loan Act authorized the issue of $5 billion worth of bonds at 3.5 percent interest three weeks after the United States declared war on Germany.
October 6, 1917 - The Trading with the Enemy Act gave the president the ability to regulate trade during times of war. The U.S. Customs Service was charged with enforcing the act.
April 5, 1918 - The Third Liberty Loan Act authorized the issue of $3 billion worth of bonds at 4.5 percent interest.
April 23, 1918 - The Pittman Silver Coinage Act was approved. The Act removed a large number of silver dollars from circulation to be melted down and sold as silver bullion. The Act required that an equal number of silver dollars be minted from American mined silver.
January 29, 1919 - The Prohibition Amendment was adopted after ratification by the States. Primary responsibility for investigation and enforcement was given to the Internal Revenue Service.
February 24, 1919 - The Revenue Act of 1918 codified existing tax laws.
October 28, 1919 - Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, which was designed to enforce the provisions of the 18th Amendment. The U.S. Customs Service was charged with enforcing prohibition at the borders.
January 1, 1920 - Secretary Carter Glass established the Office of the Commissioner of Accounts and Deposits, precursor to the Financial Management Service.
January 16, 1920 - Prohibition went into effect.
February 8, 1922 - 10,000 people watched as firemen saved the blueprint laboratory from a fire on the Treasury roof.
February 9, 1922 - Congress established the World War Foreign Debt Commission. The commission rounded debts owed to the United States to $11.5 billion repayable over a 62 year term at two percent interest. The loans were never fully repaid.
May 3, 1922 - President and Mrs. Harding watched from the White House roof as the blueprint laboratory burned on the Treasury roof.
September 14, 1922 - An Act of Congress created the White House Police Force. They are now known as the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.
April 9, 1924 - The Dawes Plan was transmitted to the Reparation Commission. It was accepted by Germany on April 16, 1924. While it was a short term success, the Dawes Plan proved to be a monumental failure because the annual payments required were too large and it required the United States to give massive loans to Germany to pay reparations. The countries receiving this money then used it to repay war loans to the United States. This cycle meant that the stock market crash of 1929 caused Germany to no longer be able to pay reparations and prevented the Allies from repaying debt owed to the United States.
August 18, 1925 - The U.S. and Belgian governments concluded an agreement on Belgian war debt obligations to the United States during World War I.
November 14, 1925 - The Debt Funding Agreement between the United States and Italy was signed
May 20, 1926 - The Air Commerce Act established the presence of the United States Customs Service at airports of entry.
March 3, 1927 - The Bureau of Customs was created as a separate bureau within the Treasury Department, but the authority for the collection of Customs revenue was established by the Constitution in 1789. Congress also established the Bureau of Prohibition.
July 10, 1929 - The first modern sized currency notes were issued, bearing the series date 1928.
October 24, 1929 - A stock market panic occurred, foreshadowing the crash that would happen five days later.
October 29, 1929 - Black Tuesday occurred, a massive stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. At the time the crash was considered to be a cause of the Great Depression but it is now generally considered to have been a symptom.
June 14, 1930 - The Bureau of Narcotics was created in the Department of the Treasury to administer laws relating to narcotics and marijuana.
January 22, 1932 - The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was established. The RFC was largely ineffective under President Hoover but it became an important tool of the New Deal under President Roosevelt. The RFC distributed $9.465 billion in loans from 1932 to 1941.
February 27, 1932 - Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act, expanding the powers of the Federal Reserve Board.
February 15, 1933 - Giuseppe Zangara fired six shots at the car of president-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami, Florida. Roosevelt was not injured but Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, died of a gunshot wound to the stomach.
February 16, 1933 - The Senate voted to repeal the 18th Amendment of the Constitution, ending prohibition.
March 6, 1933 - President Roosevelt declared a four day national bank holiday to prevent anyone from exporting or hoarding gold or silver. Banks did not necessarily reopen on March 10 because the Emergency Banking Act passed on March 9 required federal inspectors to declare a bank financially secure before it could reopen.
March 9, 1933 - Congress passed and President Roosevelt approved on the Emergency Banking Act. The act forced banks to allow the government to inspect them before they could be reopened. It gave the government the ability to permanently close down banks determined to be financially insecure and reorganize banks that were salvageable.
March 20, 1933 - President Roosevelt signed the Economy Act, which lowered federal employee salary and forced veterans to give up part of their benefits for the betterment of the economy as a whole.
April 5, 1933 - President Franklin Roosevelt issued an order making it illegal to hoard gold coin, gold bullion or gold certificates. Violation of this order was punishable by a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison, making it a felony to own gold. Eventually, gold coins from 1933 and earlier were exempted from this rule so coin collectors could avoid prosecution.
May 3, 1933 - Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman appointed as Director of the United States Mint, started her first term. Ross was director for 20 years, the longest term in U.S. Mint history, before retiring in April of 1953.
June 5, 1933 - The United States abandoned the gold standard. All existing contracts and currency that required redemption in gold were no longer considered valid.
June 13, 1933 - The Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933 created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The HOLC provided money for mortgages for people at risk of losing their house.
June 16, 1933 - The Banking Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, better known as the FDIC. Designed to instill trust in the banking system again, the FDIC initially insured deposits of up to $2,500.
August 28, 1933 - President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6260, which regulated the hoarding and exporting of gold in the United States.
December 5, 1933 - The 21st Amendment was ratified, ending prohibition. The amendment allowed for states to continue enforcing prohibition if they chose and several did with Mississippi becoming the last state to end prohibition in 1966.
December 28, 1933 - President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, ordering anyone who still held gold certificates or gold coins of non-numismatic value to deliver them to the Treasurer of the United States.
January 1, 1934 - Henry Morgenthau, Jr. started his term as 52nd Secretary of the Treasury. His 12 years of service, ending July 22, 1945, were the second longest tenure of any Secretary.
January 17, 1934 - It became illegal for private citizens to own gold certificates following the implementation of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.
January 30, 1934 - The Gold Reserve Act withdrew gold coins from circulation, provided for the devaluation of the dollar's gold content, and created the Exchange Stabilization Fund.
June 26, 1934 - The National Firearms Act became the first federal gun law. It imposed a tax of $200, payable to the Treasury, on carrying certain guns across state lines.
August 14, 1935 - President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
August 23, 1935 - The Banking Act of 1935 removed the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency from the Federal Reserve Board.
August 31, 1935 - President Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Act, which was meant to prevent the United States government from entering into activities that could lead the country into a foreign war.
January 13, 1937 - The first deposit of gold bullion was shipped to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox.
March 15, 1938 - The United States Secret Service launched the “Know Your Money” educational campaign in an effort to hurt counterfeiters.
March 25, 1938 - Secretary Morgenthau established the Division of Monetary Research. Morgenthau also established the Division of Tax Research, which would eventually become the Office of Tax Analysis. Economist Milton Friedman worked for the division from November 1941 to 1943.
May 17, 1938 - The Bureau of Engraving and Printing occupied the Treasury Annex Building.
May 23, 1938 - In Helvering v. Gerhardt, the Supreme Court held that state employees were subject to federal income tax.
March 23, 1939 - The first United States income tax treaty was signed with Sweden.
October 8, 1940 - President Roosevelt signed the Excess Profits Tax Act of 1940. The law, created as a wartime provision, heavily taxed corporations when they reached a certain profit threshold.
March 19, 1941 - Treasury Order 39 established the War Finance Division, which was transformed into the Savings Bonds Program.
May 1, 1941 - President Roosevelt purchased the first Series E Savings Bond from Secretary Morgenthau.
November 18, 1941 - The United States agreed to purchase silver from Mexico to help stabilize the peso.
November 21, 1941 - The Check Forgery Insurance Fund was established in the Treasury.
December 7, 1941 - The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, forcing the United States into World War II.
December 26, 1941 - The Secret Service escorted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to Fort Knox, Kentucky for safekeeping during World War II.
January 10, 1942 - The Treasury Hour radio program was named one of the best radio programs of 1941.
June 4, 1942 - Lieutenant Maurice Jester, commander of the Icarus, became the first officer of the United States Coast Guard awarded the Navy Cross. He was recognized for sinking U-352, a submarine which heavily outgunned his boat, off the coast of North Carolina.
October 8, 1942 - Congress authorized the removal of nickel from the five-cent coin. The nickel was needed for armor plating in World War II. Five-cent coins bearing dates from 1942 to 1945 are made up of an alloy of copper, silver and manganese. The government anticipated removing these coins from circulation after the war was over, so they added the mint mark “P” to coins minted in Philadelphia for the first time to make them easier to identify.
October 21, 1942 - The Revenue Act of 1942 increased the number of citizens on the tax rolls by adding a five percent “Victory Tax” on all incomes over $624.
July 1, 1944 - Delegates from all 45 Allied nations gathered at the United States Monetary and Fiscal Conference, better known as the Bretton Woods conference, in New Hampshire. The conference resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund or IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The IBRD is commonly referred as the World Bank today, but it is actually the largest of five organizations that make up the World Bank Group.
November 8, 1945 - The Revenue Act of 1945 was signed into law by President Truman. The Act repealed the excess profits tax that had been levied during World War II.
December 8, 1945 - The Victory Loan Drive, started to help fund World War II, ended.
January 1, 1946 - The United States Savings Bonds Division in the Treasury Department continued the programs of the War Finance Division, the War Savings Staff and the Defense Savings Staff.
January 30, 1946 - The Roosevelt Dime was introduced on the birthday of the late president.
November 9, 1946 - Wage and salary controls that were instituted during World War II were ended by Executive Order 9801.
August 11, 1948 - President Truman signed a resolution authorizing a $65 million interest-free loan to the United Nations for the construction of its headquarters in New York City.
February 26, 1949 - The United States Customs Service was charged with enforcing the Export Control Act of 1949.
June 21, 1949 - Georgia N. Clark started her term as the 29th Treasurer of the United States. She was the first woman to serve as Treasurer.
November 1, 1950 - Two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman at the Blair House. Leslie Coffelt, a White House police officer, was mortally wounded in the attempt but managed to kill one of the assassins. President Truman was unhurt in the attack.
July 16, 1951 - Congress enacted legislation that permanently authorized Secret Service protection of the president, his immediate family, the president-elect, and the vice president, if he wished.
March 1, 1953 - Secretary George Humphrey established the Analysis Staff and placed them under an Assistant to Secretary. The Analysis Staff was eventually replaced by the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy.
March 1, 1953 - Three libraries that were maintained by the staffs of the General Counsel, the Comptroller of the Currency and Tax and Debt Analysis were merged and placed under the Office of Administrative Services.
November 19, 1953 - Coin distribution responsibilities were transferred from the Treasurer of the United States to the United States Mint.
April 15, 1954 - The deadline for filing income tax was changed from March 15 to April 15, starting in 1955.
July 11, 1955 - An Act of Congress required “In God We Trust” to be placed on all currency.
May 9, 1956 - The Bank Holding Company Act was passed, limiting what other businesses and securities bank holding companies could purchase.
July 30, 1956 - President Eisenhower signed a Joint Resolution of Congress, declaring “In God We Trust” the national motto.
October 1, 1957 - One-dollar silver certificates bearing the motto “In God We Trust” entered circulation for the first time. They were the first currency to bear the motto.
March 21, 1958 - The Bureau of the Public Debt's first computer was installed at its Parkersburg, West Virginia facility.
February 12, 1959 - The first Lincoln Cents bearing the Memorial background were introduced. The image of the Lincoln Memorial replaced the “Wheat Ears” design in honor of President Lincoln’s 150th birthday.
April 8, 1959 - The Charter of the Inter-American Development Bank was signed. The IDB helps create sustainable economic and social development throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
July 11, 1962 - An Act of Congress, P.L. 87-534, changed the San Francisco Mint to the San Francisco Assay Office. It was re-designated the San Francisco Mint on March 31, 1988.
January 11, 1963 - C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th Secretary of the Treasury, approved the official Flag of the Treasury Department.
March 18, 1963 - The Office of Budget and Finance was established.
June 4, 1963 - An Act of Congress stopped all production of silver certificates.
July 1, 1963 - The official Flag of the Treasury Department was displayed for the first time. The official flag is not the flag of the Treasury Guard, which is famous for causing John Wilkes Booth to break his leg when he caught his boot on it jumping from Lincoln’s Box in Ford’s Theater.
July 8, 1963 - The Cuban Assets Control Regulations were issued, placing trade and travel restrictions on Cuba that still exist today.
November 6, 1963 - Production of $1 Federal Reserve notes bearing the portrait of President Washington and the motto “In God We Trust” began.
November 22, 1963 - President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.
December 30, 1963 - President Johnson approves Public Law No. 88-256, authorizing the John F. Kennedy Half Dollar.
January 23, 1964 - Production of $5 United States notes bearing the motto In God We Trust began.
February 11, 1964 - The Bureau of the Mint began production of the Kennedy half-dollar coin.
February 24, 1964 - Production of $10 Federal Reserve notes bearing the motto "In God We Trust" began.
March 24, 1964 - The first Kennedy half-dollar coins were released into circulation.
March 25, 1964 - Secretary C. Douglas Dillon announced that Silver Certificates would no longer be redeemable for silver dollars. They would remain redeemable for silver bullion until June 24, 1968.
April 24, 1964 - Secretary C. Douglas Dillon removed the restrictions on acquiring or holding gold certificates.
October 7, 1964 - Production of $20 Federal Reserve notes bearing the motto “In God We Trust” began.
July 23, 1965 - President Johnson approved the Coinage Act of 1965. The Act removed silver from circulating coins and authorized that cupronickel clad coins be used instead for the half dollar, quarter dollar, and dimes.
September 1, 1965 - Under the Coinage Act of 1965, minting operations at the San Francisco Assay Office were reactivated with the striking of pennies. Minting operations had been halted in 1955.
September 17, 1965 - Groundbreaking ceremonies were held for a new Philadelphia Mint, located near Independence Hall.
November 1, 1965 - The new clad quarters were released into circulation. The clad quarters, made of copper and nickel, had their silver removed because older silver quarters were worth more than face value and were being melted down for profit.
August 18, 1966 - Production of $100 Federal Reserve notes bearing the portrait of Benjamin Franklin and the motto "In God We Trust" began.
August 24, 1966 - Production of $50 Federal Reserve notes bearing the portrait of President Grant and the motto "In God We Trust" began.
October 15, 1966 - An Act of Congress transferred the U.S. Coast Guard from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Transportation. The Coast Guard was originally established as part of the Department of the Treasury in 1790.
December 19, 1966 - The Asian Development Bank commenced operations. The ADB is designed to promote economic and social development in Asian and Pacific countries and is often described as a regionally focused clone of the World Bank.
April 1, 1967 - The U.S. Coast Guard was transferred to the Department of Transportation.
January 4, 1968 - Mint marks were restored to United States coins. The marks were absent from all coins issued between 1965 and 1967.
January 29, 1968 - Henry H. Fowler, the 58th Secretary of the Treasury, approved the design for the new Seal of the Department of the Treasury that is still in use today.
April 17, 1968 - The Bureau of Engraving and Printing completed its conversion to the dry printing method. The conversion saved on production costs and increased the amount of currency that could be produced. It also enhanced details, making counterfeiting harder.
June 5, 1968 - Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy’s death led to United States Secret Service protection for presidential candidates, beginning the next day.
June 24, 1968 - The exchange of silver certificates for silver bullion was discontinued
October 22, 1968 - President Johnson signed the Gun Control Act into law. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was charged with its enforcement.
April 11, 1969 - The export ban on U. S. silver coins ended, allowing the export of silver coins for the first time since May 18, 1967.
April 26, 1969 - Pre-1934 gold coins could be imported into the country and traded without a license from the Department of the Treasury for the first time since 1933. The Treasury decided that preventing the import of pre-1934 gold coins while allowing the same coins to be traded freely domestically was inconsistent and unfair.
July 14, 1969 - Currency notes in denominations larger than $100 were discontinued by the Department of the Treasury. Though issued until 1969, the $500, $1000, $5000 and $10,000 notes had not been printed since 1945. These notes are still legal tender but are rarely seen in circulation as most are in the hands of collectors.
March 2, 1970 - Treasury Order 217 created the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center to function as an interagency training facility for Federal enforcement officials.
March 19, 1970 - The White House Police changed its name to the Executive Protective Service. It began protecting foreign diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C.
July 1, 1970 - The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center was established by Treasury Department Order 217.
January 5, 1971 - The United States Secret Service was authorized to protect visiting heads of foreign states while in the United States. Protection of foreign heads of state began during World War II but was not required.
January 21, 1971 - The last United States notes were placed into circulation by the Treasury Department.
January 25, 1971 - Several prototypes of the Eisenhower one-dollar coin were struck and then destroyed at the Philadelphia Mint.
March 31, 1971 - The first copper-clad and silver-clad Eisenhower dollars were produced for the first time.
October 1, 1971 - The first Eisenhower one-dollar coins were released into circulation.
December 1, 1971 - The Smithsonian Agreement ended the fixed exchange rates that had been enforced since the Bretton-Woods Conference. It also ended import surcharges.
December 15, 1971 - The Secret Service appointed five women Special Agents. It was the first time a woman had ever held that rank.
December 18, 1971 - President Nixon declared that the official U.S. price of gold would be raised to $38 per ounce, devaluing the dollar.
March 23, 1972 - The Old San Francisco Mint was saved from destruction when President Nixon declared it a historic landmark and turned the building over to the Department of the Treasury for restoration.
April 3, 1972 - President Richard Nixon raised the official U.S. gold price from $35 an ounce to $38 an ounce. The change in gold price was the first made since an Executive Order by President Roosevelt in 1934.
July 1, 1972 - The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms became a separate division in the Department of the Treasury. The functions of the ATF were previously part of the IRS.
October 18, 1972 - The Main Treasury building was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark.
April 4, 1973 - The Customs Bureau was renamed the United States Customs Service by Treasury Department Order 165-23. The change took effect on August 1, 1973.
November 29, 1973 - President Nixon signed the Hobby Protection Act. The Act requires that copies of collectible items, such as coins, must be clearly designated as copies or imitations.
December 1, 1973 - An interest rate of six percent was set for outstanding and new issues of United States Savings Bonds.
December 7, 1973 - The Treasury Department requested authority to make aluminum one-cent coins if necessary, because the Treasury was dangerously close to losing money on each penny it produced.
December 13, 1973 - The Treasury Historical Association was established.
January 21, 1974 - All operations of the United States Customs Service in New York City were moved into the World Trade Center.
March 6, 1974 - The winners of the Bicentennial Coin Design Competition were announced.
September 23, 1974 - An inspection to verify the gold holdings at the Fort Knox Bullion Depository was completed by members of Congress. The inspection was setup in response to conspiracy theories that Fort Knox held little or no gold at all.
December 27, 1974 - The Secret Service extended protection to the Vice President at his official residence.
December 31, 1974 - President Ford lifts the 40-year ban, enacted in 1933, on gold ownership by U.S. citizens.
July 7, 1975 - The first Bicentennial half-dollar coins were released into circulation. The Bicentennial quarter wasn’t released until August 18, 1975.
September 12, 1975 - Secretary William Simon opened the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center Facility in Glynco, Georgia.
October 13, 1975 - The first Bicentennial dollar coins are released into circulation.
March 27, 1976 - Secretary William E. Simon established the Assistant Secretary for Capital Markets and Debt Management. The position eventually became Under Secretary of Domestic Finance.
April 13, 1976 - The two-dollar bill was reissued as part of the Bicentennial. Jefferson remained on the face of the bill, but the back now featured the signing of the Declaration of Independence instead of Monticello. Contrary to popular belief, the two-dollar bill is still printed and in circulation. The most recent series of two-dollar bill is from 2003.
September 8, 1976 - Secretary William Simon dedicated the Treasury Time Capsule. It will be opened in the year 2076.
October 4, 1976 - President Ford signed the Tax Reform Act of 1976, increasing the standard deduction.
November 7, 1976 - Commemorative ceremonies were held marking the restoration of the old San Francisco Mint.
March 30, 1977 - President Jimmy Carter appointed a woman to be Under Secretary of the Treasury for the first time.
September 12, 1977 - Azie Taylor Morton started her term as the 37th Treasurer of the United States. She was the first African American to have held that office.
October 10, 1978 - President Carter signed a law that authorized the creation of a dollar coin featuring Susan B. Anthony, the first non-mythical woman to appear on a circulating United States coin.
December 13, 1978 - The first Susan B. Anthony one-dollar coins created for circulation were struck at the Philadelphia Mint.
August 13, 1981 - President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, reducing income taxes by approximately 23 percent over a three year period and lowering estate taxes. The ERTA also introduced indexing for inflation into the tax system.
April 15, 1982 - The simplified Form 1040EZ was accepted for the first time by the IRS.
June 25, 1984 - The Denver Mint produced the $10 1984 Commemorative Olympic Gold Coin, the first gold coin made by the U.S. Government in 50 years.
October 8, 1985 - Secretary Baker introduced the Baker Plan at the IMF World Bank meeting in Seoul, South Korea. The Baker Plan tried to relieve some of the debt problems that Third World countries suffered from.
October 18, 1985 - The first Statue of Liberty gold proof coin was struck.
March 18, 1986 - The Bureau of Engraving and Printing announced that a clear polyester thread was to be woven into bills to deter counterfeiting.
May 19, 1986 - Congress passed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act. FOPA prevented the sale of automatic weapons and redefined who could legally own a gun. FOPA also prevented the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from performing more than one inspection a year of Federal firearm licensees. The ATF had been repeatedly accused of harassing licensees by constantly inspecting them, in an effort to prevent them from doing business.
November 24, 1986 - Fort Worth, Texas was chosen as the site of the Western Facility for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The facility opened on April 26, 1991.
October 19, 1987 - Black Monday occurred on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, the second largest percentage and point collapse in history. The definite causes of the collapse remain a point of debate among economists.
March 31, 1988 - The West Point Bullion Depository became the first new mint since 1862.
March 18, 1989 - A woman was appointed General Counsel of the Treasury for the first time.
September 27, 1995 - The Department of the Treasury unveiled a new $100 bill, featuring an enlarged portrait of Ben Franklin and enhanced security features.
March 25, 1996 - The Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s redesigned notes with enhanced security features were first put into circulation.
June 26, 1996 - A fire started on the Treasury roof that burned out the fourth and fifth floors of the North Wing. Water and smoke damaged the entire building, closing it for one week. The Cash Room suffered heavy damage, with two feet of water pooled on its floor. Investigations later proved that the fire was accidentally started by a contractor working on the roof using a propane torch.
January 24, 2003 - Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau was established as a new bureau in the Treasury Department pursuant to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The new bureau assumed the regulatory and revenue collection functions the ATF.
January 24, 2003 - The ATF was transferred to the Justice Department.
March 1, 2003 - Three historical Treasury Bureaus were transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security. The three transferred bureaus were the U.S. Customs Service, part of Treasury since 1789, the U.S. Secret Service, part of Treasury since 1865, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, part of Treasury since 1970.
March 31, 2003 - Secretary John W. Snow established the Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.
Page Image
|
Lincoln
|
Who won the 2010 'Oscar' for Best Actor for the film 'Crazy Heart'?
|
New Five Dollar Bill Pictures and Facts
by Ryan Guina
Yesterday, March 13, 2008, the US Department of the Treasury released the new $5 bills into circulation. The new $5 bills were included among currency shipments from Federal Reserve to banks, which will distribute the money to customers and businesses. People will start seeing these new bills as soon as this weekend.
Changes to the new $5 bill
Changes to the front: There are several striking visual changes to the new $5 bill. There is a splash of light purple next to Lincoln’s portrait that fades to gray as it spreads toward the bill’s edges. To the right of Lincoln’s portrait (as you view the bill), there is an imprinting of The Great Seal of the United States. Surrounding Lincoln’s portrait and The Great Seal of the United States is a band of purple stars.
Changes to the back: The most obvious changes to the back side of the $5 bill include a large purple “5” in the bottom right corner of the bill, small yellow “5” numerals on the back, and a multitude of changes to the micro-printing and other security features.
Security features of the new $5 bill
The descriptions of the security features are taken from the US Government press release for the new $5 bill.
Watermark: There are now two watermarks on the redesigned $5 bill. A large number “5” watermark is located to the right of the portrait, replacing the previous watermark portrait of President Lincoln found on older design $5 bills. Its location is highlighted by a blank window incorporated into the background design. A second watermark — a column of three smaller “5”s — has been added to the new $5 bill design and is positioned to the left of the portrait.
Security thread: The embedded security thread, which is located to the left of the portrait on older-design $5 bills, has moved to the right of the portrait on the redesigned $5 bill. The letters “USA” followed by the number “5” in an alternating pattern are visible along the thread from both sides of the bill. The embedded security thread glows blue when held under ultraviolet light.
Rules for reproducing US currency
Don’t go printing these out! Here is what you need to know if you want to reproduce images of US currency:
Regulations for Reproducing U.S. Currency
PART 411 — COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS OF UNITED STATES CURRENCY
Authority: 18 U.S.C. 504; Treasury Directive Number 15-56, 58 FR 48539
(September 16, 1993)
411.1 Color illustrations authorized
(a) Notwithstanding any provision of chapter 25 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, authority is hereby given for the printing, publishing or importation, or the making or importation of the necessary plates or items for such printing or publishing, of color illustrations of U.S. currency provided that:
(1) The illustration be of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of any matter
so illustrated;
(2) The illustration be one-sided; and
(3) All negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of that illustration that contain an image of the
illustration or any part thereof shall be destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use in accordance with this section.
(b) [Reserved].
For more fun, explore the interactive feature for the new $5 bill. Click on the link under the small picture of the $5 bill – “Explore the Interactive $5 Bill.” This launches a separate window, but is pretty cool!
Photo credit: $5 bill front and back – The Associated Press (link no longer available). All other photos: MoneyFactory.gov .
Related Posts
|
i don't know
|
The New England range of mountains (highest point Ben Lomond) are in which Commonwealth country?
|
Glen Innes - New South Wales - Australia - Travel - smh.com.au
Glen Innes
Interesting historic township in the New England area of New South Wales
Glen Innes is situated amidst rolling countryside on the Northern Tablelands of NSW, 624 km north-east of Sydney and 1075 metres above sea-level. It has a current population of 6250 people. The local economy is based principally upon agriculture and tourism.
The town is known for its fine parks which are especially attractive in autumn. Glen Innes has numerous arts, craft and collectables shops. Fishing, fossicking and horseriding are also popular ways to enjoy the scenic environs.
The Nugumbal people who visited the area in the warmer months. They are thought to have called it 'Eehrindi', meaning wild raspberry. The first European in the area was John Oxley, en route to Port Macquarie in 1818. By 1835, two hairy convict stockmen, Chandler and Duval, assigned to Captain Dumaresq, were the first whites working in the area north of Armidale. They did much to open up the area to settlement by advising and guiding prospective settlers to new lands where they selected stations in the late 1830s. For this reason the district was initially known as 'Beardy Plains' or 'Land of the Beardies'.
The first to be guided by the 'Beardies' into the Glen Innes area was Thomas Hewitt who, in 1838, took up the Stonehenge station. Others rapidly followed and by 1840 the land was settled. There was conflict between white and black in the early days of settlement but it appears to have ceased by about 1845.
The present site was laid out in 1851 and was named after the station's former owner, Major Archibald Clunes Innes, former commandant of the Port Macquarie penal settlement. Glen Innes was gazetted in 1852 with the first land sales taking place in 1854, the year the first post office opened. The area became a noted sheep-raising and wheat-growing area with the first flour mill opening in the 1850s.
Ben Lomond station, to the south, was held up by bushranger 'Thunderbolt' (Fred Ward) in the late 1860s. As the mail coach made slow headway up the Ben Lomond Range (the highest point in northern New England), he found it an easy target.
The discovery of tin at Vegetable Creek in 1872 caused a boom for the town which lasted until the economic depression of the 1890s. Over the years antimony, gold, bismuth, manganese, silver, arsenic, molybdenite, emeralds and sapphires were all commercially mined in the district and a number of small towns sprang up around the operations.
Glen Innes became a municipality in 1872 and the prosperity and growth witnessed the erection of some substantial public buildings in the 1870s, including the courthouse, hospital and town hall. The railway arrived in 1884. Timber milling became a substantial enterprise in the 1920s with commercial sapphire mining commencing in 1959 and proving highly prosperous into the 1980s.
The town's annual celebrations include the Pastoral and Agricultural Show in February, the Australian Celtic Festival in May, 'Minerama' (the Gem and Mineral Festival) in September, in which Australian gem collectors gather and guided tours of local fossicking sites are organised, the Australian Bush Music Festival in October, and the Land of the Beardies Bush Festival in November, entailing a mardi gras, carnival, motor show, exhibits and competitions.
The town markets are held on the second Sunday of the month in Grey St and, in summer, on the third Sunday at Red Range Sports Grounds.
Things to see:
Tourist Information Centre
The town's information centre is open seven days a week from 9.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m. and is located at 152 Church St (the New England Highway), between Bourke and Meade Sts, tel: (02) 6732 2397. Arts, crafts, souvenirs and sapphires are all on sale with the coach and rest rooms open 24 hours a day. Enquiries can be made here concerning details about local fishing, fossicking, horseriding, bushwalking and farm stays. There is also a heritage walk brochure.
Powerhouse Museum
A few doors south of the visitors' centre, the museum houses the 1922 power generators which supplied Glen Innes with electricity before the introduction of the grid system in 1956. There are information boards.
Town Walk - Grey Street
The information centre's heritage walk brochure explores Grey St, between Ferguson and Wentworth Sts, with excursions into Meade and Bourke Sts. It covers the buildings erected between 1860 and 1930. Some of the highlights, concentrating on the 19th century, are listed below. Where ascertainable the buildings have been repainted in their original 19th-century colours with complementary lamp-style street lighting.
The walk begins at the corner of Grey St and Ferguson St (the Gwydir Highway) where you will find the town's oldest inn, the Royal Hotel, built c. 1860, although it is much altered.
Heading south on Grey St there is the courthouse, designed by James Barnet and built in 1873-74 of basalt with grey granite quoins. Bushranger Thunderbolt (Fred Ward) was apparently tried, presumably in 1860, in the first courthouse (built 1858). Aboriginal outlaw Black Tommy was also tried here in 1876 and acquitted but, accused of murder and horse-stealing, was shot to death by local constables 18 months later.
On the other side of the road is the Rural Lands Protection Board building (c.1900).
Town Walk - Meade Street
At the north-eastern corner of Meade and Grey Sts is the two-storey masonry post office, designed by W.L. Vernon and built in 1896 with arcaded porches, brick arches, terracotta trim and decorative lettering in a sandstone inset panel.
Over the road is the two-storey rendered masonry of the Great Central Hotel, a typical 19th-century country hotel situated on the first town allotment to be sold, in 1854.
Diagonally opposite is the rendered brick Imperial Hotel which dates from 1901. On the south-western corner is the ANZ bank, built of rendered masonry in 1884 as the Bank of NSW. It features a classical porch with pediment and cast-iron balconies.
Turn left into Meade St and to the left is the old police station, residence and sheriff's cottage, built 1876-1878.
Town Walk - Grey Street Continued
Return to Grey St and continue southwards. The Edwardian-style Central Buildings, to the left, have an interesting parapet. The Westpac bank building (erected as the Australian Joint Stock Bank, 1884-85) is an Italianate design with ionic columns, a slate roof, seven-bay elevation and brick stables at the rear.
The florid late Victorian town hall has a typical Victorian interior. The foundation stone was laid by Sir Henry Parkes in 1875 though the initial building was not completed until 1888.
Town Walk - Bourke Street
At Grey and Bourke is the National Bank building (built as the CBC Bank - 1890), an Italianate design with iron palisade fence and stables at the rear. Over the road is the rendered brick School of Arts, built in 1887 to an Italianate design and long in use as a community centre.
At Bourke St turn left to the old three-storey stone-gristing mill, built in 1882 as the Utz Mill. Return to Grey St then head west along Bourke to Chaffey's, a two-storey brick building erected in 1883 for coach-builders J.F. Chaffey & Son. The two-storey weatherboard building at the rear may be older. On the other side of the road is the Glen Innes Examiner, built of rendered brick with a parapet in 1874 when the newspaper (still in operation) commenced production.
Return to Grey St, heading south. The Mackenzie building (1885 with later additions) is a two-storey rendered brick design with an internal stairway still lit by the original lanterns. Over the road is Kwong Sing and Co., the town's oldest continuously operating retail business, still in the original family's hands. This Late Victorian general store was built in 1893 with later additions.
At the corner of Wentworth and Grey Sts is the Club Hotel, a two-storey Edwardian hotel (1906) with colonnade and timber columns and a balustraded parapet around the roof with pediments, cast-iron lacework and other ornamentation.
History House
At the corner of Ferguson St and West Ave is the Land of the Beardies History House and Research Centre, a quality folk museum located in the town's first hospital (1875). One of the largest in NSW, it is set in extensive grounds which include a reconstructed slab hut. The museum has a fine collection of 19th-century relics. The whole is set out to demonstrate the material culture of the colonial era. The museum is open weekdays from 10.00 a.m. - 12.00 a.m. and from 2.00 p.m. - 5.00 p.m. and on weekends from 2.00 p.m. - 5.00 p.m. and on public holidays from 9.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m., and at other times by appointment, tel: (02) 6732 1035.
Holy Trinity Anglican Church
At the corner of Meade St and West Ave is Holy Trinity Anglican Church (1867), featuring a stained-glass window depicting the crucifixion and World War II servicemen. The tower was added in 1913.
Brickworks
In Thomas St the town's brickworks have been in continuous operation since 1886. It is possible to arrange inspections. Although no longer steam-powered the old equipment is still in working order, tel: (018) 667 926.
Centennial Parklands and the Australian Standing Stones
1.5 km east of the post office, via the Gwydir Highway (Meade St), is the signposted turnoff to Centennial Parklands where 1000 trees were planted in the late 1970s. There are panoramic views of the town from Martins Lookout, picnic, barbecue and toilet facilities, a replica crofter's cottage which supplies refreshments, souvenirs and information, and the Australian Standing Stones. The latter is intended as a tribute to the Celtic peoples who contributed to the development of Australia and who were important in the early European history of the district. It is based on the Ring of Brodgar, a megalithic stone circle in the Orkneys. It has been given a distinctively Australian flavour by the way the Southern Cross has been superimposed on the design. Like the ancient stone arrangements it is modelled on, it functions as a seasonal clock clearly displaying both the summer and winter solstices. Further information on the significance of the arrangement can be obtained from the visitors' centre.
Beardy Waters
5.6 km east of town along the Gwydir Highway is Beardy Waters, named after the two bearded stockmen who led the first settlers into the area. There are barbecue and picnic facilities and plenty of birdlife. You can also walk upstream to the town weir.
Gibraltar Range National Park
Gibraltar Range National Park is an ideal place for bushwalking. Located east via the Gwydir Highway, the park is in high granite country, dominated by eucalypt forest. There are large numbers of wildflowers in the warmer months and a plenitude of wildlife. About 61 km from Glen Innes, Boundary Falls Rd heads off to the left and will take you to the falls of the same name. From there you can walk 1 km downstream to the beautiful Lyrebird Falls. Just over a kilometre beyond Boundary Creek Falls Rd another road heads off the Gwydir Highway to the right, leading to Raspberry Lookout where there are picnic tables and excellent views.
Another 6 km along the highway brings you to Mulligans Rd on the right. This is the main access road into the park, leading, after 10 km, to the Mulligans Hut Rest Area on the western bank of Little Dandahra Creek where there are campsites, showers, toilets, fireplaces and tables. There are various swimming holes along the creek and, in the school holidays, the rangers sometimes put on an evening campfire program for visitors.
Five walking trails depart from Mulligans leading to the beautiful Dandahra Falls, the Barra Nula Cascades, the Atrichornis/Murrumbooee Cascades, Tree Fern Forest and The Needles. The latter are six separate granite outcrops which, according to Aboriginal lore, are six sisters turned to stone by the curse of their pursuer.
There is also a picnic area just off the highway in Mulligans Rd and two walking tracks depart from a point about 3 km along the road. One heads south to Anvil Rock (4 km return). The other heads south-west to the spectacular Dandahra Crags (5 km return). Ring (02) 6732 5133 for further information on these parks.
Washpool National Park
3 km past the Mulligans Rd turnoff, Coombadjha Rd heads off to the left into World Heritage listed Washpool National Park, which includes the largest undisturbed rainforest in NSW and the world's largest remaining undisturbed stand of coachwood forest. The plateau upon which it stands rises to 1200 m above sea-level and the Washpool and Coombadjha Creeks have carved gorges through the plateau.
Less than a kilometre along Coombadjha Rd a side road heads off to the left to The Granite where there is a picnic area and a 700-m walking track to a lookout which takes in the south-eastern section of the park.
Coombadjha Rd leads past three clearings - the Bellbird Rest Area, the Coachwood Picnic Area, and the Coombadjha Creek Rest Area from whence there are two walks. The 1.1-km Coombadjha Nature Stroll and the Washpool Walk (10 km return).
Old Grafton Road
35 km east of Glen Innes the Old Grafton Rd heads south off the Gwydir Highway and passes through some outstanding mountain and riverside scenery, looping back to the highway after 131 km (mostly unsealed). Until the present highway opened this was the main access road to the coast. The original bush track was cut by wool haulers and timbergetters in the early 1840s. With convict labour a proper road was created in the 1860s and it was declared a highway in 1876.
The road soon descends Big Hill in a series of hairpin bends, offering some fine views to passengers. At the foot of the mountain, 16 km from the highway, is the Mann River Nature Reserve where there is a picnic area with opportunities for bush camping, fishing, canoeing and bushwalking.
About 64 km from the highway the traveller will come to a 20-metre tunnel which was carved through solid rock by convicts when the road was constructed. It is the only one of its type in Australia.
8 km on is the abandoned settlement of Dalmorton. All that remains are some ruins in the paddocks where cattle graze amidst the attractive scenery. A cleared area on the right, one kilometre prior to crossing Jackass Creek, allows cars to pull off the road and a walking track leads 500 m into the bush where you can find relics from the goldmining which occurred here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
At Buccarumbi, 91 km from the highway, the remains of a bridge ruined by flood sit beside the new bridge.
Another 11 km will take you past a 4WD road on the left, signposted for Ramornie Forest Camping Area, which leads to Nymboida National Park (see entry on Grafton ).
Balancing Rock
12 km south on the New England Highway this enormous pear-shaped boulder of granite balances precariously on a 30-cm fulcrum amidst a rock forest of unusual formations. Located on private property it can only be viewed from the roadside. There are picnic facilities 1 km north at Stonehenge Recreational Reserve. The Stonehenge property was the first to be taken up in the area (1838).
Glencoe
Glencoe is a small village 21 km south of Glen Innes on the New England Highway. The Red Lion Tavern is a popular spot for a drink, rest or overnight stay.
Bellevue Country Cottage is 3 km east of Glencoe on the Mt Mitchell Rd. They specialise in locally made handcrafted items including linen shirts, silver jewellery, woodwork, wool embroidery, paintings, pottery, celtic silks and tartans. They are open Wednesdays to Sundays from 10.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m. with morning and afternoon teas and group tours welcome, tel: (02) 6733 3241.
Kings Plains National Park
45 km north-west of Glen Innes, off Kings Plains Rd, which connects the locality of Wellingrove to Inverell, is Kings Plains National Park, an area of rugged terrain, with rocky ridges, woodland, heath and open forest. There are some rare plants, as well as a large population of birds and mammals, many of them coming to drink in the early morning and late afternoon at the park's main feature, Kings Plains Creek, which has rapids, waterfalls and large tranquil waterpools. It is a good spot for bushwalking, exploring, picnicking, camping and birdwatching. There are basic facilities.
Kings Plains Station
The Kings Plains Station (3100 acres) is owned by the Vivers family who claim to have occupied the land since 1832. In 1910 an elaborate vine-covered homestead, known as 'The Castle', was built on the property to recreate a piece of Scotland in Australia. You can go on a guided tour of the property, the 'Castle', the country garden and the historic family cemetery. They are open from 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, tel: (02) 6733 6807.
State Forests
There are a number of recreational areas located in the local state forests - Gibraltar Range, London Bridge, Warra and Glen Nevis. There is 2WD access to Perigine Point Lookout in Gibraltar Range State Forest and the London Bridge Forest Preserve. Other areas are 4WD only. Contact the Glen Innes Information Centre for further information, tel: (02) 6732 2397.
Farm Holidays
Boolabinda Holiday Homestead is 16 km north-west of Glen Innes on Bullock Mountain Rd by Reddestone Creek, the most productive sapphire-bearing creek in the area. The homestead offers holiday accommodation, horseriding, fishing, swimming and fossicking, with instructions on the process and equipment for hire, tel: (02) 6732 2215.
The Willows is a 3500-acre property on the Severn River with picnic and camping grounds on the river with barbecues, toilets and shelters. There are also self-contained units. It is ideal for fishing, bushwalking and birdwatching. Guides will take you on walks, tell you about the Aboriginal culture of the area and provide bush tucker and dance displays, tel: (02) 6732 5960.
For further information on farmstays ring (02) 6732 2397.
Fishing
The fishing season runs from the October long weekend to the June long weekend. The local waters are noted for their trout, catfish, perch, cod and redfin. For further information contact the local information centre, tel: (02) 6732 2397, or Alan Gash on (02) 6732 2204.
Fossicking
Sapphires, topaz, quartz, zircon, garnet and beryl are all found in the district, which sports numerous fossicking areas. Equipment and advice is available from local outlets such as Gem Hunter's Haven on the Highway, tel: (02) 6732 4176. Crystal Cottage at 155 Church St has crystals, minerals and polished stones for sale, tel: (02) 6732 1536, and Reddestone Sapphires (152 New England Highway) have a specialist cutter in attendance so you can view the cutting and faceting process or make a purchase. They are open seven days from 8.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.
Bushwalking
The local bushwalking club are willing to take visitors on bushwalks by prior arrangement, tel: (02) 6732 3093 or (02) 6732 1262.
Tourist Information
|
Australia
|
Which colonial power governed Mauritius before the British?
|
Guyra Shire
Contact
Ebor
Ebor is situated between Armidale and Grafton in Northern NSW approximately 85km from Guyra and 53kms from Armidale.
The village is beside Ebor Falls, on the Guy Fawkes River, one of the headwaters of the Clarence River. In the heart of the Waterfall Way, one of the most scenic drives in Australia, Ebor is the halfway point between the New England Tablelands and the Mid North Coast. The village is a service hub for travellers and tourists. Ebor is 1,350 metres above sea level. Nearby Road Mountain (1,585 metres), is the highest point on the Great Dividing Range outside the Southern Alpine Region. This altitude gives the area the beauty of four distinct seasons throughout the year. Some of the best grazing country in NSW is in the Ebor area. Ebor has a colourful past and an interesting place in the history of white settlement and industry in New England. The wild & beautiful mountains of the Ebor area were a refuge for the Bush Ranger Thunderbolt. From the beginning of settlement in the 1840's, Ebor was a stopping off point for people and produce travelling to and from the New England Tablelands and Grafton, which was a major deep water port for shipping up and down the East Coast of Australia.
Guyra Fawkes National Park is next to Ebor village. Close by are the New England and Cathedral Rock National Parks. These spectacular and unique parks attract thousands of visitors every year. Wonderful displays of wildflowers, native forests, wetlands and waterways are to be seen and enjoyed throughout the district. Ebor has an ancient and fascinating geophysical history and is situated on a massive extinct volcano. The LP Dutton Trout Hatchery at Ebor is a popular attraction that supplies fish stock for local streams and other areas around the state. Activities available in the area include Bushwalking, Camping, Trout Fishing, Fossicking for Minerals, Rock Climbing and trail Riding. The National Trail and the Walcha to Coffs Harbour Walking Track run through the Area. Ebor boasts a very active community representation that continues to improve the area for the comfort and interest of travellers. The Ebor Village community website, currently underdevelopment, will provide up to date information on happening events, places to visit and sights to see in and around the picturesque village of Ebor.
SUBSCRIBE NOW TO GET THE LATEST UPDATES
Name
|
i don't know
|
American Chester Carlson invented which now common office machine?
|
Chester Carlson : definition of Chester Carlson and synonyms of Chester Carlson (English)
Early life
“
Work outside of school hours was a necessity at an early age, and with such time as I had I turned toward interests of my own devising, making things, experimenting, and planning for the future. I had read of Thomas Alva Edison and other successful inventors, and the idea of making an invention appealed to me as one of the few available means to accomplish a change in one's economic status, while at the same time bringing to focus my interest in technical things and making it possible to make a contribution to society as well.
”
—Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale [1]
Carlson's father, Olaf Adolph Carlson, had little formal education, but was described as "brilliant" by a relative. Carlson wrote of his mother, Ellen, that she "was looked up to by her sisters as one of the wisest." [2]
When Carlson was an infant, his father contracted tuberculosis , and also later suffered from arthritis of the spine (a common, age-related disease). When Olaf moved the family to Mexico for a seven-month period in 1910, in hopes of gaining riches through what Carlson described as "a crazy American land colonization scheme," Ellen contracted malaria. [3] Because of his parents' illnesses, and the resulting poverty, Carlson worked to support his family from an early age; he began working odd jobs for money when he was eight. By the time he was thirteen, he would work for two or three hours before going to school, then go back to work after classes. By the time Carlson was in high school, he was his family's principal provider. [4] His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 17, and his father died when Carlson was 27.
Carlson began thinking about reproducing print early in his life. At age ten, he created a newspaper called This and That, created by hand and circulated among his friends with a routing list. His favorite plaything was a rubber stamp printing set, and his most coveted possession was a toy typewriter an aunt gave him for Christmas in 1916—although he was disappointed that it was not an office typewriter. [5]
While working for a local printer while in high school, Carlson attempted to typeset and publish a magazine for science-minded students like himself. He quickly became frustrated with traditional duplicating techniques. As he told Dartmouth College professor Joseph J. Ermene in a 1965 interview, "That set me to thinking about easier ways to do that, and I got to thinking about duplicating methods." [6]
Education
“
Well, I had a fascination with the graphic arts from childhood. One of the first things I wanted was a typewriter —even when I was in grammar school. Then, when I was in high school I liked chemistry and I got the idea of publishing a little magazine for amateur chemists. I also worked for a printer in my spare time and he sold me an old printing press which he had discarded. I paid for it by working for him. Then I started out to set my own type and print this little paper. I don't think I printed more than two issues, and they weren't much. However, this experience did impress me with the difficulty of getting words into hard copy and this, in turn, started me thinking about duplicating processes. I started a little inventor's notebook and I would jot down ideas from time to time.
”
—Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale, when asked about his choice of field [1]
Because of the work he put into supporting his family, Carlson had to take a postgraduate year at his high school to fill in missed courses. He then entered a cooperative work/study program at Riverside Junior College , working and going to classes in alternating six-week periods. Carlson held three jobs while at Riverside, paying for a cheap one-bedroom apartment for himself and his father. At Riverside, Chester began as a chemistry major, but switched to physics, largely due to a favorite professor. [7]
After three years at Riverside, Chester transferred to the California Institute of Technology , or Caltech—his ambition since high school. His tuition, $260 a year, exceeded his total earnings, and the workload prevented him from earning much money—though he did mow lawns and do odd jobs on weekends, and work at a cement factory in the summer. By the time he graduated, he was $1,500 in debt. [8] He graduated with good—but not exceptional—grades, earning a B.S. degree in Physics in 1930, near the start of the Great Depression . He wrote letters seeking employment to 82 companies; none offered him a job. [9]
Early career
“
The need for a quick, satisfactory copying machine that could be used right in the office seemed very apparent to me—there seemed such a crying need for it—such a desirable thing if it could be obtained. So I set out to think of how one could be made.
”
—Chester Carlson [10]
As a last resort, he began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City as a research engineer. Finding the work dull and routine, [11] after a year Carlson transferred to the patent department as an assistant to one of the company's patent attorneys.
Carlson wrote over 400 ideas for new inventions in his personal notebooks while working at Bell Labs. He kept coming back to his love of printing, especially since his job in the patent department gave him new determination to find a better way to copy documents. "In the course of my patent work," wrote Carlson, "I frequently had need for copies of patent specifications and drawings, and there was no really convenient way of getting them at that time." [9] At the time, the department primarily made copies by having typists retype the patent application in its entirety, using carbon paper to make multiple copies at once. There were other methods available, such as mimeographs and Photostats , but they were more expensive than carbon paper, and they had other limitations that made them impractical. [12] The existing solutions were 'duplicating' machines—they could make many duplicates, but one had to create a special master copy first, usually at great expense of time or money. Carlson wanted to invent a 'copying' machine, that could take an existing document and copy it onto a new piece of paper without any intermediate steps.
In 1933, during the Great Depression , Carlson was fired from Bell Labs for participating in a failed "business scheme" outside of the Labs with several other employees. [13] After six weeks of job-hunting, he got a job at the firm Austin & Dix, near Wall Street , but he left the job about a year later as the firm's business was declining. He got a better job at the electronics firm P. R. Mallory Company, founded by Philip Mallory (now known as the Duracell division of Procter & Gamble ), where Carlson was promoted to head of the patent department.
The invention of electrophotography
Further information: Xerography
“
There was a gap of some years, but by 1935 I was more or less settled. I had my job, but I didn't think I was getting ahead very fast. I was just living from hand to mouth, you might say, and I had just got married. It was kind of a hard struggle. So I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone; it would be a chance to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good.
”
—Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale [1]
In 1936, Carlson began to study law at night at New York Law School , receiving his LL.B. degree in 1939. He studied at the New York Public Library, copying longhand from law books there because he could not afford to buy them. The pains induced by this laborious copying hardened his resolve to find a way to build a true copying machine. He began supplementing his law studies with trips to the Public Library's science and technology department. It was there that he was inspired by a brief article, written by Hungarian physicist Pál Selényi in an obscure German scientific journal, that showed him a way to obtain his dream machine. [14]
Carlson's early experiments, conducted in his apartment kitchen, were smoky, smelly, and occasionally explosive. In one set of experiments, he was melting pure crystalline sulfur (a photoconductor) onto a plate of zinc by moving it just so over the flame of his kitchen stove. This often resulted in a sulfur fire, filling the building with the smell of rotten eggs. [15] In another experiment, the chemicals he was working with caught fire, and he and his wife were hard-pressed to extinguish the flames. [16]
During this period, he developed arthritis of the spine, like his father. He pressed on with his experiments, however, in addition to his law school studies and his regular job.
Having learned about the value of patents in his early career as a patent clerk and attorney, Carlson patented his developments every step along the way. He filed his first preliminary patent application on October 18, 1937.
By the fall of 1938, Carlson's wife had convinced him that his experiments needed to be conducted elsewhere. He rented a room on the second floor of a house owned by his mother-in-law at 32-05 37th Street in Astoria, Queens . He hired an assistant, Otto Kornei, an out-of-work Austrian physicist.
Carlson knew that several major corporations were researching ways of copying paper. The Haloid Company had the Photostat , which it licensed to Eastman Kodak , the photography giant. However, these companies were researching along photographic lines, and their solutions required special chemicals and papers. The Photostat, for instance, was essentially a photograph of the document being copied.
Electrophotography
Further information: Electrophotography
Selényi's article described a way of transmitting and printing facsimilies of printed images using a beam of directed ions directed onto a rotating drum of insulating material. The ions would create an electrostatic charge on the drum. A fine powder could then be dusted upon the drum; the powder would stick to the parts of the drum that had been charged, much as a balloon will stick to a static-charged stocking.
To this point, Carlson's apartment-kitchen experiments in constructing a copying machine had involved trying to generate an electric current in the original piece of paper using light. Selényi's article convinced Carlson to instead use light to 'remove' the static charge from a uniformly-ionized photoconductor . As no light would reflect from the black marks on the paper, those areas would remain charged on the photoconductor, and would therefore retain the fine powder. He could then transfer the powder to a fresh sheet of paper, resulting in a duplicate of the original. [17] This approach would give his invention an advantage over the Photostat, which could create only a photographic negative of the original.
The world's first xerographic image [18]
On October 22, 1938, they had their historic breakthrough. Kornei wrote the words "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA." in India ink on a glass microscope slide . The Austrian prepared a zinc plate with a sulfur coating, darkened the room, rubbed the sulfur surface with a cotton handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, then laid the slide on the plate, exposing it to a bright, incandescent light. They removed the slide, sprinkled lycopodium powder to the sulfur surface, softly blew the excess away, and transferred the image to a sheet of wax paper . They heated the paper, softening the wax so the lycopodium would adhere to it, and had the world's first xerographic copy. After repeating the experiment to be sure it worked, Carlson celebrated by taking Kornei out for a modest lunch. [19] [20]
Kornei was not as excited about the results of the experiment as Carlson. Within a year, he left Carlson on cordial terms. His pessimism about electrophotography was so strong that he decided to dissolve his agreement with Carlson that would have given Kornei ten percent of Carlson's future proceeds from the invention and partial rights to the inventions they had worked on together. [21] Years later, when Xerox stock was soaring, Carlson sent Kornei a gift of one hundred shares in the company. [22] Had Kornei held onto that gift, it would have been worth more than $1 million by 1972. [23]
The road to Carlson's success—or that for xerography's success—had been long and filled with failure. From 1939 to 1944, his funding requests were turned down by more than twenty companies. [24] He tried for some time to sell the invention to International Business Machines (IBM), the great vendor of office equipment, but no one at the company saw merit in the concept—it is not clear that anyone at IBM even 'understood' the concept. [25] His next-to-last attempt to garner the interest—and funds—he needed to commercialize the physics was a meeting with the Department of the Navy. The Navy had a specific interest in the production of dry copies, but they did not "see" what Carlson saw.[ citation needed ]
On October 6, 1942, the Patent Office issued Carlson's patent on electrophotography. [26]
Battelle Memorial Institute
When Carlson was close to giving up on getting his invention from a proof-of-concept to a usable product, happenstance provided a solution. In 1944, Russell W. Dayton, a young engineer from the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio , visited the patent department at Mallory where Carlson worked. Dayton, brought in as an expert witness in a patent appeal case by Mallory, seemed to Carlson to be "the kind of fellow who looked like he was interested in new ideas." [27] Although Battelle had not previously developed ideas generated by others, Dayton was fascinated by Carlson's invention. When Carlson was invited to Columbus to demonstrate his invention, Dayton's statement to the Battelle scientists and engineers present showed that he understood the importance of Carlson's invention: "However crude this may seem, this is the first time any of you have seen a reproduction made without any chemical reaction and a dry process."
Battelle took a risk on Carlson's invention, which seemed to come out of nowhere:
Electrophotography had practically no foundation in previous scientific work. Chet put together a rather odd lot of phenomena, each of which was obscure in itself and none of which had previously been related in anyone's thinking. The result was the biggest thing in imaging since the coming of photography itself. Furthermore, he did it entirely without the help of a favorable scientific climate. There are dozens of instances of simultaneous discovery down through scientific history, but no one came anywhere near being simultaneous with Chet. I'm as amazed by his discovery now as I was when I first heard of it.
—Dr. Harold E. Clark, Battelle Memorial Institute,
New Yorker, 1967 [28]
By the fall of 1945, Battelle agreed to act as Carlson's agent for his patents, pay for further research, and develop the idea. Battelle tried to interest major printing and photography companies, like Eastman Kodak and Harris-Seybold, to license the idea, but to no avail.
Haloid Company
The commercial breakthrough came when John Dessauer, chief of research at the Haloid Company, read an article about Carlson's invention. Haloid, a manufacturer of photographic paper, was looking for a way out of the shadow of its Rochester, New York, neighbor, Eastman Kodak. Through previous acquisitions, Haloid was already in the duplicating-machine business; Dessauer thought that electrophotography might allow Haloid to expand into a new field that Kodak did not dominate. [29]
In December 1946, Battelle, Carlson, and Haloid signed the first agreement to license electrophotography for a commercial product. The $10,000 contract—representing ten percent of Haloid's total earnings from 1945—granted a nonexclusive right to make electophotography-based copying machines intended to make no more than twenty copies of an original. Both sides were tentative; Battelle was concerned by Haloid's relatively small size, and Haloid had concerns about electrophotography's viability. [30]
During this period, Battelle conducted most of the basic research into electrophotography, while Haloid concentrated on trying to make a commercial product out of the results. In 1948, Haloid's CEO, Joseph Wilson, convinced the U.S. Army Signal Corps to invest $100,000 in the technology, an amount that would double later. The Signal Corps was concerned about nuclear war. The traditional photographic techniques they used for reconnaissance would not function properly when exposed to the radiation from a nuclear attack; the film would fog, much as consumer photographic film can be fogged by an airport X-ray machine. The Signal Corps thought that electrophotography might be developed into a product that would be immune to such radiation. Through the 1950s, over half the money Battelle spent developing electrophotography came from government contracts. [31]
In 1947, Carlson was becoming worried that Battelle was not developing electrophotography quickly enough; his patent would expire in ten years. After meeting with Joe Wilson, Carlson accepted an offer to become a consultant to Haloid. He and his wife Dorris moved to the Rochester area, to be near the company's base of operations.
After years of trying to interest additional licensees in electrophotography, Battelle agreed to renegotiate with Haloid, making it the exclusive licensee for the invention (except for a few minor uses that Battelle wished to retain for itself). [32]
Xerox
Main article: Xerox
“
What Bell is to the telephone—or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography—Haloid could be to xerography.
”
—Chester Carlson, letter to Joseph Wilson, 1953 [33]
Xerography
By 1948, Haloid realized that it would have to make a public announcement about electrophotography in order to retain its claims to the technology. However, the term electrophotography troubled Haloid; for one thing, its use of the term "photography" invited unwelcome comparisons with traditional duplicating technologies. After considering several options, Haloid chose a term invented by a public-relations employee at Battelle, who had asked a classics professor at Ohio State University for ideas. The professor suggested the term xerography—formed by combining the Greek words xeros ("dry") and graphein ("writing"). Carlson was not fond of the name, but Haloid's Wilson liked it, and so Haloid's board of directors voted to adopt it. The company's patent department wanted to trademark "xerography;" Haloid's head of sales and advertising, John Hartnett, vetoed the idea: "Don't do that. We want people to use the word." [34]
XeroX Model A
On October 22, 1948, ten years to the day after that first microscope slide was copied, the Haloid Company made the first public announcement of xerography. In 1949, it shipped the first commercial photocopier: the XeroX Model A Copier, known inside the company as the "Ox Box." The Model A was difficult to use, requiring thirty-nine steps to make a copy, as the process was mostly manual. The product would likely have been a failure, except that it turned out to be a good way to make paper masters for offset printing presses, even with the difficulty of use. Sales of the Model A to the printing departments of companies like Ford Motor Company kept the product alive. [35]
Before the Model A, in order to make a paper lithographic master for a lithographic press like the Multigraph 1250, one had two choices: Type up a new master using wax-coated carbon paper on a special master sheet, or use a metal plate coated with a modified silver halide photographic emulsion. If retyping the document was not feasible, the photographic method could be used, but it was slow, expensive, and messy. Because the Model A's toner repelled water but attracted oil-based inks, a lithographic master could be made easily by simply making a copy of the document with the Model A onto a blank paper master. It reduced the cost of creating a lithographic master for an existing document from three dollars to less than forty cents. Ford saved so much money by using the Model A that the savings were specifically mentioned in one of Ford's annual reports. [36]
After the Model A, Haloid released a number of xerographic copiers to the market, but none yet particularly easy to use. Meanwhile, competitors such as Kodak and 3M brought out their own copying devices using other technologies. Kodak's Verifax, for instance, could sit on one side of a desk and sold for $100; Haloid's competing machines were more expensive and substantially larger. [37]
Haloid Xerox
In 1955, Haloid signed a new agreement with Battelle granting it full title to Carlson's xerography patents, in exchange for fifty thousand shares of Haloid stock. [38] Carlson received forty percent of the cash and stock from that deal, due to his agreement with Battelle. [39] That same year, in order to exploit those patents in Europe, Haloid partnered with the British motion-picture company Rank Organisation in a joint venture called Rank Xerox . [38]
Haloid needed to grow, and its existing offices in Rochester were old and scattered. In 1955, the company purchased a large parcel of land in the Rochester suburb of Webster, New York; this site would eventually become the company's main research-and-development campus. [40]
Haloid's CEO, Joseph Wilson, had decided Haloid needed a new name as early as 1954. After years of debate within the company, the board approved a name change to "Haloid Xerox" in 1958, reflecting the fact that xerography was now the company's main line of business. [41]
The Xerox 914
The first device recognizable as a modern photocopier was the Xerox 914. Although large and crude by modern standards, it allowed an operator to place an original on a sheet of glass, press a button, and receive a copy on plain paper. Manufactured in a leased building off Orchard Street in Rochester, the 914 was introduced to the market at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City on September 16, 1959. Even plagued with early problems—of the two demonstration units at the hotel, one caught fire, and one worked fine—the Xerox 914 became massively successful. Between 1959, when the Model 914 first shipped, and 1961, Haloid Xerox's revenues nearly doubled.
The 914's success was not only due to its relative ease of use, its design (that, unlike competing copiers, carried no risk of damage to the original), and its low operating costs compared to other machines that required special paper; Haloid Xerox's decision to rent the 914—at the price of $25 per month, plus the cost of copies at four cents each with a minimum of $49 per month—made it vastly more affordable than a similar competing copier. [42]
In 1961, because of the success of the Xerox 914, the company changed its name again, to Xerox Corporation. [43]
For Carlson, the commercial success of the Xerox 914 was the culmination of his life's work: a device that could quickly and cheaply make an exact copy of an existing document. After the 914 went into production, Carlson's involvement with Xerox declined as he began pursuing his philanthropic interests. [44]
Personal life
In the fall of 1934, Carlson married Elsa von Mallon, whom he had met at a YWCA party in New York City. Carlson described the marriage as "an unhappy period interspersed with sporadic escapes." [45] They were divorced in 1945.
Carlson married his second wife, Dorris Helen Hudgins, while the negotiations between Battelle and Haloid were under way.
Later life
“
To know Chester Carlson was to like him, to love him, and to respect him. He was generally known as the inventor of xerography, and although it was an extraordinary achievement in the technological and scientific field, I respected him more as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist. His concern for the future of the human situation was genuine, and his dedication to the principles of the United Nations was profound. He belonged to that rare breed of leaders who generate in our hearts faith in man and hope for the future.
”
—U Thant, secretary-general, United Nations, at the Xerox memorial service for Chester Carlson
In 1951, Carlson's royalties from Battelle amounted to about $15,000 (in current terms, $134 thousand). Carlson continued to work at Haloid until 1955, and he remained a consultant to the company until his death. From 1956 to 1965, he continued to earn royalties on his patents from Xerox, amounting to about one-sixteenth of a cent for every Xerox copy made worldwide. [39]
In 1968, Fortune magazine ranked Carlson among the wealthiest people in America. He sent them a brief letter: "Your estimate of my net worth is too high by $150 million. I belong in the 0 to $50 million bracket." This was because Carlson had spent years quietly giving most of his fortune away. He told his wife his remaining ambition was "to die a poor man." [39]
Carlson devoted his wealth to philanthropic purposes. He donated over $150 million to charitable causes and was an active supporter of the NAACP . Carlson's wife Dorris got him interested in Hinduism, particularly the ancient texts known as the Vedanta, as well as in Zen Buddhism. [39] They hosted Buddhist meetings, with meditation, at their home. After reading Philip Kapleau 's book The Three Pillars of Zen, Dorris invited Kapleau to join their meditation group; in June 1966, they provided the funding that allowed Kapleau to start the Rochester Zen Center . [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] Dorris paid for 1,400 acres (5.7 km2) of land that became Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji , a Zen monastery in the Catskill Mountains of New York led by Eido Tai Shimano . [52] Carlson had purchased a New York City carriage house for use by Shimano; he died four days after it was dedicated. [52] Carlson is still commemorated in special services by Shimano; his dharma name, Daitokuin Zenshin Carlson Koji, is mentioned. [53]
In his essay "Half a Career with the Paranormal," researcher Ian Stevenson describes Carlson's philanthropic style. According to Stevenson, Carlson's wife, Dorris, had some skill at extrasensory perception, and convinced Carlson to help support Stevenson's research. Carlson not only made annual donations to the University of Virginia to fund Stevenson's work, but in 1964 he made a particularly large donation that helped fund one of the first endowed chairs at the University. Stevenson was the first incumbent of this chair. [54]
Although Carlson insisted on anonymous donations, wrote Stevenson, he was unusual in that he closely followed the details of the research, maintaining contact with Stevenson. "He rarely made suggestions, but what he said always deserved attention," wrote Stevenson. [54]
In the spring of 1968, while on vacation in the Bahamas, Carlson had his first heart attack. He was gravely ill, but hid this from his wife, embarking on a number of unexpected household improvements and concealing his doctor's visits. On September 19, 1968, Carlson died of a heart attack in the Festival Theatre, on West 57th Street in New York City, while watching the film He Who Rides a Tiger . Dorris arranged a small service in New York City; Xerox held a much larger service in the corporate auditorium in Rochester on September 26, 1968. [55] [56]
Legacy
The New York Civil Liberties Union was among the beneficiaries of his bequests.[ citation needed ] The University of Virginia received $1 million, [54] under strict instructions that the money was to be used only to fund parapsychology research. [57] The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions received a bequest of over $4.2 million from Carlson, in addition to the more than $4 million he had contributed while alive. [58] [59]
In 1981 Carlson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame .
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
US Presidential Proclamation 5886
United States Public Law 100-548, signed into law by Ronald Reagan , designated October 22, 1988, as "National Chester F. Carlson Recognition Day". He was honored by the United States Postal Service with a 21¢ Great Americans series postage stamp . [60]
Carlson is memorialized by buildings at the two largest institutions of higher learning in Rochester, New York , Xerox's hometown. The Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, a department of the Rochester Institute of Technology , specializes in remote sensing, eye tracking, and xerography. [61] The University of Rochester 's Carlson Science and Engineering Library is the University's primary library for the science and engineering disciplines. [62]
The following awards are named in Carlson's honor:
American Society for Engineering Education: The Chester F. Carlson Award is presented annually to an individual innovator in engineering education who, by motivation and ability to extend beyond the accepted tradition, has made a significant contribution to the profession. [63]
Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, IVA: The Chester Carlson Award recognizes persons or institutions for significant research or development within the area of information science. [64]
Society for Imaging Science and Technology: The Chester F. Carlson Award recognizes outstanding technical work that advances the state of the art in electrophotographic printing. [65]
See also
Copy art
References
|
copying machine
|
New Britain, the largest island of the Bismark Archipelago, is part of which country?
|
Technology Innovations — Chester Carlson & the Xerographic Process - Prof. Boerner's Explorations
Prof. Boerner's Explorations
Due to injury, this commentary will be added later. Please check back. Thank you. GLB
These Introductory Comments are copyrighted:
Copyright©2010 — Gerald Boerner — All Rights Reserved
[ 3851 Words ]
“Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.”
— Andrew Young
“I thought administration was the running of the office. The Xerox machine. Paying bills.”
— Lesley Stahl
“It’s good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it’s good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.”
— Steve Guttenburg
“A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.”
— Antonin Scalia
“A free America… means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
— William Strunk, Jr.
“A tool is usually more simple than a machine; it is generally used with the hand, whilst a machine is frequently moved by animal or steam power.”
— Charles Babbage
“Xerox did OK in moving to digital in the commercial space. They didn’t do well in the consumer market, but they’re not a consumer brand. They don’t even know how to spell consumer.”
— Antonio Perez
Chester Carlson — Roots of Xerographic Photocopying Process
Chester Floyd Carlson (1906 – 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington.
He is best known for having invented the process of electrophotography, which produced a dry copy rather than a wet copy, as was produced by the mimeograph process. Carlson’s process was subsequently renamed to xerography, a term that literally means "dry writing."
Carlson began thinking about reproducing print early in his life. At age ten, he created a newspaper called This and That, created by hand and circulated among his friends with a routing list. His favorite plaything was a rubber stamp printing set, and his most coveted possession was a toy typewriter an aunt gave him for Christmas in 1916—although he was disappointed that it wasn’t an office typewriter.
While working for a local printer while in high school, Carlson attempted to typeset and publish a magazine for science-minded students like himself. He quickly became frustrated with traditional duplicating techniques. As he told Dartmouth College professor Joseph J. Ermene in a 1965 interview, "That set me to thinking about easier ways to do that, and I got to thinking about duplicating methods."
Education
“Well, I had a fascination with the graphic arts from childhood. One of the first things I wanted was a typewriter—even when I was in grammar school. Then, when I was in high school I liked chemistry and I got the idea of publishing a little magazine for amateur chemists. I also worked for a printer in my spare time and he sold me an old printing press which he had discarded. I paid for it by working for him. Then I started out to set my own type and print this little paper. I don’t think I printed more than two issues, and they weren’t much. However, this experience did impress me with the difficulty of getting words into hard copy and this, in turn, started me thinking about duplicating processes. I started a little inventor’s notebook and I would jot down ideas from time to time.”
—Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale, when asked about his choice of field
Because of the work he put in supporting his family, Carlson had to take a postgraduate year at his high school to fill in missed courses. He then entered a cooperative work/study program at Riverside Junior College, working and going to classes in alternating six-week periods. Carlson held three jobs while at Riverside, paying for a cheap one-bedroom apartment for himself and his father. At Riverside, Chester began as a chemistry major, but switched to physics, largely due to a favorite professor.
After three years at Riverside, Chester transferred to the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech—his ambition since high school. His tuition, $260 a year, exceeded his total earnings, and the workload prevented him from earning much money—though he did mow lawns and do odd jobs on weekends, and work at a cement factory in the summer. By the time he graduated, he was $1,500 in debt. He graduated with good—but not exceptional—grades, earning a B.S. degree in Physics in 1930, near the start of the Great Depression. He wrote letters seeking employment to 82 companies; none offered him a job.
Early Career
“The need for a quick, satisfactory copying machine that could be used right in the office seemed very apparent to me—there seemed such a crying need for it—such a desirable thing if it could be obtained. So I set out to think of how one could be made.”
—Chester Carlson
As a last resort, he began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City as a research engineer. Finding the work dull and routine, After a year, Carlson transferred to the patent department as an assistant to one of the company’s patent attorneys.
Carlson wrote over 400 ideas for new inventions in his personal notebooks while working at Bell Labs. He kept coming back to his love of printing, especially since his job in the patent department gave him new determination to find a better way to copy documents. "In the course of my patent work," wrote Carlson, "I frequently had need for copies of patent specifications and drawings, and there was no really convenient way of getting them at that time." At the time, the department primarily made copies by having typists retype the patent application in its entirety, using carbon paper to make multiple copies at once. There were other methods available, such as mimeographs and Photostats, but they were more expensive than carbon paper, and they had other limitations that made them impractical. The existing solutions were ‘duplicating’ machines—they could make many duplicates, but one had to create a special master copy first, usually at great expense of time or money. Carlson wanted to invent a ‘copying’ machine, that could take an existing document and copy it onto a new piece of paper without any intermediate steps.
In 1933, during the Great Depression, Carlson was fired from Bell Labs for participating in a failed "business scheme" outside of the Labs with several other employees. After six weeks of job-hunting, he got a job at the firm Austin & Dix, near Wall Street, but he left the job about a year later as the firm’s business was declining. He got a better job at the electronics firm P. R. Mallory Company, founded by Philip Mallory (now known as the Duracell division of Procter & Gamble), where Carlson was promoted to head of the patent department.
The Invention of Electrophotography
“There was a gap of some years, but by 1935 I was more or less settled. I had my job, but I didn’t think I was getting ahead very fast. I was just living from hand to mouth, you might say, and I had just got married. It was kind of a hard struggle. So I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone; it would be a chance to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good.”
— Chester Carlson, to A. Dinsdale
In 1936, Carlson began to study law at night at New York Law School, receiving his LL.B. degree in 1939. He studied at the New York Public Library, copying longhand from law books there because he couldn’t afford to buy them. The pains induced by this laborious copying hardened his resolve to find a way to build a true copying machine. He began supplementing his law studies with trips to the Public Library’s science and technology department. It was there that he was inspired by a brief article, written by Hungarian physicist Pál Selényi in an obscure German scientific journal, that showed him a way to obtain his dream machine.
Carlson’s early experiments, conducted in his apartment kitchen, were smoky, smelly, and occasionally explosive. In one set of experiments, he was melting pure crystalline sulfur (a photoconductor) onto a plate of zinc by moving it just so over the flame of his kitchen stove. This often resulted in a sulfur fire, filling the building with the smell of rotten eggs. In another experiment, the chemicals he was working with caught fire, and he and his wife were hard-pressed to extinguish the flames.
During this period, he developed arthritis of the spine, like his father. He pressed on with his experiments, however, in addition to his law school studies and his regular job.
Having learned about the value of patents in his early career as a patent clerk and attorney, Carlson patented his developments every step along the way. He filed his first preliminary patent application on October 18, 1937.
By the fall of 1938, Carlson’s wife had convinced him that his experiments needed to be conducted elsewhere. He rented a room on the second floor of a house owned by his mother-in-law at 32-05 37th Street in Astoria, Queens. He hired an assistant, Otto Kornei, an out-of-work Austrian physicist.
Carlson knew that several major corporations were researching ways of copying paper. The Haloid Company had the Photostat, which it licensed to Eastman Kodak, the photography giant. However, these companies were researching along photographic lines, and their solutions required special chemicals and papers. The Photostat, for instance, was essentially a photograph of the document being copied.
Electrophotography
Selényi’s article described a way of transmitting and printing facsimilies of printed images using a beam of directed ions directed onto a rotating drum of insulating material. The ions would create an electrostatic charge on the drum. A fine powder could then be dusted upon the drum; the powder would stick to the parts of the drum that had been charged, much as a balloon will stick to a static-charged stocking.
To this point, Carlson’s apartment-kitchen experiments in constructing a copying machine had involved trying to generate an electric current in the original piece of paper using light. Selényi’s article convinced Carlson to instead use light to ‘remove’ the static charge from a uniformly-ionized photoconductor. As no light would reflect from the black marks on the paper, those areas would remain charged on the photoconductor, and would therefore retain the fine powder. He could then transfer the powder to a fresh sheet of paper, resulting in a duplicate of the original. This approach would give his invention an advantage over the Photostat, which could only create a photographic negative of the original.
The world’s first xerographic image
On October 22, 1938, they had their historic breakthrough. Kornei wrote the words "10.-22.-38 ASTORIA." in India ink on a glass microscope slide. The Austrian prepared a zinc plate with a sulfur coating, darkened the room, rubbed the sulfur surface with a cotton handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, then laid the slide on the plate, exposing it to a bright, incandescent light. They removed the slide, sprinkled lycopodium powder to the sulfur surface, softly blew the excess away, and transferred the image to a sheet of wax paper. They heated the paper, softening the wax so the lycopodium would adhere to it, and had the world’s first xerographic copy. After repeating the experiment to be sure it worked, Carlson celebrated taking Kornei out for a modest lunch.
Kornei was not as excited about the results of the experiment as Carlson. Within a year, he left Carlson on cordial terms. His pessimism about electrophotography was so strong that he decided to dissolve his agreement with Carlson that would have given Kornei ten percent of Carlson’s future proceeds from the invention and partial rights to the inventions they had worked on together. Years later, when Xerox stock was soaring, Carlson sent Kornei a gift of one hundred shares in the company. Had Kornei held onto that gift, it would have been worth more than $1 million by 1972.
The road to his success—or that for xerography’s success—had been long and filled with failure. From 1939 to 1944, his funding requests were turned down by more than twenty companies. He tried for some time to sell the invention to International Business Machines (IBM), the great vendor of office equipment, but no one at the company saw merit in the concept—it is not clear that anyone at IBM even ‘understood’ the concept. His next-to-last attempt to garner the interest—and funds—he needed to commercialize the physics was a meeting with the Department of the Navy. The Navy had a specific interest in the production of dry copies but they did not "see" what Carlson saw.
On October 6, 1942, the Patent Office issued Carlson’s patent on electrophotography.
Schematic overview of the
xerographic photocopying process.
The first commercial use was hand processing of a flat photosensor with a copy camera and a separate processing unit to produce offset lithographic plates. Today this technology is used in photocopy machines, laser printers, and digital presses such as Xerox iGen3 and Xeikon presses which are slowly replacing many traditional offset presses in the printing industry for shorter runs.
By using a cylinder to carry the photosensor, automatic processing was enabled. In 1960 the automatic photocopier was created and many millions have been built since. The same process is used in microform printers and computer output laser or LED printers.
The steps of the process are described below as applied on a cylinder, as in a photocopier. Some variants are described within the text. Every step of the process has design variants.
A metal cylinder is mounted to rotate about a horizontal axis. This is called the drum. The end to end dimension is the width of print to be produced plus a generous tolerance. The drum in the copiers originally developed by Xerox Corporation were manufactured with a surface coating of amorphous selenium (more recently ceramic or organic photo conductor or OPC), applied by vacuum deposition. Amorphous selenium will hold an electrostatic charge in darkness and will conduct away such a charge under light. In the 1970s, IBM Corporation sought to avoid Xerox’s patents for selenium drums by developing organic photoconductors as an alternative to the selenium drum. The organic system, Photocopiers which rely on silicon or selenium (and its alloys) are charged positiive and use negative toner. Photoconducters using organic compounds (e.g., zinc oxide or cadmium sulfide), are vice versa. Organic photoconductors are now preferred because they can be deposited on a flexible, oval or triangular belt instead of a round drum.
Laser printer photo drums are made with a doped silicon diode sandwich structure with a hydrogen doped silicon light chargeable layer, a boron nitride rectifying (diode causing) layer that minimizes current leakage, as well as a surface layer of silicon doped with oxygen or nitrogen, silicon nitride is a scuff resistant material
The drum rotates at the speed of paper output. One revolution passes the drum surface through the steps described below.
Step 1. Charging…
An electrostatic charge of -600 volts is uniformly distributed over the surface of the drum by a corona discharge from a Corona unit (Corotron), with output limited by a control grid or screen. The complete unit is correctly called a Screened Corotron or Scorotron for short. This effect can also be achieved with the use of a contact roller with a charge applied to it. Essentially, a corona discharge is generated by a narrow wire 1/4 to 1/2 inch apart from the photoconductor. A negative charge is placed on the wire, which will ionize the space between the wire and conductor, so electrons will be repelled and pushed away onto the conductor. The conductor is set on top of a conducting surface, kept at ground potential.
The polarity is chosen to suit the Positive or Negative process. Positive process is used for producing black on white analogue copies. Negative process is used for producing black on white from negative “originalsF” (mainly microfilm) and all digital printing and copying. This is to economize on the use of laser light by the “Blackwriting” or Write to Black exposure method.
Step 2. Exposure…
The document or microform to be copied is illuminated by flash lamps on the platen and either passed over a lens or is scanned by a moving light and lens, such that its image is projected onto and synchronized with the moving drum surface. Where there is text or image on the document, the corresponding area of the drum will remain unlit. Where there is no image the drum will be illuminated and the charge will be dissipated. The charge that remains on the drum after this exposure is a ‘latent’ image and is a negative of the original document. Alternatively, the image may be Flash Exposed, using a Xenon strobe, onto the surface of the moving drum or belt, fast enough to render a perfect latent image.
Whether in a scanning or a stationary optical system, combinations of lenses and mirrors are used to project the original image on the platen (scanning surface) onto the photoconductor. Additional lenses, with different focal lengths or zooming lenses are utilized to enlarge or reduce the image. The scanning system, though, must change its scanner speed to adapt to elements or reductions.
A drum is inferior to a belt in the sense that although it is simpler than a belt, it must be buffered gradually in parts rolling on the drum. As a result, the belt is more efficient to use one exposure to make a direct passage.
In a laser or LED printer, modulated light is projected onto the drum surface to create the latent image. The modulated light is used only to create the positive image, hence the term “Blackwriting.”
Step 3. Development…
In high-volume copiers, the drum is presented with a slowly turbulent mixture of toner particles and larger, iron, reusable carrier particles. The carrier particles have a coating which, during agitation, generates a triboelectric charge (a form of static electricity), which attracts a coating of toner particles. In addition, the mix is manipulated with a magnetic roller to present to the surface of the drum/belt a brush of toner. By contact with the carrier each neutral toner particle has an electric charge of polarity opposite to the charge of the latent image on the drum. The charge attracts toner to form a visible image on the drum. To control the amount of toner transferred, a bias voltage is applied to the developer roller to counteract the attraction between toner and latent image.
Where a negative image is required, as when printing from a microform negative, then the toner has the same polarity as the corona in Step 1. Electrostatic lines of force drive the toner particles away from the latent image towards the uncharged area, which is the area exposed from the negative.
Early color copiers and printers used multiple copy cycles for each page output, using colored filters and toners. Modern units use only a single scan to four separate, miniature process units, operating simultaneously, each with its own coronas, drum and developer unit.
Step 4. Transfer…
Paper is passed between the drum and the transfer corona, which has a polarity that is the opposite of the charge on the toner. The toner image is transferred by a combination of pressure and electrostatic attraction, from the drum to the paper. On many color and high speed machines, it is common to replace the transfer corona with, one or more, charged Bias Transfer Rollers (BTRs), which apply greater pressure and produce a higher quality image.
Step 5. Separation or Detack…
Electric charges on the paper are partially neutralized by AC from a second corona, usually constructed in tandem with the transfer corona and immediately after it. As a result, the paper, complete with most (but not all) of the toner image is separated from the drum or belt surface.
Step 6. Fixing or Fusing…
The toner image is permanently fixed to the paper using either a heat and pressure mechanism (Hot Roll Fuser) or a radiant fusing technology (Oven Fuser) to melt and bond the toner particles into the medium (usually paper) being printed on. There also used to be available ‘Offline’ vapor fusers. These were trays covered in cotton gauze which was sprinkled with a volatile liquid, such as ether. When the transferred image was brought into proximity with the vapor from the evaporating liquid the result was a perfectly fixed copy without any of the distortion or toner migration which can occur with the other methods. This method is now outlawed by the ‘Health and Safety’ authorities, for obvious reasons.
Step 7. Cleaning…
The drum, having already been partially discharged during detack, is further discharged, by light, and any remaining toner, that did not transfer in Step 6, is removed from the drum surface by a rotating brush under suction, or a squeegee known as the Cleaning Blade. In most cases, this ‘waste’ toner is routed into a waste toner compartment for later disposal; however, in some systems it is routed back into the developer unit for reuse. This process, known as Toner Reclaim, is much more economical but can possibly lead to a reduced overall toner efficiency through a process known as ‘toner polluting’ whereby concentration levels of toner/developer having poor electrostatic properties are permitted to build up in the developer unit, reducing the overall efficiency of the toner in the system.
Note: Some systems have abandoned entirely the use of a separate developer (carrier). These systems, known as Mono Component, operate as above but use either a magnetic toner or fusible developer (however you wish to view it). This results in the complete removal of the need to replace worn out developer, as the user effectively replaces it along with the toner. An alternative developing system, developed by KIP from an abandoned line of research by Xerox, completely replaces magnetic toner manipulation and the cleaning system, with a series of, computer controlled, varying biases. The toner is printed directly onto the drum, by direct contact with a rubber developing roller which, by reversing the bias, removes all the unwanted toner and returns it to the developer unit for re-use.
The development of xerography has led to new technologies that some predict will eventually eradicate traditional offset printing machines. These new machines that print in full CMYK color, such as Xeikon, use xerography but provide nearly the quality of traditional ink prints.
Please take time to further explore more about
Chester Carlson and the Xerographic Process by accessing
the Wikipedia articles referenced below…
Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: Chester Carlson…
|
i don't know
|
Which novelist wrote 'The Dubliners'?
|
The Epiphany as the Evanescent Moment: Flashes of Unintellectual Light in James Joyce’s Dubliners » Writing Program » Boston University
The Epiphany as the Evanescent Moment: Flashes of Unintellectual Light in James Joyce’s Dubliners
Navraj Narula
Download this essay
James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories, defies literary norms by breaking the original storyline format of Freytag’s pyramid, which suggests that a clear beginning consisting of a proper introduction of the setting and the characters, a middle discussing the conflict that would lead to a climax, and an end that ties the story together with a denouement are indispensable to any written work of fiction (“Analyzing a Story’s Plot: Freytag’s Pyramid”). James Joyce challenges these conventions by abruptly positioning the conflict at the start of his stories and refusing to include a resolution at the end of each one, inviting his readers to consider the cliffhanger at the end of each story in Dubliners rather than offering them a realization or, as most critics would say, an epiphany. In fact, as relayed by Zach Bowen, the founding editor of both the James Joyce Literary Supplement and the Florida James Joyce Series, a large number of Joyce’s critics “have had something to say about [Joyce’s] epiphanies and their use” in Dubliners (103). However, these noted critics—such as Henry Levin, Thomas Connolly, and William York Tindall—only acknowledge the everyday, hackneyed definition of epiphany, that of a “revelation” or a “realization.” These critics, who solely relate the word epiphany to enlightenment, claim that the characters in Dubliners do indeed arrive at a realization at the end of each story. Upon inspecting Dubliners and its unconventional endings though, I have come to the conclusion that the figures in Joyce’s stories arrive at no revelation at all. Published in 1914, a time when Irish nationalism instilled in people a desire to discover their identities, Dubliners offers its characters no sort of realization of their life’s purposes. Instead most find themselves lost, accepting failure or unable to proceed. Through a close reading of “Araby,” “The Boarding House,” and “Eveline,” I will, by recovering the Joycean definition of “epiphany,” demonstrate that an epiphany does not always necessarily adhere to the critical definition (or even worldly meaning) of the word as a “revelation” or a “realization.” In congruency with the Joycean definition of an epiphany as a departure from the critical definition of an epiphany, the Joycean definition does not go so far as to take action in reaching a point of realization; instead, it merely showcases the experiences of the characters in Dubliners, not drawing the reader’s attention to any sort of profound revelation.
While many critics claim that what Joyce meant by an epiphany is a realization, I will argue that what Joyce meant by an epiphany is simply an unrevealing experience. In Stephen Hero, Joyce’s posthumously published autobiographical novel, he relates that an epiphany is a “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (Stephen Hero 211), believing that these epiphanies must be recorded “with extreme care, seeing that they [epiphanies] themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (211). Florence L. Walzi, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is an expert on the early works of Joyce, examines the etymology of the word “epiphany,” indicating that the basic meaning of epiphany in Greek is an “appearance” or “manifestation” related to a verb meaning “to display or show forth” (436). Then, Walzi goes even further to say that this basic meaning of an epiphany “reflects the later sense of the word as a revelation,” deeming it “a flash of intellectual light” (436). While Walzi, like most critics, extends the definition of “epiphany” beyond its basic meaning, I am hesitant to leap from “appearance” or “manifestation” all the way to “revelation.” Joyce explicitly defines an epiphany as a “manifestation,” suggesting that an epiphany has the tendency to make a person aware of something, but not actually realize the significance of it, not struck by any “flash of intellectual light.” Joyce also asserts that an epiphany is defined by “moments.” In doing so, Joyce suggests that an epiphany could simply be an experience, or an occurrence in a particular moment of time that holds importance but not necessarily a revelation. The Joycean definition of an epiphany differs from the critical definition of an epiphany in that Joyce’s epiphany is more than what Joyce himself presents it to be: a simple manifestation, an evanescent moment, a significant experience. The characters in “Araby,” “The Boarding House,” and “Eveline” are aware of the action in their setting but never fully realize the implications of it; they are standing examples of Joycean characters who never reach the critical definition of an epiphany.
While I concur with Tindall’s statement that each of the stories in Dubliners “may be thought of as a great epiphany…an epiphany of epiphanies” (qtd. in Scholes 65), I refute his critical definition of the word “epiphany” as meaning a realization rather than an experience. For instance, the young boy in the story of “Araby” is left unsatisfied, hallowed, and questioning his movements because no light bulb of realization has popped up beside his head (Dubliners 29). He had promised a girl he fancied that he would go to Araby, a night market, and bring her back a souvenir (32). Arriving at the bazaar near closing time, the young boy lingers for a while at a stall and then leaves, not buying anything (35). At the end of the story, he sees himself as a “creature driven and derided by vanity,” his eyes “[burning] with anguish and anger” (35). The young boy does not come to any sort of realization; he simply goes through an experience of confusion, not knowing how to respond to his first love. Though he gains awareness of the gap between himself and his schoolboy crush, he remains in the dark about how to respond to the girl he loves. Taking no control of his situation, he angrily leaves the market—lifeless (35). He does not realize what to do next or how to go about handling the lovesickness of his situation; as a matter of fact, the reader must go about ending the story of “Araby” for this young boy since Joyce provides no resolution for him, but only delivers a taste of his “evanescent…[moment]” (Stephen Hero 211), rather than yielding to Tindall’s definition of an epiphany, which would imply that the young boy arrived at a concrete turning point rather than simply a halfway point.
In agreement with Scholes’ view, the role of the epiphany is to “function dramatically in an artistic context, revealing character, attitude, and emotion” (76). The “epiphanies” that Joyce employs at the end of each story in Dubliners may leave the reader blank without a resolution in mind, but the very emptiness of a proper ending also injects readers with a greater understanding of the figures in the story as well as how they respond to their own experiences. Much like the reader, Polly in “The Boarding House” is uninformed about the happenings in her life (61). She does not realize that her mother is pushing for Mr. Doran to take her hand in marriage so as to save the family reputation Polly has stained by becoming involved with him, or that Mr. Doran is hesitant to wed Polly because he trusts that he could never truly grow to love her (66). At the end of the story, Polly does not come to any firm realization. “The Boarding House” ends with her as she is shedding tears of confusion, still wary about what the future might hold for her (69). Much like Polly, the reader is also unable to reach a conclusion. However, by vicariously living through Polly’s Joycean epiphany, the reader can sympathize with her experience and better understand Polly as a character while at the same time struggling to remove the cliffhanger at the end of her story; for like many of Joyce’s characters, she arrives at no revelation.
As with “Araby” and “The Boarding House,” “Eveline” does not conform to the critical definition of an epiphany as a realization, but rather to the Joycean definition of an epiphany as an experience instead. Eveline needs to make a choice: to either remain subjugated at home by staying with her abusive father or to sail away to Buenos Aires with her lover to live a life of freedom (36). Unlike the young boy in “Araby” and Polly in “The Boarding House” who respond to their experiences—whether by abruptly leaving the marketplace or crying for comfort—Eveline finds herself at an impasse, literally unable to move (41). Her lover, Frank, wills her to come by calling out to her three times, but instead “she set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or of recognition” (41). Eveline encounters no sort of aha moment, no revelation. She is left confounded, lost without a revelation. The critical definition of an epiphany does not apply to Eveline; she simply stumbles upon a Joycean epiphany, or an experience, much like the characters in both “Araby” and “The Boarding House” that were also left in the unknown.
A close reading of the stories in Dubliners reveals Joyce suggesting that in any individual’s life span, the chance of arriving at a realization is nil. Joyce presents the characters in his story in a pattern of age, starting from the youngest—“[The] Sisters” (9)—moving to the oldest, and ending with “The Dead” (175). Even as young children transform into adults, they have yet to find their purposes in life—unable to locate their ciphers. They only experience the Joycean epiphany, arriving at death before being able to indulge in the critical epiphany. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, an English professor at Pomona College, states, “If we are honest, however, for many of us the story ends not in epiphany but in utter muddle” (80). Much like the readers who are left in confusion at the end of the story, the characters are more so left without answers, still questioning their identities. Joyce provides no ending for them, no resolution, and certainly no realization. As a matter of fact, the pattern of age that Joyce adopts while relating the stories of the characters in Dubliners points toward the notion that throughout one’s life, one may never even encounter any sort of realization. As opposed to critics who assert that Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories emphasizing revelations, I propose, in adopting the Joycean definition of an epiphany, that Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories lacking in revelations. Both the characters in Dubliners and Joyce’s readers arrive at no realizations at the end of any of the stories.
Joyce wrote Dubliners between 1905 and 1914: a time when Irish nationalism was at its apex (Vore 3). During this time, people were not only instilled with a desire to fight for Ireland’s independence, but they were also struggling to discover their identities and their purposes in life amidst the revolution (Vore 3). The young boy of “Araby,” Polly, and Eveline, posed in the backdrop of this fueling, nationalistic setting, ironically do not reach any revelations. Instead these characters are merely at a loss for their identities: the young boy unaware of how to respond to his first love, Polly not knowing if her future is with Mr. Doran or not, and Eveline having trouble letting go of her former identity as a domestic-bound woman. The experiences that these characters go through of still being left in the unknown during a time when Irish nationalism and identity-finding was at its apex mirrors the experience of the readers who are also still left in confusion with no resolution to cling on to. Critics—such as Levin, Connolly, and Tindall—assert that epiphanies are prevalent in James Joyce’s Dubliners; however, in actuality no character transforms into a dynamic one and proceeds towards change because no character, much like the reader, has reached any sort of revelation. The young boy, Polly, and Eveline have only jumped into the pool of experience that is the Joycean epiphany, not yet having bathed in the “flash of intellectual light” (Walzi, 436), not yet having immersed themselves in realization. They are still left lost in the shallow end: the “evanescent . . . moment[s].”
Works Cited
“Analyzing a Story’s Plot: Freytag’s Pyramid.” Freytag’s Pyramid. Ohio University. Web. 5 Dec. 2012. <http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/fiction>.
Bowen, Zack. “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach.” Journal of Modern Literature 9.1 (1981–1982): 103–114. Web. 8 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831278>.
Dettmar, Kevin J. H. “The Dubliners Epiphany: (Mis)Reading the Book of Ourselves.” In The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Print.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Print.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Binghamton, NY: New Directions, 1944. Print.
Scholes, Robert. “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?” Sewanee Review 72.1 (1964): 65–77. Web. 8 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/27540956>.
Vore, Bob. “The Literature of James Joyce and Nick Joaquin: Reflections of National Identity in Ireland and the Philippines.” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9.1 (1995): 1–32. Web. 5 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40860489>.
Walzi, Florence L. “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce.” PMLA 80.4 (1965): 436–450. Web. 5 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/460937>.
Book a Writing Consultation
|
James Joyce
|
Which operetta, first performed in 1874, features the character 'Gabriel von Eisenstein', who is given a prison sentence for insulting an official, and is then conspired against by, amongst others, a notary called 'Dr. Falke'?
|
Review: Dubliners by James Joyce | lisasliterarylife
Review: Dubliners by James Joyce
≈ Leave a comment
Tags
book review , classic literature , Dubliners by James Joyce , gnomon , Irish Literature , Modernism , paralysis , Short Stories , The Dead , The Sisters
During his construction of Ulysses , James Joyce was asked to submit a short story to a Dublin newspaper. Joyce wrote, ‘I am writing a series of epiclets-ten-for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.’ Dubliners is a compilation of fifteen short stories about the lives of the Irish and the struggles they face due to a history of cultural ‘paralysis.’ Each story can be read as its own separate entity, but when read together; they create a larger whole or gnomon .
Dubliners is arranged with much thought and eloquence as a collection. The first story, “The Sisters,” sets up the rest of the book perfectly. In this story, a Catholic priest, Father Flynn has just died. The young boy and narrator had been the priest’s companion. The boy reflects upon the death of the old man and the things the man had taught him in their time together. Flynn had an obsession with the words paralysis, gnomon (story within a story), and simony which play out in the rest of the text. Joyce chooses the juxtaposition of a friendship between a boy at the onset of life and a man at the brink of death in order to exhibit the importance that the wisdom of age may bestow upon a person. The young boy is receiving his first real lesson; appreciate the things you have while you have them-especially life.
Each story follows another in chronological order, exemplifying the life stages of a person from life to death. Despite the fact that the stories describe different people, the protagonists progressively age as the reader moves further along in Dubliners. In addition, when Dubliners begins, nature is beginning a new year. If the readers looks closely, the seasons move on from spring, summer, autumn, until finally at the end it is winter. It is the tiny thought out details which make this text one of the best.
There are repeated themes within the stories which send Joyce’s message about the paralysis of Dublin and issues plaguing Irish culture. The Catholic religion looms over many of the characters. Worries about committing sins, GUILT, and remaining in unhappy marriages are all blamed on religion. There is a suggestion of a rhetoric of fear and silence among the people. The Irish live in a society where much goes unspoken until it is too late. The last words of Eveline’s mother in “Eveline” warn her daughter: ‘After pleasure comes pain.’ Ready to escape Ireland with her bethrothed, Eveline cannot. Her mother’s words bring fear,guilt, she is paralyzed.
Due to years of oppression through colonialism-mostly British-the Irish are poor. Not only do they live in poverty, but the ramifications of little freedom and hopelessness in the country has led to alcoholism, abuse, and the feeling of worthlessness among its citizens. In “Araby,” for example, the small boy wants to go to the Araby bazaar. He waits until nine o’clock for his careless, drunken uncle to come home, only for the man to toss him barely enough money to pay for the train to the bazaar. When he finally arrives he must pay the entry fee, and hasn’t enough money to buy anything for the girl he likes.In addition,the people working at the concessions are British and he feels inferior. The poor little soul leaves the event solemn, thinking he had been ‘derided by vanity’ for having wanted to go in the first place. Only a child, he already feels he doesn’t deserve the smallest things out of life. Where will he go from here? Does he have a way out or will he perpetuate the cycle? The psychological instead of plot driven writing approach Joyce takes with his characters to create a unique situation for each of them allows the reader to understand that despite their paralysis each person deals with it differently. At the same time, it is easy to see how the similar cultural barriers they all face may lead to their immobility in life-the story within a story.
The last story of the book, “The Dead” becomes representative of the conclusion of all the other stories. This story deals with the secrets people carry with them all their lives. Gabriel and Gretta are a married couple but when she confesses to him about her broken heart from years before, he finds there are things about loved ones that people may not want to know. There are experiences and pain of others that we cannot relate to. This story communicates the transience of life, shadows, grayness, and loneliness. It is the winter of Gabriel’s life as snows fall outside the window below him. His paralysis is the tendency to keep the past alive. Is he truly dead or only dead at heart?
The closing of “The Dead” is one of the most captivating and praised in literature. The inevitability of life coming to an end and the existential questions: what is the point of trying, striving, living at all, brings this last story and the preceeding stories together with grace and elegance. Joyce is one of the few authors to take the world around him and dig down to it’s core, while still remaining true to his groundbreaking, unparalleled style. Yes he is negative, but his characters are fighters and living such a difficult existence, I don’t know that you can ask for more.
Final Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
For more information:
|
i don't know
|
What was the name of the Irish dancer who founded the Royal Ballet School?
|
DANCE VIEW - More Than a Revival, a Revelation - NYTimes.com
DANCE VIEW; More Than a Revival, a Revelation
By Jack Anderson
Published: September 26, 1993
Dame Ninette de Valois, The Irish-born dancer who founded Britain's Royal Ballet, turned 95 this year. The company celebrated the occasion by demonstrating that she is not only a remarkable organizer but also a gifted choreographer.
Her directorial genius is legendary. In 1931, she formed a group known as the Vic-Wells Ballet, after the theaters in which it performed: the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells. Later, it changed its name to the Sadler's Wells Ballet, moved to the Royal Opera House after World War II, made a triumphant American debut in 1949 and became the Royal Ballet in 1956. Although Dame Ninette retired as director in 1963, she continues to serve the Royal as an adviser. The organization now consists of two large troupes, the London-based Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
What tends to be overlooked today is Dame Ninette's choreography. Over the years, as her administrative duties increased, she allowed her creative output to dwindle, and she choreographed little after 1950. Dame Ninette's artistry was re-affirmed this summer. Both London's Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School mounted her well-known "Checkmate," of 1937, which depicts an allegorical chess game between Love and Death.
What came as a revelation was the Birmingham Royal's revival of her "Job," a 1931 work that had not been staged for 20 years. The reconstruction, supervised by Joy Newton and Jean Bedells, two former Sadler's Wells dancers, was one of the highlights of the Birmingham company's summer engagement at the Royal Opera House. Dame Ninette -- looking frail yet still indomitable -- attended the first presentation, on July 29. The Birmingham Royal will keep "Job" in its repertory and has scheduled a special performance of the work on Nov. 11 in Coventry Cathedral.
"Job" is distinguished in every respect. Its score by Ralph Vaughan Williams resounds with solemn beauty. "Job" originally had scenery by Gwen Raverat, but in 1948 it was redesigned by the painter John Piper, and the Birmingham staging retains his conceptions. The darkly glowing colors of the backdrops are reminders that Piper also designed stained-glass windows.
Despite the work's beauty, audiences were startled by "Job" at its premiere. Most of its characters are barefoot, others wear sandals, and no one is on point. This refusal to be bound by balletic conventions supports the view of some dance historians that, although Dame Ninette never wavered in her devotion to classical training, her willingness to experiment allied her esthetically with some of the modern dancers of the 30's.
The austerity of footgear also suggests something of the work's tone. Inspired by the Old Testament Book of Job and the visionary illustrations made for it in 1825 by the mystical poet and artist William Blake, the deeply expressive yet often understated choreography is not so much a telling of a tale as a meditation on it.
The ballet begins by showing Job's family living quietly and happily. The deliberate simplicity of the steps makes this scene akin to a stately folk dance. The backdrop then rises to reveal a stairway with God at its top. Challenged by Satan, God agrees to test Job's faith. Grotesque dancers symbolizing pestilences enter. Messengers bring melancholy tidings. Hypocritical comforters wring their hands in displays of grief; it is clear they are reveling in Job's misfortunes.
GIVEN THE SUBJECT MATTER, some choreographers might have stressed frenzy. Dame Ninette takes another approach. "Job" resembles a Greek tragedy. Although Greek playwrights dealt with disasters, they seldom showed mayhem on stage. Dame Ninette is similarly restrained; her ballet has only two chillingly violent moments. Early on, the members of Job's household suddenly fall after Satan curses them. Later, justice triumphs when, as Satan tries to climb the heavenly stairs, a gesture of banishment by God causes him to tumble.
Dame Ninette makes a point of contrasting Satan with Elihu, the youth who proclaims God's glory. Both have grandly scaled movements. Whereas Satan's are twisted and jagged, Elihu's are flowing and harmonious.
At the conclusion of "Job" at the Royal Opera House, there was a moment of silence. It was as if a church service had ended. But hearty applause followed. "Job" is decidedly worth preserving. That being so, why not restore some of Dame Ninette's other ballets? "Checkmate" was also well received this summer. And her past successes include "The Haunted Ballroom" (1934), a ghost story; "Bar aux Folies-Bergere" (1934), an evocation of a Parisian nightspot; "The Rake's Progress" (1935), an account of a young man's descent into debauchery, inspired by Hogarth paintings, and "The Prospect Before Us" (1940), a comedy about 18th-century theatrical rivalries.
If "Job" is a good example of their quality, revivals of all of them could enhance balletic repertories on both sides of the Atlantic.
Photo: Michael O'Hare, left, Alain Dubreuil and Michela Centin in the Birmingham Royal Ballet production of Dame Ninette de Valois's "Job" -- Deeply expressive. (Leslie E. Spatt/Birmingham Royal Ballet)
|
Ninette de Valois
|
In which British city would you find Perry Bar Greyhound Stadium?
|
THE ROYAL BALLET
The Royal Ballet is an internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England. The largest of the four major ballet companies in Great Britain, the Royal Ballet was founded in 1931 by Dame Ninette de Valois, it became the resident ballet company of the Royal Opera House in 1946 and was granted a royal charter in 1956, becoming recognised as Britain's flagship national ballet company.
The Royal Ballet was one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century, and continues to be one of the world's most famous ballet companies to this day, generally noted for its artistic and creative values. The company employs approximately 100 dancers and has purpose built facilities within the Royal Opera House. The official associate school of the company is the Royal Ballet School, and it also has a sister company, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which operates independently. The Prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet is the late Dame Margot Fonteyn.
History
In 1926, the Irish-born dancer Ninette de Valois founded the Academy of Choreographic Art, a dance school for girls. Her intention was to form a repertory ballet company and school, leading her to collaborate with the English theatrical producer and theatre owner Lilian Baylis. Baylis owned the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres and in 1925 she engaged de Valois to stage dance performances at both venues.
Sadler's Wells reopened in 1931 and the Vic-Wells Ballet and Vic-Wells Ballet School were established in premises at the theatre. These would become the predecessors of today's Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School. Prior to her return to Britain, Ninette de Valois had been a member of the Ballets Russes, one of the most renowned and influential ballet companies of the 20th century. The company disbanded in 1929 following the death of its founder Serge Diaghilev. When de Valois formed the Vic-Wells Ballet, she employed some of the company's former stars, including Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, who joined as Principal dancers, and Tamara Karsavina, who worked with the company as an advisor. The Founder Musical Director was the conductor and composer Constant Lambert who had considerable artistic as well as musical influence over the early years of the company.
After losing the link with the Old Vic theatre, in 1939 the company was renamed Sadler's Wells Ballet and the school became Sadler's Wells Ballet School. Both continued at Sadler's Wells Theatre until 1946, when the company was invited to become the resident ballet company of the newly re-opened Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, under the direction of David Webster. The company relocated to the opera house the same year in 1946, with their first production at the venue being The Sleeping Beauty.
Following the relocation of the company, the school moved to its own premises in 1947. A sister company was established to continue performances at Sadler's Wells, called the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, under the direction of John Field. In 1955, the sister company temporarily lost its link with Sadler's Wells and returned to the Royal Opera House as a touring unit of the main company.
In 1956, a Royal Charter was granted for both companies and the school; they were subsequently renamed the Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School.[5]
The Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet returned to Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1970, while continuing to tour the country. In 1987, however, the company was invited to become the resident ballet company at the Birmingham Hippodrome. It relocated to Birmingham in 1990, being renamed Birmingham Royal Ballet and it ceased to be part of the Royal Ballet in 1997 when it was made independent of the Royal Opera House, with Sir Peter Wright as Artistic Director. Birmingham Royal Ballet retains close relationships with both the Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School, although it now has its own associate ballet school, Elmhurst School for Dance.
In 1964 the Royal Ballet established "Ballet for All" under the direction of Peter Brinson. Between 1964 and 1979 "Ballet for All" toured throughout the country, presenting around 150 performances per annum and reaching around 70,000 people each year. In 1976 the Royal Opera House established its schools' matinee programme.
Today the Royal Ballet remains the resident ballet company at the Royal Opera House, conducting its own tours internationally, and it continues to be the parent company of the Royal Ballet School, which is now based at White Lodge, Richmond Park and premises in Floral Street which are adjacent to and have direct access to the Royal Opera House.
Sergeyev
During its formative years, the Sadler's Wells Ballet would become one of the first ballet companies outside the Soviet Union to stage full productions of ballets by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, which were central to the repertory of the Imperial Russian Ballet. To stage these ballets with her newly formed company, de Valois employed Nicholas Sergeyev, a former r�gisseur of the Imperial. He staged productions of Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty; Petipa and Ivanov's Swan Lake and The Nutcracker; Petipa and Cecchetti's production of Copp�lia; and Petipa's Giselle. Created with the aid of choreographic notation written in St Petersburg at the turn of the 20th century, these works have been included in the repertoire of the Royal Ballet ever since. The company now uses Peter Wright's 1984 production of The Nutcracker, which uses some of Sergeyev's notation. Sergeyev's revivals of these ballets in London are regarded as the foundation point of the traditional classical ballet repertoire, and led to their being restaged throughout the world. Sergeyev is considered to have made one of the most significant contributions to the popularity of ballet worldwide. His choreographic notation and other materials relating to it have been preserved in the Sergeyev Collection, part of the theatre collection of the Harvard University Library.
Prima ballerina assoluta
The Royal Ballet is one of the few ballet companies in the world to have staged performances by three dancers considered to be Prima ballerina assoluta, the two 20th-century dancers having studied at the Royal Ballet School. The first was Alicia Markova who, having been mentored by Ninette de Valois as a member of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, was invited to become one of the founder dancers of the Royal Ballet. She was designated the company's first Prima ballerina, and was later recognised as a Prima ballerina assoluta. Margot Fonteyn spent her entire career dancing with the company and was appointed Prima ballerina assoluta by Queen Elizabeth II . Alessandra Ferri began her career with the Royal Ballet; she was later appointed Prima ballerina assoluta of La Scala Theatre Ballet in Milan.
Structure
The Royal Ballet has six ranks of dancers in ascending order:
Artist: the lowest rank in the company and, together with the First Artists, dancers at this level form the Corps de ballet. Ballet school graduates entering the company usually do so at this level.
First Artist: a rank for the more senior members of the Corps de Ballet. Dancers at this level have the opportunity to perform some of the Corps de Ballet's more featured r�les, such as the Dance of the Cygnets in Swan Lake. First Artists will occasionally be cast in minor Soloist r�les if they are being considered for promotion.
Soloist: there are normally 15�20 soloists in the company. As the title suggests, dancers at this level perform the majority of the solo and minor r�les in a ballet, such as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet or one of the Fairies in The Sleeping Beauty.
First soloist: the rank where dancers are being considered for promotion to principal level. A dancer at this rank will dance a varied repertoire of the most featured soloist r�les, whilst understudying and having the opportunity to perform leading r�les when a Principal dancer is either injured or unavailable.
Principal character artist: the rank given to members of the company who perform important character r�les in a ballet. These r�les are normally very theatrical and often include character dance and ballet mime. Examples include Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty or Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker. Most Principal Character Artists in the Royal Ballet are older dancers who have been high-ranking members of the company.
Principal: the highest rank in the Royal Ballet and dancers at this level generally perform the leading and most featured r�les in a ballet. To be a principal is to be recognised as one of the leading dancers in the company and a number of the world's most celebrated dancers have been principals with the company.
The Royal Ballet also has special ranks for visiting dancers, they are "guest artist and "principal guest artist".
The Company
The Royal Ballet employs approximately 100 dancers and a complete list is shown below. The company also has an Executive, Artistic and Music staff, including the following:
Director � Kevin O'Hare, a graduate of the Royal Ballet School and former dancer with The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Associate Director � Jeanetta Laurence, a graduate of the Royal Ballet School and former dancer with the Royal Ballet Touring Company, the New Group and Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet.
Music Director � Barry Wordsworth, a British conductor and junior alumnus of the Trinity College of
Music
Company & Tour Manager � Andrew Hurst, a Royal Ballet School graduate who was previously General Manager for Phoenix Dance Company.
Resident Choreographer � Wayne McGregor CBE, an award-winning choreographer, most noted in the field of contemporary dance and as Artistic Director of Random Dance company.
Artistic Associate � Christopher Wheeldon
SIR FREDERICK ASHTON
Sir Frederick Ashton was the founder choreographer of the Royal Ballet. Previously a dancer with the Ballet Rambert, Ashton started his career as a choreogapher under the direction of Dame Marie Rambert, before joining the Royal Ballet as its associate choreographer when the company was founded in 1931. He created the majority of the company's early works and staged their first performance at the Royal Opera House, a production of The Sleeping Beauty in 1946. Ashton was appointed Artistic director of the Royal Ballet from 1963 to 1970, when he retired from the post. He continued to work as a choreographer internationally, with his final work being the Nursery Suite, for a gala performance by the Royal Ballet School at the Royal Opera House in 1986. His numerous ballets have since been staged by leading dance companies worldwide and feature strongly in the programming of the Royal Ballet today.
Choreographic works
Ashton created over 100 original ballet works and numerous other productions, some of the most notable including:
A Month in the Country
Birthday Offering
Varii capricci
SIR KENNETH MACMILLAN
Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 1929 � 29 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977. Although a talented dancer, MacMillan is best known for his choreography, and particularly for his work with the Royal Ballet. He also worked with the American Ballet Theatre (1956�7) and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (1966�69). He succeeded Frederick Ashton as Director of the Royal Ballet in 1970 and resigned after seven years, frustrated at balancing the conflicting demands of creating ballets with administration. He continued as Principal Choreographer to the Royal Ballet until his death in 1992.
|
i don't know
|
Which pop star called one of his children Dandelion?
|
Keith Richards pictured in public with love child Dandelion | Daily Mail Online
comments
She may not be a famous face, but the woman seen with Keith Richards once teetered on the brink of musical history.
Pictured with the rock star in public for the first time as they dined in London on Tuesday is Dandelion – the child who almost broke up the Rolling Stones.
The 38-year-old, Richards’s daughter by Anita Pallenberg, was born at the height of the band’s success, during their days of wild partying.
Love child: Keith Richards dined with his daughter Dandelion, who uses her middle name, Angie, in London after his book signing
Extraordinarily, Richards apparently believed that the baby had been fathered by Mick Jagger while he was too befuddled by heroin to notice.
The fall-out from that argument between Jagger and Richards would go on for years.
And Richards makes much of the two men’s rocky relationship in his recently released autobiography.
Around the time Miss Pallenberg became pregnant, in the summer of 1971, she was also addicted to heroin. She would shoot up three times daily while on tour with the band.
Strung out: Anita Pallenberg and Richards, pictured in 1969, were addicted to heroin when Dandelion was conceived - she had to be looked after by his mother
And Dandelion, who now uses her middle name Angela, was brought up by Richards’s mother, in Dartford, Kent, because her own mother was too drug-addled to care for her.
Miss Pallenberg, who was living with Richards in the South of France when she discovered that she was pregnant, asked Richards’s PA to arrange for her to have an abortion.
But although she asked several times for flights to be booked so she could have a termination at home, she never took them.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share
In time, everyone accepted that the child was Richards’s.
And, demonstrating how deeply he cared for the baby, the rock star wrote Wild Horses and Angie about her.
When his mother died in 2007, Richards installed his daughter in a large estate with an equestrian school in West Wittering, on the Sussex coast. Today, she, her mother and her father all live as neighbours on their three separate sprawling estates near Chichester.
And as father and daughter dined at the Ivy Club in Soho this week, with Richards’s wife Patti Henson and his son Marlon by Miss Pallenberg, 66, it is obvious the family bond is as strong as ever.
|
Richard Keith
|
Englishman Henry Mills patented the earliest known what in 1714?
|
Keith Richards pictured in public with love child Dandelion | Daily Mail Online
comments
She may not be a famous face, but the woman seen with Keith Richards once teetered on the brink of musical history.
Pictured with the rock star in public for the first time as they dined in London on Tuesday is Dandelion – the child who almost broke up the Rolling Stones.
The 38-year-old, Richards’s daughter by Anita Pallenberg, was born at the height of the band’s success, during their days of wild partying.
Love child: Keith Richards dined with his daughter Dandelion, who uses her middle name, Angie, in London after his book signing
Extraordinarily, Richards apparently believed that the baby had been fathered by Mick Jagger while he was too befuddled by heroin to notice.
The fall-out from that argument between Jagger and Richards would go on for years.
And Richards makes much of the two men’s rocky relationship in his recently released autobiography.
Around the time Miss Pallenberg became pregnant, in the summer of 1971, she was also addicted to heroin. She would shoot up three times daily while on tour with the band.
Strung out: Anita Pallenberg and Richards, pictured in 1969, were addicted to heroin when Dandelion was conceived - she had to be looked after by his mother
And Dandelion, who now uses her middle name Angela, was brought up by Richards’s mother, in Dartford, Kent, because her own mother was too drug-addled to care for her.
Miss Pallenberg, who was living with Richards in the South of France when she discovered that she was pregnant, asked Richards’s PA to arrange for her to have an abortion.
But although she asked several times for flights to be booked so she could have a termination at home, she never took them.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share
In time, everyone accepted that the child was Richards’s.
And, demonstrating how deeply he cared for the baby, the rock star wrote Wild Horses and Angie about her.
When his mother died in 2007, Richards installed his daughter in a large estate with an equestrian school in West Wittering, on the Sussex coast. Today, she, her mother and her father all live as neighbours on their three separate sprawling estates near Chichester.
And as father and daughter dined at the Ivy Club in Soho this week, with Richards’s wife Patti Henson and his son Marlon by Miss Pallenberg, 66, it is obvious the family bond is as strong as ever.
|
i don't know
|
In which modern-day African country was the author Wilbur Smith born?
|
Wilbur Smith - Worldwide Bestselling Author : Books and Films : The Thriller Novels
Wilbur Smith - Worldwide Bestselling Author
“When it comes to writing the adventure novel, Wilbur Smith is the master; a 21st Century H. Rider Haggard” - Vanity Fair.
Search
Extracts
Blood was the fertiliser that made the African soil bloom...
From under the shadow of the Mountains of the Moon and the deep, brooding Forests of the Tall Trees, to the hidden opulence of Taiwan and the panelled boardrooms of power in the heart of London, a tough, determined man and a dedicated woman begin their fight against the forces of greed, evil and corruption...
In Zimbabwe, Dr Daniel Armstrong, world-famous TV naturalist, films the slaughter of a herd of elephant: closing in as their blood stains the soil and their death song echoes around the stillness of the valley, his professionalism is tinged with a deep sadness.
In London, anthropologist Kelly Kinnear is forced into violent confrontation with the shareholders of the most powerful conglomerate in the City of London, warning them of the destruction of an African country and of a people – the Bambuti – she has come to love as her own.
Combining breathtaking realism with thrilling suspense, Elephant Song is a gripping adventure from the world's master storyteller – a journey deep into the heart of a wild, magnificent continent, threatened for ever by the destructive hand of man.
' With Wilbur Smith the action is never further than the turn of a page.'
– The Independent
'Sex, money, ambition fear and blood ... an emotional stampede.'
– The Daily Mail
Listen to an Audio Extract from 'Elephant Song'
Text Extract from 'Elephant Song'
It was a windowless thatched building of dressed sandstone blocks, that Daniel Armstrong had built with his own hands almost ten years ago. At the time he had been a junior game ranger in the National Parks' administration. Since then the building had been converted into a veritable treasure house.
Johnny Nzou slipped his key into the heavy padlock, and swung open the double doors of hewn native teak. Johnny was chief warden of Chiwewe National Park. Back in the old days, he had been Daniel's tracker and gunbearer, a bright young Matabele whom Daniel had taught to read, write and speak fluent English by the light of a thousand campfires.
Daniel had lent Johnny the money to pay for his first correspondence course from the University of South Africa which had led much later to his degree of Bachelor of Science. The two youngsters, one black and one white, had patrolled the vast reaches of the National Park together, often on foot or bicycle. In the wilderness they had forged a friendship which the subsequent years of separation had left undimmed.
Now Daniel peered into the gloomy interior of the godown and whistled softly.
'Hell, Johnny boy, you have been busy since I've been away.'
The treasure was stacked to the roof beams, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of it.
Johnny Nzou glanced at Daniel's face, his eyes narrowed as he looked for criticism in his friend's expression. The reaction was reflex, for he knew Daniel was an ally who understood the problem even better than he did. Nevertheless, the subject was so emotionally charged that it had become second nature to expect revulsion and antagonism.
However, Daniel had turned back to his cameraman. 'Can we get a light in here? I want some good shots of the interior.' The cameraman trudged forward, weighed down by the
heavy battery packs slung around his waist, and switched on the hand-held arc lamp. The high stacks of treasure were lit with a fierce blue-white light.
'Jock, I want you to follow me and the warden down the length of the warehouse,' Daniel instructed, and the cameraman nodded and moved in closer, the sleek Sony video recorder balanced on his shoulder. Jock was in his middle thirties. He wore only a pair of short khaki pants, and open sandals. In the Zambezi valley heat his tanned bare chest was shiny with sweat and his long hair was tied with a leather thong at the nape of his neck. He looked like a pop star. but was an artist with the big Sony camera.
'Got you.' he agreed, and panned the camera over the untidy stacks of elephant tusks, ending on Daniel's hand as it stroked one elegant curve of glowing ivory. Then he pulled back into a full shot of Daniel.
It was not merely Daniel's doctorate in biology, nor his books and lectures, that had made him an international authority and spokesman on African ecology. He had the healthy outdoors looks and charismatic manner that came over so well on the television screen, and his voice was deep and compelling. His accent had sufficient Sandhurst undertones remaining to soften the flat unmelodious vowel sounds of colonial speech. His father had been a staff officer in a Guards regiment during World War and had served in North Africa under and Montgomery. After the war he came out to Rhodesia to grow tobacco. Daniel had been born in Africa but had been sent home to finish his at Sandhurst, before coming back to Rhodesia to join the National Parks Service.
'Ivory,' he said now, as he looked into the camera. 'Since the time of the pharaohs, one of the most beautiful and treasured natural substances. The glory of the African elephant - and its terrible cross.'
Daniel began to move down between the tiers of stacked tusks, and Johnny fell in beside him. 'For two thousand years man has hunted the elephant to obtain this living white gold, and yet only a decade ago there still remained over two million elephant on the African continent. The elephant population seemed to be a renewable resource, an asset that was protected and harvested and controlled - and then something went terribly, tragically wrong. In these last ten years, almost a million elephant have been slaughtered. It is barely conceivable that this could have been allowed to happen. We are here to find out what went wrong, and how the perilous existence of the African elephant can be retrieved from the brink of extinction.'
He looked at Johnny. 'With me today is Mr John Nzou, chief warden of Chiwewe National Park. one of the new breed of African conservationists. By coincidence, the name Nzou in the Shona language means elephant. John Nzou is Mr Elephant in more than name alone. As warden of Chiwewe, he is responsible for one of the largest and healthiest elephant herds that still flourish in the African wilderness. Tell us. Warden, how many tusks do you have in this store room here at Chiwewe National Park?'
'There are almost five hundred tusks in store at present four hundred and eighty-six to be exact - with an average weight of seven kilos.'
On the international market ivory is worth three hundred dollars a kilo,' Daniel cut in, 'so that is well over a million dollars. Where does it all come from?'
'Well, some of the tusks are pick-ups – ivory from elephant found dead in the Park, and some is illegal ivory that my rangers have confiscated from poachers. But the great majority of tusks are from the culling operations that my department is forced to undertake.'
The two of them paused at the far end of the godown and turned back to face the camera. 'We will discuss the culling programme later. Warden. But first can you tell us a little more about poaching activity in Chiwewe. How bad is it?' 'It is getting worse every day.' Johnny shook his head sadly.
'As the elephant in Kenya and Tanzania and Zambia are wiped out, so the professionals are turning their attention to our healthy elephant herds further south. Zambia is just across the Zambezi river, and the poachers that come across this side are organised and better armed than we are. They shoot to kill men as well as elephant and rhino. We have been forced to do the same. If we run into a band of poachers, we shoot first.'
'As for these…' Daniel laid his hand on the nearest pile of tusks. No two of the ivory shafts were the same; each curve was unique. Some were almost straight, long and thin as needles; others were bent like a drawn longbow. Some were sharp-tipped tipped as javelins; others were squat and blunt. There were pearly shafts, and others were of buttery alabaster tone; still others were stained dark with vegetable juices, and scarred and worn with age.
Most of the ivory was female or immature; a few tusks were no longer than a man's forearm, taken from small calves. A very few were great curved imperial shafts, the heavy mature ivory of old bulls.
Daniel stroked one of these, and his expression was not simply for the camera. Once again, he felt the full weight of the melancholy that had first caused him to write about the passing and destruction of the old Africa and its enchanted animal kingdom.
'A sage and magnificent beast has been reduced to this,' his voice sank to a whisper. 'Even if it is unavoidable, we cannot escape the inherently tragic nature of the changes that are sweeping through this continent. Is the African elephant symbolic of the land?The elephant is dying. Is Africa dying?'
His sincerity was absolute. The camera recorded it faithfully. It was the most compelling reason for the enormous appeal of his television programmes around the world.
Now Daniel roused himself with an obvious effort, and turned back to Johnny Nzou. 'Tell us. Warden, is the elephant doomed? How many of these marvellous animals do you have in Zimbabwe and how many of those are in Chiwewe National Park?'
'There are an estimated fifty-two thousand elephant in Zimbabwe, and our figures for Chiwewe are even more accurate. Only three months ago, we were able to conduct an aerial survey of the Park sponsored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The entire area of the Park was and the animals counted from the high-resolution prints.'
'How many?' Daniel asked.
'In Chiwewe alone, eighteen thousand elephant.'
'That's a huge population, something approaching a third of all the remaining animals in the country – all in this area.' Daniel raised an eyebrow.'In the climate of gloom and pessimism that prevails, this must give you a great deal of encouragement?'
Johnny Nzou frowned. 'On the contrary, Doctor Armstrong, we are extremely concerned by these numbers.'
'Can you explain that please, Warden?'
'It's simple, Doctor. We cannot support that many elephant. We estimate that thirty thousand elephant would be an ideal population for Zimbabwe. A single beast requires up to a ton of vegetable matter each day, and he will push over trees that have taken many hundreds of years to grow, even trees with trunks four feet in diameter, to obtain that food.'
'What will happen if you allow that huge herd to flourish and to breed?'
'Quite simply, in a very short period they will reduce this park to a dust bowl, and when that happens the elephant population will collapse. We will be left with nothing – no trees, no park, no elephant.'
Daniel nodded encouragement. When the film was edited he would cut in at this point a series of shots he had taken some years previously in Kenya's Amboseli Park. These were haunting vistas of devastation, of bare red earth and dead black trees stripped of bark and leaves holding up their naked branches in agonised supplication to a hard blue African sky, while the desiccated carcasses of the great animals lay like discarded leather bags where famine and poachers had destroyed them.
'Do you have a solution, Warden?' Daniel asked softly.
'A drastic one, I'm afraid.'
'Will you show us what it is?'
Johnny Nzou shrugged. 'It is not very pretty to watch, but, yes, you may witness what has to be done.'
Daniel woke twenty minutes before sunrise. Even the intervening years spent in cities out of Africa, and the passage of so many other dawns in northern climes, or in the fluid time zones of jet aircraft travel, had not dulled the habit that he had first acquired in this valley. Of course, the habit had been reinforced during the years of that terrible Rhodesian bush war, when he had been called up to serve in the security forces. For Daniel the dawn was the most magical time of each day, and especially so in this valley. He rolled out of his bag and reached for his boots. He and his men had slept fully clothed on the sun-baked earth, with the embers of the campfire in the centre of the huddle of their prostrate forms. They had not built a boma of thorn branches to protect themselves, although at intervals during the night lions had grunted and roared along the escarpment.
Daniel laced up his boots and slipped quietly out of the circle of sleeping men. The dew that hung like seed pearls upon the grass stems soaked his trouser legs to the knees as he moved out to the promontory of rock at the head of the cliff. He found a seat on the rough grey granite knoll and huddled into his anorak.
The dawn came on with stealthy and deceptive speed and painted the clouds above the great river in subtle talcum shades of pink and grey. Over the Zambezi's dark green waters the river mist undulated and pulsed like ghostly ectoplasm and the dawn flights of duck were very dark and crisp against the pale background, their formations precise and their wing-beats flickering quick as knife-blades in the uncertain light.
A lion roared, near at hand, abrupt gales of sound that died away in a descending series of moaning grunts. Daniel shivered with the thrill of that sound. Though he had heard it countless times, it always had the same effect upon him. There was no other like it in all the world. For him it was the veritable voice of Africa.
Then he picked out the great cat shape below him at the edge of the swamp. Full-bellied, dark-maned, it carried its massive head low and swung it from side to side to the rhythm of its stately arrogant walk. Its mouth was half open and its fangs glinted behind thin black lips. He watched it vanish into the dense riverine bush and sighed with the pleasure it had given him.
There was a small sound close behind him. As he started up, Johnny Nzou touched his shoulder to restrain him and settled down on the granite slab beside him. Johnny lit a cigarette. Daniel had never been able to talk him out of the habit. They sat in companionable silence as they had so often before and watched the dawn come on more swiftly now, until that religious moment when the sun thrust its burning rim above the dark mass of the forest. The light changed and all their world was bright and glazed as a precious ceramic creation fresh from the firing oven.
'The trackers came into camp ten minutes ago. They have found a herd,' Johnny broke the silence, and the mood.
Daniel stirred and glanced at him. 'How many?' he asked.
'About fifty.' That was a good number. They would not be able to process more, for flesh and hide putrefy swiftly in the heat of the valley, and a lower number would not justify all this use of men and expensive equipment.
'Are you sure you want to film this?' Johnny asked. Daniel nodded. 'I have considered it carefully. To attempt to conceal it would be dishonest.' 'People eat meat and wear leather, but they don't want to see inside the abattoir,' Johnny pointed out. 'This is a complex and emotional subject we are examining. People have a right to know.' 'In anyone else I would suspect journalistic sensationalism,' Johnny murmured, and Daniel frowned. 'You are probably the only person I would allow to say that - because you know better.' 'Yes, Danny, I know better,' Johnny agreed. 'You hate this as much as I do, and yet you first taught me the necessity of it.'
'Let's go to work,' Daniel suggested gruffly, and they stood up and walked back in silence to where the trucks were parked. The camp was astir, and coffee was brewing on the open fire. The rangers were rolling their blankets and sleeping-bags and checking their rifles.
There were four of them, two black lads and two white, all of them in their twenties. They wore the plain khaki uniform of the Parks Department with green shoulder flashes, and though they handled their weapons with the casual competence of veterans they kept up a cheerful high-spirited banter. Black and white treated each other as comrades, although they were just old enough to have fought in the bush war and had probably been on opposing sides. It always amazed Daniel that so little bitterness remained.
Jock, the cameraman, was already filming. It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback. 'I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little,' Daniel warned Johnny. 'We both know the answers to the questions, but we have to fake it, okay?' 'Go ahead.' Johnny looked good on film. Daniel had studied the rushes the previous night. One of the joys of working with modern video equipment was the instant replay of footage. Johnny resembled the younger Cassius Clay before he became Mohammed Ali. However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic. His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult. They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them.
'We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Daniel told Johnny, and he nodded. 'You have explained to me that the Chiwewe Park cannot support such numbers of these huge animals, and that this year alone at least a thousand of them must be removed from the Park, not only for the good of the ecology, but for the very survival of the remaining elephant herds. How do you intend removing them?
'We will have to cull them,' Johnny said curtly.
'Cull them?' Daniel asked. 'That means kill, doesn't it?
'Yes. My rangers and I will shoot them.'
'All of them, Warden? You are going to kill fifty elephant today?'
'We will cull the entire herd.'
'What about the young calves and the pregnant cows? Won't you spare a single animal?'
'They all have to go,' Johnny insisted.
'But why, Warden? Couldn't you catch them, dart and drug them, and send them elsewhere?' 'The costs of transporting an animal the size of an elephant are staggering. A big bull weighs six tons, an average cow around four. Look at this terrain down here in the valley.' Johnny gestured towards the mountainous heights of the escarpment and the broken rocky and wild forest. 'We would require special trucks and we would have to build roads to get them in and out. Even if that were possible, where would we take them? I have told you that we have a surplus of almost twenty thousand elephant in Zimbabwe. Where would we take these elephant?There simply isn't space for them.'
'So, Warden, unlike the other countries to the north such as Kenya and Zambia who have allowed their elephant herds to be almost wiped out by poaching and unwise conservation policy, you are in a Catch 22 situation. Your management of your herds of elephant has been too good. Now you have to destroy and waste these marvellous animals.'
'No, Doctor we won't waste them. We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses, ivory and hides and meat which will be sold. The proceeds will be ploughed back into conservation, to prevent poaching and to protect our National Parks. The death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.'
'But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?' Daniel insisted.
You are cheating, Doctor,' Johnny warned him. 'You are using the emotive, slanted language of the animal rights groups, "mothers and babies". Let's rather call them cows and calves, and admit that a cow eats as much and takes up as much space as a bull, and that calves grow very swiftly into adults.'
'So you feel–' Daniel started, but despite his earlier warning, Johnny was becoming angry.
'Hold on,' he snapped. 'There's more to it than that. We have to take out the entire herd. It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors. The elephant herd is a complex family group. Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd. The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin. They know – I mean, they really understand …' he broke off, and cleared his throat. His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment.
'The terrible truth is', Johnny's voice was husky as he went on, 'that if we allowed any of them to escape the cull, they would communicate their terror and panic to the other herds in the Park. There would be a swift breakdown in the elephants' social behaviour.'
'Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden? Daniel asked softly.
'No. It has happened before. After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park. At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations. We soon learned. Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds. By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom. We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits. Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready. Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest. Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts.' Johnny shook his head. 'No, we have to take out the whole herd at one stroke.'
Almost with relief, he looked up at the sky. They both picked up the distant insect drone of an aircraft engine beyond the towering cumulus clouds.
'Here comes the spotter plane,' he said quietly, and reached for the microphone of the radio.
'Good morning, Sierra Mike. We have you visual due south of our position approximately four miles. I will give you yellow smoke.'
Copyright by Wilbur Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsover without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact St. Martin's Press (in the USA) or PanMacmillan in the UK and elsewhere.
Latest Videos from Wilbur's YouTube Channel
|
Zambia
|
Mikhail Fokine was the chief choreographer to which ballet company from 1909-1914?
|
Wilbur Smith - Worldwide Bestselling Author : Books and Films : The Thriller Novels
Wilbur Smith - Worldwide Bestselling Author
“When it comes to writing the adventure novel, Wilbur Smith is the master; a 21st Century H. Rider Haggard” - Vanity Fair.
Search
Extracts
Blood was the fertiliser that made the African soil bloom...
From under the shadow of the Mountains of the Moon and the deep, brooding Forests of the Tall Trees, to the hidden opulence of Taiwan and the panelled boardrooms of power in the heart of London, a tough, determined man and a dedicated woman begin their fight against the forces of greed, evil and corruption...
In Zimbabwe, Dr Daniel Armstrong, world-famous TV naturalist, films the slaughter of a herd of elephant: closing in as their blood stains the soil and their death song echoes around the stillness of the valley, his professionalism is tinged with a deep sadness.
In London, anthropologist Kelly Kinnear is forced into violent confrontation with the shareholders of the most powerful conglomerate in the City of London, warning them of the destruction of an African country and of a people – the Bambuti – she has come to love as her own.
Combining breathtaking realism with thrilling suspense, Elephant Song is a gripping adventure from the world's master storyteller – a journey deep into the heart of a wild, magnificent continent, threatened for ever by the destructive hand of man.
' With Wilbur Smith the action is never further than the turn of a page.'
– The Independent
'Sex, money, ambition fear and blood ... an emotional stampede.'
– The Daily Mail
Listen to an Audio Extract from 'Elephant Song'
Text Extract from 'Elephant Song'
It was a windowless thatched building of dressed sandstone blocks, that Daniel Armstrong had built with his own hands almost ten years ago. At the time he had been a junior game ranger in the National Parks' administration. Since then the building had been converted into a veritable treasure house.
Johnny Nzou slipped his key into the heavy padlock, and swung open the double doors of hewn native teak. Johnny was chief warden of Chiwewe National Park. Back in the old days, he had been Daniel's tracker and gunbearer, a bright young Matabele whom Daniel had taught to read, write and speak fluent English by the light of a thousand campfires.
Daniel had lent Johnny the money to pay for his first correspondence course from the University of South Africa which had led much later to his degree of Bachelor of Science. The two youngsters, one black and one white, had patrolled the vast reaches of the National Park together, often on foot or bicycle. In the wilderness they had forged a friendship which the subsequent years of separation had left undimmed.
Now Daniel peered into the gloomy interior of the godown and whistled softly.
'Hell, Johnny boy, you have been busy since I've been away.'
The treasure was stacked to the roof beams, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of it.
Johnny Nzou glanced at Daniel's face, his eyes narrowed as he looked for criticism in his friend's expression. The reaction was reflex, for he knew Daniel was an ally who understood the problem even better than he did. Nevertheless, the subject was so emotionally charged that it had become second nature to expect revulsion and antagonism.
However, Daniel had turned back to his cameraman. 'Can we get a light in here? I want some good shots of the interior.' The cameraman trudged forward, weighed down by the
heavy battery packs slung around his waist, and switched on the hand-held arc lamp. The high stacks of treasure were lit with a fierce blue-white light.
'Jock, I want you to follow me and the warden down the length of the warehouse,' Daniel instructed, and the cameraman nodded and moved in closer, the sleek Sony video recorder balanced on his shoulder. Jock was in his middle thirties. He wore only a pair of short khaki pants, and open sandals. In the Zambezi valley heat his tanned bare chest was shiny with sweat and his long hair was tied with a leather thong at the nape of his neck. He looked like a pop star. but was an artist with the big Sony camera.
'Got you.' he agreed, and panned the camera over the untidy stacks of elephant tusks, ending on Daniel's hand as it stroked one elegant curve of glowing ivory. Then he pulled back into a full shot of Daniel.
It was not merely Daniel's doctorate in biology, nor his books and lectures, that had made him an international authority and spokesman on African ecology. He had the healthy outdoors looks and charismatic manner that came over so well on the television screen, and his voice was deep and compelling. His accent had sufficient Sandhurst undertones remaining to soften the flat unmelodious vowel sounds of colonial speech. His father had been a staff officer in a Guards regiment during World War and had served in North Africa under and Montgomery. After the war he came out to Rhodesia to grow tobacco. Daniel had been born in Africa but had been sent home to finish his at Sandhurst, before coming back to Rhodesia to join the National Parks Service.
'Ivory,' he said now, as he looked into the camera. 'Since the time of the pharaohs, one of the most beautiful and treasured natural substances. The glory of the African elephant - and its terrible cross.'
Daniel began to move down between the tiers of stacked tusks, and Johnny fell in beside him. 'For two thousand years man has hunted the elephant to obtain this living white gold, and yet only a decade ago there still remained over two million elephant on the African continent. The elephant population seemed to be a renewable resource, an asset that was protected and harvested and controlled - and then something went terribly, tragically wrong. In these last ten years, almost a million elephant have been slaughtered. It is barely conceivable that this could have been allowed to happen. We are here to find out what went wrong, and how the perilous existence of the African elephant can be retrieved from the brink of extinction.'
He looked at Johnny. 'With me today is Mr John Nzou, chief warden of Chiwewe National Park. one of the new breed of African conservationists. By coincidence, the name Nzou in the Shona language means elephant. John Nzou is Mr Elephant in more than name alone. As warden of Chiwewe, he is responsible for one of the largest and healthiest elephant herds that still flourish in the African wilderness. Tell us. Warden, how many tusks do you have in this store room here at Chiwewe National Park?'
'There are almost five hundred tusks in store at present four hundred and eighty-six to be exact - with an average weight of seven kilos.'
On the international market ivory is worth three hundred dollars a kilo,' Daniel cut in, 'so that is well over a million dollars. Where does it all come from?'
'Well, some of the tusks are pick-ups – ivory from elephant found dead in the Park, and some is illegal ivory that my rangers have confiscated from poachers. But the great majority of tusks are from the culling operations that my department is forced to undertake.'
The two of them paused at the far end of the godown and turned back to face the camera. 'We will discuss the culling programme later. Warden. But first can you tell us a little more about poaching activity in Chiwewe. How bad is it?' 'It is getting worse every day.' Johnny shook his head sadly.
'As the elephant in Kenya and Tanzania and Zambia are wiped out, so the professionals are turning their attention to our healthy elephant herds further south. Zambia is just across the Zambezi river, and the poachers that come across this side are organised and better armed than we are. They shoot to kill men as well as elephant and rhino. We have been forced to do the same. If we run into a band of poachers, we shoot first.'
'As for these…' Daniel laid his hand on the nearest pile of tusks. No two of the ivory shafts were the same; each curve was unique. Some were almost straight, long and thin as needles; others were bent like a drawn longbow. Some were sharp-tipped tipped as javelins; others were squat and blunt. There were pearly shafts, and others were of buttery alabaster tone; still others were stained dark with vegetable juices, and scarred and worn with age.
Most of the ivory was female or immature; a few tusks were no longer than a man's forearm, taken from small calves. A very few were great curved imperial shafts, the heavy mature ivory of old bulls.
Daniel stroked one of these, and his expression was not simply for the camera. Once again, he felt the full weight of the melancholy that had first caused him to write about the passing and destruction of the old Africa and its enchanted animal kingdom.
'A sage and magnificent beast has been reduced to this,' his voice sank to a whisper. 'Even if it is unavoidable, we cannot escape the inherently tragic nature of the changes that are sweeping through this continent. Is the African elephant symbolic of the land?The elephant is dying. Is Africa dying?'
His sincerity was absolute. The camera recorded it faithfully. It was the most compelling reason for the enormous appeal of his television programmes around the world.
Now Daniel roused himself with an obvious effort, and turned back to Johnny Nzou. 'Tell us. Warden, is the elephant doomed? How many of these marvellous animals do you have in Zimbabwe and how many of those are in Chiwewe National Park?'
'There are an estimated fifty-two thousand elephant in Zimbabwe, and our figures for Chiwewe are even more accurate. Only three months ago, we were able to conduct an aerial survey of the Park sponsored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The entire area of the Park was and the animals counted from the high-resolution prints.'
'How many?' Daniel asked.
'In Chiwewe alone, eighteen thousand elephant.'
'That's a huge population, something approaching a third of all the remaining animals in the country – all in this area.' Daniel raised an eyebrow.'In the climate of gloom and pessimism that prevails, this must give you a great deal of encouragement?'
Johnny Nzou frowned. 'On the contrary, Doctor Armstrong, we are extremely concerned by these numbers.'
'Can you explain that please, Warden?'
'It's simple, Doctor. We cannot support that many elephant. We estimate that thirty thousand elephant would be an ideal population for Zimbabwe. A single beast requires up to a ton of vegetable matter each day, and he will push over trees that have taken many hundreds of years to grow, even trees with trunks four feet in diameter, to obtain that food.'
'What will happen if you allow that huge herd to flourish and to breed?'
'Quite simply, in a very short period they will reduce this park to a dust bowl, and when that happens the elephant population will collapse. We will be left with nothing – no trees, no park, no elephant.'
Daniel nodded encouragement. When the film was edited he would cut in at this point a series of shots he had taken some years previously in Kenya's Amboseli Park. These were haunting vistas of devastation, of bare red earth and dead black trees stripped of bark and leaves holding up their naked branches in agonised supplication to a hard blue African sky, while the desiccated carcasses of the great animals lay like discarded leather bags where famine and poachers had destroyed them.
'Do you have a solution, Warden?' Daniel asked softly.
'A drastic one, I'm afraid.'
'Will you show us what it is?'
Johnny Nzou shrugged. 'It is not very pretty to watch, but, yes, you may witness what has to be done.'
Daniel woke twenty minutes before sunrise. Even the intervening years spent in cities out of Africa, and the passage of so many other dawns in northern climes, or in the fluid time zones of jet aircraft travel, had not dulled the habit that he had first acquired in this valley. Of course, the habit had been reinforced during the years of that terrible Rhodesian bush war, when he had been called up to serve in the security forces. For Daniel the dawn was the most magical time of each day, and especially so in this valley. He rolled out of his bag and reached for his boots. He and his men had slept fully clothed on the sun-baked earth, with the embers of the campfire in the centre of the huddle of their prostrate forms. They had not built a boma of thorn branches to protect themselves, although at intervals during the night lions had grunted and roared along the escarpment.
Daniel laced up his boots and slipped quietly out of the circle of sleeping men. The dew that hung like seed pearls upon the grass stems soaked his trouser legs to the knees as he moved out to the promontory of rock at the head of the cliff. He found a seat on the rough grey granite knoll and huddled into his anorak.
The dawn came on with stealthy and deceptive speed and painted the clouds above the great river in subtle talcum shades of pink and grey. Over the Zambezi's dark green waters the river mist undulated and pulsed like ghostly ectoplasm and the dawn flights of duck were very dark and crisp against the pale background, their formations precise and their wing-beats flickering quick as knife-blades in the uncertain light.
A lion roared, near at hand, abrupt gales of sound that died away in a descending series of moaning grunts. Daniel shivered with the thrill of that sound. Though he had heard it countless times, it always had the same effect upon him. There was no other like it in all the world. For him it was the veritable voice of Africa.
Then he picked out the great cat shape below him at the edge of the swamp. Full-bellied, dark-maned, it carried its massive head low and swung it from side to side to the rhythm of its stately arrogant walk. Its mouth was half open and its fangs glinted behind thin black lips. He watched it vanish into the dense riverine bush and sighed with the pleasure it had given him.
There was a small sound close behind him. As he started up, Johnny Nzou touched his shoulder to restrain him and settled down on the granite slab beside him. Johnny lit a cigarette. Daniel had never been able to talk him out of the habit. They sat in companionable silence as they had so often before and watched the dawn come on more swiftly now, until that religious moment when the sun thrust its burning rim above the dark mass of the forest. The light changed and all their world was bright and glazed as a precious ceramic creation fresh from the firing oven.
'The trackers came into camp ten minutes ago. They have found a herd,' Johnny broke the silence, and the mood.
Daniel stirred and glanced at him. 'How many?' he asked.
'About fifty.' That was a good number. They would not be able to process more, for flesh and hide putrefy swiftly in the heat of the valley, and a lower number would not justify all this use of men and expensive equipment.
'Are you sure you want to film this?' Johnny asked. Daniel nodded. 'I have considered it carefully. To attempt to conceal it would be dishonest.' 'People eat meat and wear leather, but they don't want to see inside the abattoir,' Johnny pointed out. 'This is a complex and emotional subject we are examining. People have a right to know.' 'In anyone else I would suspect journalistic sensationalism,' Johnny murmured, and Daniel frowned. 'You are probably the only person I would allow to say that - because you know better.' 'Yes, Danny, I know better,' Johnny agreed. 'You hate this as much as I do, and yet you first taught me the necessity of it.'
'Let's go to work,' Daniel suggested gruffly, and they stood up and walked back in silence to where the trucks were parked. The camp was astir, and coffee was brewing on the open fire. The rangers were rolling their blankets and sleeping-bags and checking their rifles.
There were four of them, two black lads and two white, all of them in their twenties. They wore the plain khaki uniform of the Parks Department with green shoulder flashes, and though they handled their weapons with the casual competence of veterans they kept up a cheerful high-spirited banter. Black and white treated each other as comrades, although they were just old enough to have fought in the bush war and had probably been on opposing sides. It always amazed Daniel that so little bitterness remained.
Jock, the cameraman, was already filming. It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback. 'I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little,' Daniel warned Johnny. 'We both know the answers to the questions, but we have to fake it, okay?' 'Go ahead.' Johnny looked good on film. Daniel had studied the rushes the previous night. One of the joys of working with modern video equipment was the instant replay of footage. Johnny resembled the younger Cassius Clay before he became Mohammed Ali. However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic. His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult. They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them.
'We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Daniel told Johnny, and he nodded. 'You have explained to me that the Chiwewe Park cannot support such numbers of these huge animals, and that this year alone at least a thousand of them must be removed from the Park, not only for the good of the ecology, but for the very survival of the remaining elephant herds. How do you intend removing them?
'We will have to cull them,' Johnny said curtly.
'Cull them?' Daniel asked. 'That means kill, doesn't it?
'Yes. My rangers and I will shoot them.'
'All of them, Warden? You are going to kill fifty elephant today?'
'We will cull the entire herd.'
'What about the young calves and the pregnant cows? Won't you spare a single animal?'
'They all have to go,' Johnny insisted.
'But why, Warden? Couldn't you catch them, dart and drug them, and send them elsewhere?' 'The costs of transporting an animal the size of an elephant are staggering. A big bull weighs six tons, an average cow around four. Look at this terrain down here in the valley.' Johnny gestured towards the mountainous heights of the escarpment and the broken rocky and wild forest. 'We would require special trucks and we would have to build roads to get them in and out. Even if that were possible, where would we take them? I have told you that we have a surplus of almost twenty thousand elephant in Zimbabwe. Where would we take these elephant?There simply isn't space for them.'
'So, Warden, unlike the other countries to the north such as Kenya and Zambia who have allowed their elephant herds to be almost wiped out by poaching and unwise conservation policy, you are in a Catch 22 situation. Your management of your herds of elephant has been too good. Now you have to destroy and waste these marvellous animals.'
'No, Doctor we won't waste them. We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses, ivory and hides and meat which will be sold. The proceeds will be ploughed back into conservation, to prevent poaching and to protect our National Parks. The death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.'
'But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?' Daniel insisted.
You are cheating, Doctor,' Johnny warned him. 'You are using the emotive, slanted language of the animal rights groups, "mothers and babies". Let's rather call them cows and calves, and admit that a cow eats as much and takes up as much space as a bull, and that calves grow very swiftly into adults.'
'So you feel–' Daniel started, but despite his earlier warning, Johnny was becoming angry.
'Hold on,' he snapped. 'There's more to it than that. We have to take out the entire herd. It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors. The elephant herd is a complex family group. Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd. The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin. They know – I mean, they really understand …' he broke off, and cleared his throat. His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment.
'The terrible truth is', Johnny's voice was husky as he went on, 'that if we allowed any of them to escape the cull, they would communicate their terror and panic to the other herds in the Park. There would be a swift breakdown in the elephants' social behaviour.'
'Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden? Daniel asked softly.
'No. It has happened before. After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park. At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations. We soon learned. Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds. By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom. We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits. Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready. Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest. Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts.' Johnny shook his head. 'No, we have to take out the whole herd at one stroke.'
Almost with relief, he looked up at the sky. They both picked up the distant insect drone of an aircraft engine beyond the towering cumulus clouds.
'Here comes the spotter plane,' he said quietly, and reached for the microphone of the radio.
'Good morning, Sierra Mike. We have you visual due south of our position approximately four miles. I will give you yellow smoke.'
Copyright by Wilbur Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsover without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact St. Martin's Press (in the USA) or PanMacmillan in the UK and elsewhere.
Latest Videos from Wilbur's YouTube Channel
|
i don't know
|
In which North American city was singer Bryan Adams born?
|
Bryan Adams’ First Concert Was David Bowie | FishbowlNY
© 2016 Adweek All Rights Reserved
Bryan Adams’ First Concert Was David Bowie
Advertisement
Comment
It doesn’t get much better than writing a blog post about David Bowie while listening to the Bowie tribute channel in question.
For iHeartRadio’s 24-7 stream of the work of the man born David Robert Jones, the thoughts of famous artists have been gathered and recorded. Some of these are also highlighted in an associated blog post and the one that really jumped out to us is from Bryan Adams:
“In 1974, I went to one of my first concerts, actually it might have been 1973 thinking about it. I was living in Ottawa in Canada, and the word on the street was David Bowie was coming to town. He’d already had a bunch of records out that were huge and the tour he was doing at the time was the Diamond Dogs Tour and I ended up working with his musical director many years later; Michael Kamen on some songs but, getting back to the show. It was a great show. It was the first show I’d ever seen.”
Kamen passed away in 2003. Other artists who chatted with iHeartRadio when they came in to record guest DJ spots, about Bowie, include Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, Seal and Alabama Shakes lead singer Brittany Howard. The David Bowie Tribute channel, launched Monday, also mingles with the greatest hits various comments from Bowie himself.
P.S. Adams was right with the first date. The Bowie show he saw took place on June 15, 1974 . The Ottawa Civic Centre stop was in fact one of the very first on the Diamond Dogs North American itinerary.
|
CIVI-DT
|
Who invented the game of 'Monopoly'?
|
25 Amazing Bryan Adams Facts You (Probably) Never Knew
25 Amazing Bryan Adams Facts You (Probably) Never Knew
The Huffington Post Canada | By Brian Gasparek
Posted:
reddit
ADVERTISEMENT
It's been a big few months for Canadian music legend Bryan Adams. In addition to celebrating his 55th birthday last fall, Adams released his twelfth studio album, "Tracks of My Years," a chart-topping mix of covers and new material.
Now Adams is bringing his epic back catalogue of hits out on a giant Canadian tour beginning this week to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his classic rock record "Reckless." (Yep, that's the one with "Heaven," "Summer of '69," "It's Only Love" and "Run To You."
To get you pumped for Bryan Adams’ guaranteed-to-be-awesome upcoming concert in a city near you, here’s a look at 25 things you (probably) didn't know about the Canadian music icon. Hopefully it helps up your super fan game while killing time in the beer line.
Close
1. Bryan Adams actually quit school when he was just 16 years old to pursue music and convinced his mom to let him spend his college savings on a grand piano instead.
2. Bryan Adams was once a glam rocker in his mid-teens. Before he launched his solo career, Adams played in Vancouver glam rock band Sweeney Todd. (Yes, like the demon barber.) Adams sang in the band for a short time in the mid ‘70s, joining at age 16 to replace the band's lead singer Nick Gilder.
3. Bryan Adams' fourth album "Reckless" was a Canadian sales juggernaut. It was actually the very first album by a Canadian artist to sell a million copies in Canada. It was also huge internationally, selling five million copies in the U.S. alone.
4. Did you know that Bryan Adams once wanted to get into acting? He even acted in a film with Clint Eastwood. Back in 1989, Adams had a role in "Pink Cadillac" where he played a gas station attendant. Very glamorous, right? Adams also had a role in the 2002 film "House of Fools."
5. Adams was born in Kingston, Ont. but lived in Europe and Asia during various parts of his childhood because his father was a Canadian Foreign Service diplomat.
6. In addition to music, Adams is also a successful photographer. His work has been published in British Vogue, L'uomo Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Interview magazine and i-D . He also has shot big money ad campaigns for Guess Jeans, Sand, Converse, Montblanc, John Richmond, Fred Perry, and more recently for Escada.
7. Bryan Adams refused to let his music be featured in the 1986 Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun." The filmmakers wanted to use Adams' "Only The Strong Survive" but he said no because he thought the fighter jet film glorified war.
8. It's been long speculated that during the part of his youth spent in B.C.'s lower mainland, Bryan Adams attended the same high school as fellow Canadian star Michael J. Fox. Regardless, the two have become friends over the years and Adams even photographed Fox back in 2011 in a funny shoot for optical manufacturers Carl Zeiss AG's yearly calendar.
9. Adams was originally going to call his second album "Bryan Adams Hasn't Heard of You Either" in 1981 because of the critical indifference he received for his first. His record label wasn't thrilled about his sense of humour and convinced him to change it. He went with "You Want It You Got It" instead, and established his sound on that record.
10. Adams released a book of his photography last November called "Wounded: The Legacy of War." In his photos, Adams captured portraits of young British soldiers that suffered life-changing injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan or during training for war. With the release, Adams hoped to "reveal the sheer grit and bravery of the victims who, despite personal sacrifice, live each day with continued vim, vigour and dignity." This past Remembrance Day, an exhibition was held in London displaying the war photographs he's taken over the past four years.
11. Bryan Adams was once rumoured to have had an affair with the late Princess of Wales. Adams' ex-girlfriend Cecilie Thomsen claims that he dated Diana back in 1996 when she separated from Prince Charles. He also may have written his 1985 song “Diana” about his longing for her years before.
12. Bryan Adams has been nominated for a whopping 58 Juno awards in his career so far. He has won 18 times, with the highlights including Best Male Artist in 2000, Male Vocalist of the Year in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1997.
13. Out of all of Adams' number one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S., the only one that wasn't written specifically for a movie was "Heaven" from 1985's "Reckless."
14. Adams is a proud Canadian, but lives in the UK. He lives in Chelsea, London with his longtime girlfriend Alicia Grimaldi and their two daughters. They also have a home in Paris.
15. Bryan Adams' massive hit "Everything I Do, I Do For You" from "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and "Waking Up The Neighbors" set a UK chart record. It has been the only song to spend 16 consecutive weeks at number one in British chart history. It spent seven weeks at the chart top in the U.S. and nine weeks in Canada. The single alone has sold over 15 million copies internationally.
16. Adams says the most memorable collaboration of his career was when he recorded "It's Only Love" with Tina Turner. According to Adams, "Working with Tina Turner was amazing. I used to go to see her in the clubs when I was in my late teens, early 20s before she hit the big time. It was incredible to watch her. It was such a privilege to have sung with her, especially since I was only 24 at the time."
17. If you ever have Bryan Adams over for dinner at your place, don’t serve meat. The rocker has been a practicing vegan since 1989 and a strong animal rights activist with PETA.
18. Believe it or not, Bryan Adams actually somehow shares the same birthday as American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams on Nov. 5th. What are the odds of that? Ryan Adams had received a variety of infuriating Bryan Adams jokes throughout the early years of his career, but he's recently gotten a sense of humour about it.
19. Bryan Adams been named a Member of the Order of Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions to Canadian culture. Adams also has a star on both the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood and on Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto as a charter member.
20. Adams has been nominated for three Academy Awards. Once in 1992 for "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" from "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," once in 1996 for "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" from "Don Juan DeMarco," and once in 1997 for "I Finally Found Someone" from "The Mirror Has Two Faces." He hasn't won any.
21. In his career so far, Adams has been nominated for 15 Grammy Awards. He has only won once for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media for "Everything I Do, I Do For You" from "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" in 1992.
22. "Summer of '69," was originally going to be titled "Best Days of My Life." The phrase "summer of '69" only appeared once in its original form, and Adams initially thought the song wasn't strong enough to be featured on an album.
23. Bryan Adams' 1998 hit "When You're Gone" with Spice Girl Mel C was actually reworked in 2005 for the release of his "Anthology" album. The new take featured Pamela Anderson as his duet partner for the U.S. version. Weird.
24. 1991’s "Waking Up The Neighbors," one of Adams' most popular albums, caused a lot of controversy when it was released because the CRTC didn't consider it a Canadian album. That meant it received limited airplay on Canadian radio in favour of "real" Canadian content. The CRTC felt that since Adams co-produced the album with British producer and songwriter Mutt Lange and recorded it outside of Canada, it didn’t qualify as being Canadian content. Adams fought the CRTC on the movement and it eventually led to Canadian content rules being broadened. Way to go Bry.
25. Bryan Adams owns a recording studio in the Gastown neighbourhood of Vancouver called The Warehouse. He originally had a home recording studio but in 1991 he restored the oldest brick building in the city to house his new digs. As well as recording his own music there, the studio has hosted everyone from AC/DC, Avril Lavigne, and Billy Talent to Nickelback, Stars, and Tragically Hip.
NEXT: More Bryan Adams Pics
OAKLAND, CA - OCTOBER 12: Bryan Adams performs at a Day On The Green at the Oakland Colusium on October 12, 1981 in Oakland California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1985: Photo of Bryan Adams (Photo by Lisa Haun/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
CANADA - SEPTEMBER 19: Hamming it up: Music star Bryan Adams hams it up at Bellair Cafe. (Photo by Mike Slaughter/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 15: Canadian singer songwriter Bryan Adams performs on stage during the Amnesty International 'A Conspiracy of Hope' tour at Giants Stadium on June 15, 1986 in New York City. (Photo by Peter Carrette Archive/Getty Images)
CANADA - FEBRUARY 11: Mob scene: Canadian pop star Bryan Adams (in sunglasses), who wrote lyrics for Tears Are Not Enough, is mobbed by fans and media as he enters a Toronto recording studio yesterday to join other top stars in singing the benefit song for Ethiopian famine relief. The event went so smoothly, organizers say the record could be out within two weeks. (Photo by David Cooper/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 01: Photo of Bryan ADAMS (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns)
UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 01: Photo of Bryan ADAMS; Posed portrait of Bryan Adams (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns)
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1983: Photo of Bryan Adams (Photo by Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Bryan Adams performs on stage at The Wall Concert Berlin 20th July 1990. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 01: Photo of Bryan ADAMS (Photo by Mick Hutson/Redferns)
1991’s “Waking Up The Neighbors,” one of Adams’ most popular albums, caused a lot of controversy when it was released because the CRTC didn’t consider it a Canadian album. That meant it received limited airplay on Canadian radio in favour of “real Canadian” content. The CRTC felt that since Adams co-produced the album with British producer and songwriter Mutt Lange and recorded it outside of Canada for the most part, it didn’t qualify as being Canadian content. Adams fought the CRTC on the movement and it eventually led to Canadian content rules being broadened. Way to go Bry.
Singer Bryan Adams, 1987
Portuguese-Canadian singer Nelly Furtado (L) and Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams perform at BC Place during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver on February 12, 2010. AFP PHOTO / DDP / MICHAEL KAPPELER (Photo credit should read MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)
Bryan Adams performs on stage in Bratislava on July 28, 2012.
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 11: Photographer Bryan Adams and HRH Prince Harry attend the private view of 'Wounded: The Legacy of War' at Somerset House on Remembrance Day, November 11, 2014 in London, England. The photography exhibition by Bryan Adams of young wounded servicemen and women from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts opens to the public on Wednesday 12th November and runs until Sunday 25th January 2015. (Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)
Share
Also on The Huffington Post
Close
Underappreciated gal rock act Toronto had a hit with the gals-get-to-cause-trouble song "Your Daddy Don't Know" in 1982. The song experienced a renaissance in 2003 when The New Pornographers covered it for the "FUBAR" movie soundtrack.
Yes, it's a theme for a cheesball Canadian TV show from the '80s about a dog who saves people. And yes, you know all the words. Maybe tomorrow we won't like it so much, but until tomorrow we'll just keep listening.
Trooper's 1978 arena rock jam "Raise A Little Hell" was the band's only song to become a hit in the U.S. The song was produced by BTO/Guess Who's Randy Bachman.
We make fun of the not so dearly departed Canadian discount department store Zellers, but they did at least one thing right: they picked up this infectious and rollicking 2006 single from Clayton Park, Nova Scotia’s indie folk rock hero Joel Plaskett for a television spot, which made the chain temporarily cool. “Nowhere With You” scored Plaskett Single of the Year and Songwriter of the Year trophies at the 2007 East Coast Music Awards.
"The Messenger" was the lead-off track from Daniel Lanois' 1993 album "For The Beauty Of Wynona." Aspiring mystic rockers The Tea Party would cover the song in 1999.
This song is a punchline, but Snow's skin colour shouldn't colour our opinions on this radio smash. In hindsight we can appreciate how impressive his rapid-fire toasting actually is, how bold it was back then to shout-out Toronto and how cool it was he collaborated with rap legend MC Shan.
Taken from Sweeney Todd's self-titled 1975 album, the glam rock-ish "Roxy Roller" became a number one hit in Canada. Fun fact: Bryan Adams was part of Sweeney Todd when he was 15 years old.
Canada’s R&B and entertainment show queen, Jully Black, scored her first top 20 hit with this sexy single from her 2005 album, "This Is Me."
The pride of St. John’s made traditional Newfoundland music cool with their playful and punkish take on the old comic folk song “Mari-Mac” from their 1995 album, "Up."
"Rock Me Gently" was a Billboard number one hit for Andy Kim in 1974. The Montreal musician was a noted songwriter, scoring hits with songs like "Sugar Sugar" for The Archies. Kim is currently working on a new album with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew.
Part of Can-Rock's breakout late-'80s scene, "Teenland" gave Canada its own answer to R.E.M. The band's biggest hit would come three years later with "She Ain't Pretty."
“I Cry” is the song that gave North York's Bass is Base a top 40 hit, but the far superior sing-song jam “Funkmobile” is the song that scored the R&B trio their record deal in the first place. It’s also a lot more fun to break out at parties.
This hit 1980 single by Toronto new wave artists Martha and the Muffins was so good they named a concert venue after it. Echo Beach, the venue, is located along Toronto’s waterfront, but it’s more fun if you tell people that it's far away in time.
One of the all-time classic tributes to the wireless music transmission, Rush's "The Spirit Of Radio" was a worldwide hit from their 1980 album "Permanent Waves." The song was a nod to Toronto alternative radio station CFNY, who were one of the first outlets to play Rush songs.
The second single from Cape Breton native Ashley MacIsaac’s 1995 debut album "Hi, How Are You Today?" Only in Canada could an enfant terrible fiddler hook up with a Celtic folk singer and produce a ridiculously catchy, chart-topping pop hit sung in Scottish Gaelic.
This Toronto-based group who had neither an Edward or a Bear in the band, were one of the earliest Canadian acts to sign to a major U.S. label when they joined Capitol Records in 1969. Their 1972 hit "Last Song" reached number one in Canada and number three in the States, their best chart performance.
First Nations DJ crew A Tribe Called Red have radically flipped what it means to make aboriginal music, combining modern beats and drops with traditional powwow drums and singing to create something completely new. "Electric Pow Wow Drum" is the signature song for the Ottawa trio.
One of the pillars of Toronto's innovative Queen Street scene, The Parachute Club's new wave dance track "Rise Up" was a hit in 1983. The self-titled album this came from was produced by future U2 conductor Daniel Lanois.
One of '80s most iconic songs, "Rock You," with its helpful lesson "Gimme an R-R, O-O, C-C, K-K, whatcha got?" taught hair metallers everywhere how to spell Rock. Years later Sum 41 would cover the song and start a minor feud with the band.
Belleville, Ontario’s own Lee Aaron, further cemented her status as the Metal Queen with this 1989 single from her most successful album, "Bodyrock." The record was nominated for Album and Rock Album of the Year at the Junos and “Watcha” received a nomination for Video of the Year.
"Working For The Weekend" may get more attention, but leather pant rockers Loverboy's first real hit was "The Kid Is Hot Tonight" from the band's self-titled 1980 debut. Bob Rock, later to become a producer for the likes of Bon Jovi, Metallica and Aerosmith, was an engineer on this album.
Prolific and brilliant Toronto rapper D-Sisive, along with his longtime collaborator Muneshine, won SOCAN’s ECHO Songwriting Prize for this complex and confessional look at his life and career from the 2009 album "Let The Children Die."
This 1981 song by the Tom Cochrane-led Red Rider was written to address the wave of anti-Semitism which took place in the late-1970s. Mixed martial arts champ Dan Henderson has used the song as his walkout music before fights.
This single from ethereal Toronto singer/songwriter Jane Sibbery’s 1984 album "No Borders Here" accomplished what few seven and a half minute-long art rock epics have ever managed: it received massive radio play and became a breakthrough hit for the ethereal Toronto singer/songwriter.
Shad's self-deprecating throwback track captured everything that was right about old-school hip-hop -- clever references, catchy rhymes and a sense of humour. That this song about a grown man too broke to move out was released during the Great Recession adds some strong subext, too.
This Police-style new wave/reggae song "Eyes Of A Stranger" was a Canadian hit in 1982. Perhaps more notable was that the band, anchored by super-producer Bob Rock and Paul Hyde, also featured David Bowie collaborator Mick Ronson and future Last Gang Records owner Chris Taylor at various points.
The first track on Skinny Puppy’s first full-length album, "Bites," released in 1985, is one hell of a way to kick off a disc and is the perfect introduction to the Vancouver industrial gods in general. “Assimilate” is Skinny Puppy at their most melodically sinister.
This hit 1976 song by Klaatu was inspired by the idea of earthlings trying to contact alien races telepathically. Though written by Canadians and Klaatu band members Terry Draper and John Woloschuk part of the song's success can be attributed to the rumours when it came out that it was a secret Beatles side-project.
This title track from indie supergroup The New Pornographers' 2000 album featured Neko Case on lead vocals.The song has appeared in a number of places, including the TV show "Queer As Folk" and the curling movie "Men With Brooms."
This instant synthpop classic from Calgary’s beloved singer/songwriter twins Tegan and Sara was the lead single from their massively successful 2012 album "Heartthrob." The platinum-certified single scored the duo “Single of the Year” honours at the 2014 Junos and got the "Glee" treatment in March of 2013.
Think of this song as a dual citizen. It was written by American singer Montell Jordan of “This is How We Do It” fame and his songwriting partner Anthony “Shep” Crawford, but it was performed by Canada’s own R&B star Deborah Cox. It was a massive breakthrough for Cox, topping the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in October of 1998 and staying there for a record 14 weeks.
In a perfect world, Toronto indie rock gods Change of Heart would have dominated the airwaves throughout their decades-long career. In the real world, they did have one moment of unexpected top 40 glory. This beautifully delicate little song from their epic 1992 album, "Smile," briefly charted in Saskatchewan.
College rock goofballs the Barenaked Ladies named the titular character of this sweet love gone wrong song from 1994 after the intersection of Jane and St. Clair in Toronto. Stephen Duffy, who cowrote the song with BNL singer Steven Page, thought that it sounded like the most beautiful intersection in the world. Page didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't.
This breakthrough single from Toronto electroclash art rocker Peaches’ 2000 album, "The Teaches of Peaches" is about, well, fucking the pain away (and staying in school). The unabashedly dirty and undeniably addictive tune been featured on a bevy of film soundtracks and has been covered of Montreal and Bollo from The Mighty Boosh. Oh, and in "30 Rock" Liz Lemon used it as her ringtone.
Toronto indie rock legends The Lowest of the Low were/are one of the smartest, sharpest, and most literate bands that Canada has ever produced. And this tune from their 1991 debut album, "Shakespeare My Butt," is one of the smartest, sharpest, and most literate songs they ever produced.
Vancouver shoegazers Mystery Machine scored their biggest hit with this swirling and swoony single from their second album, "10 Speed." If social media had been around in 1994, all of the indie rock kids would have been tweeting about all of the feels this song gave them.
Electro-pop breakout Grimes pairs her chipmunk vocals, la la las and burbly beats, not to mention that adorable video, with dichotomously dark lyrics about the mental aftermath of a sexual assault.
With “Sweet Jane,” the sexy and smoky first single the Cowboy Junkies’ debut album, The Trinity Sessions, the Toronto alternative folk band proved that they were good enough to cover a legendary band like The Velvet Underground. With their second single, the haunting and dreaming “A Misguided Angel,” they proved that they were even better when they played their own songs.
This 1996 song from the Toronto rock trio is basically the Platonic Ideal of a Danko Jones song: naughty, boastful, bombastic, and bad ass with a killer rock riff and a refreshing lack of stereotypical Canadian meekness.
This 1979 single from London, Ontario’s The Demics was named the greatest Canadian song of all time in Chart Magazine’s inaugural Best Canadian music poll in 1996 and was ranked fifth in a follow-up poll in 2000. In 2014, this punk ode to small-ish town frustration remains as vital as ever, and no Best Canadian Song list worth anything would be complete without it.
This song from The Rheos’ beloved and critically acclaimed 1991 album, "Melville," sees the Etobicoke, Ontario rock band at their strangest, most unique and most arresting. The short tune about about a suicidal young man named Joey remains a favourite of disaffected weirdos and art rockers the world over.
It didn't take long for Randy Bachman to make his mark when he split from The Guess Who in 1970. By 1974 BTO were an established band and "Takin' Care Of Business," their ode to getting things done, was a hard rock hit. Oddly, it was their song "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" from next album "Not Fragile" that became an international number one.
In the early seventies, Canada had a pretty good reputation for folk music and a burgeoning reputation for rock, but the Great White North wasn’t really known for its boy bands and cheesy pop music. Port Colborne, Ontario’s DeFranco Family did their part to change all of that with this cheesy but catchy as hell ditty that hit number one in 1973 and landed the whole DeFranco family in Tiger Beat.
Trip-hop gets a bad rap, which may be why rip-hop duo Esthero have ben laregly forgotten. The late-90s outfit's best song, "Heaven Sent" mixed singer Esthero's breathy, jazz-inflected and progressively tougher vocals over future Weeknd producer Doc's impeccable quiet-loud production and turntable scratcing.
This 1986 hit isn’t just a killer single that becomes more pointed and uncomfortably true with each passing year, it’s also one of the first and best independent success story in Canadian music history. In 1985, a little known band from Toronto recorded a song called “I’m An Adult Now,” filmed an extremely low budget video for it and released both by themselves. It became a massive hit and landed TPOH a record deal. Their debut album, "Love Junk," went platinum in 1988.
This track from 54-40’s eponymous second album was a breakthrough college radio hit for the Vancouver band in 1986. It remains the best 54-40 song that Hootie and the Blowfish never covered.
The sweet and melancholy title track from The Poppy Family’s 1969 album was the Vancouver psychedelic pop rock band’s biggest hit. It was a number one single in Canada and Ireland, and reached number two of the US charts.
The godmother of Canadian hip-hop was the first northern rapper to sign to a U.S. label and be taken under the wing of an American star (KRS-One) and she did by representing the Tdot's cultural mix with a healthy does of dancehall reggae as this classic single makes crystal clear.
Ottawa alt country singer/songwriter sings about eating at Toronto’s infamous Vesta Lunch diner, getting CBC airplay, and being more of a Marty McSorely than a Wayne Gretzky in this clever and thoroughly Canadian single from her critically and commercially successful 2008 album, "Asking For Flowers."
This blistering and emotional track from Toronto’s Melanie Fiona topped cracked the Billboard Hot 100, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (the award eventually went to some up-and-comer named Beyonce), and established the singer as an R&B force on both sides of the border.
This striking and gorgeous lead track from Zaki Ibrahim’s 2012 album, "Every Opposite," is a fine example of why the Canadian and South African soul and R&B singer garners so much praise, so many prestigious award nominations (including the Polaris 2013 short list), and opening slots for artists like Erykah Badu.
In 1997, an electro-alterna-rock collective from Montreal called Bran Van 3000 came out of nowhere and conquered the Canadian (and U.K.) airwaves with the irresistibly infectious “Drinking In L.A.” It remains the single catchiest pop song that has ever been written about ennui and career dissatisfaction.
We have a real-life "Footloose" situation to thank for this ubiquitous new wave hit from 1983. Singer Ian Doroschuk wrote “Safety Dance” after getting kicked out of a club for pogoing.
This classic from the 1971 album "Blue" sees Alberta’s folk giant Joni Mitchell at her most poignant and piercing. Given that Mitchell is responsible for an entire career’s worth of poignant and piercing songs like “Free Man In Paris,” “People’s Parties,” “Both Sides Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “River” and “Woodstock,” that’s saying quite a lot.
This unflinching and unsentimental look at teenage sexual frustration from the Toronto new wave band Rough Trade’s 1980 album "Avoid Freud" became one of the most sexually explicit songs to ever appear on the Canadian pop charts when it cracked the top 20 the following year. The lyrics, even the infamous “She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way” line, might be borderline tame by today’s standards, but the song remains every bit as cool as the day it was released.
The sweet, melodic melancholy of this 1994 single from Calgary’s Jann Arden makes the singer’s biggest hit, “Insensitive,” look positively perky by comparison. “Could I Be Your Girl” took home the Single Of The Year Juno in 1995.
"Good Enough" was the third single from Sarah McLachlan's 1993 breakthrough album "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy." That album would sell almost three million copies in the U.S.
CBC Radio listeners voted this the best Canadian song of all time in a 2005 poll for 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version, and with good reason. The iconic sixties folk classic by Toronto’s Ian and Sylvia remains one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking things to ever come out of this country. And the covers – by the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Neil Young and many more – are all pretty swell, too.
“Romantic Rights,” the first single from Death From Above 1979’s 2004 debut "You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine" was a perfect introduction to the Toronto duo’s doing it-themed noise rock. As happy as we are about the band's reunion and upcomiong second album, we have problems believing that anything could ever top this.
There’s something uniquely Canadian about sampling the theme music from a nerdy CTV game show for your hip-hop track. Which is exactly what Toronto’s Dream Warriors did with the theme from "Definition" (“Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones) on this massive jazz hip hop hit from 1991.
This melancholy, finger-picked ballad by the Vancouver folk-rockers was deservedly their biggest hit and soundtracked countless pity parties when it came out on the late-80s.
Frustrated by the poor treatment that Canada's hip-hop scene was receiving at home, Vancouver rap group The Rascalz assembled a superstar team of fellow Canadian artists to celebrate the talent and resilience of the domestic scene. The resulting track, 1998’s “Northern Touch,” was successful both as a rallying cry and a single. It helped establish Canadian hip-hop as a creative and commercial force and it became the country’s most successful hip-hop single since The Dream Warrior’s “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style” in 1991.
Stars's cinematic soft revolution first ignited with this beautiful ballad about star-crossed love and quarter life crises as sung by the band's boy-girl co-lead singers.
For a long time, Joel "Deadmau5" Zimmerman was dismissed by the electronic cognoscenti, his Maus head seen as a gimmick to get bros onto the dancefloor. "Ghosts n Stuff" was his chance to prove himself as a mask-less producer and he scored with this instantly iconic EDM track that mixes a distorted vocal with buzzy synths and an infectiously dirty beat.
Many artists have covered Canadian Gene MacLellan’s most famous song, including Elvis, Loretta Lynn, Bing Crosby, and Burl Ives. But it was Anne Murray’s sweetly earnest take on the tune in 1970 that made “Snowbird” a hit and an enduring classic. It was one of the first songs inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
If Carly Rae winds up a one-hit wonder, at least the former "Canadian Idol" also-ran's hit was this wondrous piece of pure pop perfection that was so relatable it pretty much took over popular culture for months.
Toronto often doubles as Anycity, USA in TV and film and used to be similarly disguised in Toronto hip-hop for fear hometown pride might make it harder to crossover south of the border. But then Kardi's Tdot anthem arrived, proudly describing the ins and outs of local slang and reminding rappers that it's about both where you're from and where you're at.
Two years before his tragic and untimely death, Hamilton, Ontario’s folk phenom released this haunting exploration of the Canadian landscape and the Canadian psyche. Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called “Northwest Passage” an “unofficial Canadian anthem” in a pro-Mackenzie Pipeline speech, but let’s not hold that against the poor song.
Winnipeg’s Weakerthans pack a hell of a lot of hooks and heartbreak into two and a half minutes in this perfect folk punk rock single from the band’s 1997 debut album, "Fallow."
The third single from The Hip’s 1992 album, "Fully Completely," was a top 10 hit in Canada and a top 20 hit stateside. Which likely makes it the most successful rock song that quotes an entire passage from a literary novel. The entire “There’s not simple explanation...” verse is lifted directly from Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends The Night, hence the full name of the song, “Courage (For Hugh MacLennan).”
Montreal synthpop singer and heartthrob Corey Hart burst onto the new wave and pop scenes in 1983 with this earworm-worthy single from his debut album, "First Offense." Since then, the pop rock classic has been featured everywhere from video game soundtracks to an episode of "Daria" and referenced by the likes of Wyclef Jean and "Degrassi."
The title track from Blue Rodeo’s 1992 album "Lost Together" remains a popular and emotional sing-along at the Toronto band’s concerts to this day. And it might just be the best us-against-the-world anthem that roots rock has ever heard.
Even removed from the mystery of its release -- back before we knew who Abel Tesfaye was, much less saw him presenting at the MMVA -- or the excitement of hearing such such a new talent, this dark, disturbing debut single remains as powerful and gorgeous as ever, especially when the drums drop.
Some bands have a song so outrageously good, they will always be primarily associated with it. For the Dears, that songs is "Lost in the Plot," where Murray Lightburn goes all-in with his Morrissey impression and wings up with his best vocal ever, especially in the epic climax. The guitars and drums amp up the post-9/11 paranoia while Murray warns: "don't mess our love."
The modern music era began in the 1950s, and thanks to then-teenage Anka Canadians were there from the get go. Need proof? "Diana," his first of many hits, went to number one in the U.S. sandwiched between Elvis' "All Shook Up" and Buddy Holly's "That'll Be The Day."
It’s not often that good rock and roll and commerce go together so well. “Money City Maniacs” the first single from 1998’s "Navy Blues," is probably the most commercially successful song that Halifax Nova Scotia’s indie rock royalty Sloan ever released. It even appeared in a beer ad in the late nineties. And yet it’s every bit as brilliant and critically acclaimed as any of the band’s more underground hits like “Underwhelmed,” “Coax Me,” and “The People of the Sky.”
"Almost Crimes" was one of the anchor tracks from Broken Social Scene's 2002 commercial breakthrough album "You Forgot It In People." Featuring a pre-iPod commercial fame Leslie Feist, the song helped pave the way for a generation of indie rock collectives.
Spirit of the West's alcoholic anthem mixed Canada's Celtic influence with folk-rock to create a song that was guaranteed to get dance floors and residence rooms bouncing in unison as everyone chanted "You'll have to excuse me, I'm not at my best, I've been gone for a month, I've been drunk since I left."
Canada's most acclaimed electronic artist, Richie Hawtin, made his name playing techno parties across the river in Detroit, but he cemented his legend with his minimal techno alter-ego Plastikman. The acid-laced "Plasticine"from his landmark "Sheet One" album is considered one of the greatest techno tracks ever and is a bit more dancefloor targeted then some of Plastikman's more esoteric earphone-focused productions.
The Coca-Cola FIFA World Cup version of this song, “Wavin’ Flag (Celebration Mix)” is a cool sports anthem and the all-star Haiti fundraiser was for a good cause, but we’re even bigger fans of the original “Wavin' Flag” as it appears on Somali-Canadian hip hop artist’s 2009 album, "Troubador," for its powerful testament to the hopes and strengths of the people of Somalia.
"1,2,3,4" got the iPod endorsement and the "Sesame Street" remake, but "Mushaboom" was Feist's first proper introduction to the masses with that unique vocal style and a narrative about the pastoral fantasies of hipsters stuck second-floor living without a yard over playfully light instrumentation and a finger-snapped beat That manic pixie dream video didn't hurt.
The greatest inspired-by Michael Jackson track ever didn't just jack the "Billie Jean" disco beat, it also lyrically put k-os into late MJ's mindset. Its also a good reminder that Drake didn't invent the skill of singing and rapping.
The post-9/11 era may have felt scary, but it had nothing on the terror of 80s Cold War when the end of the world truly felt nigh. That's the subtextual background of this Bruce Cockburn classic, later covered beautifully by Barenaked Ladies, which gives the song much of its power. Lines like "Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight" don't hurt, either.
Admittedly something of a deep cut, despite its former status as the band's go-to encore, Hustle Rose might not be as well known as, say Dead Disco, but it should be. Perfectly capturing what makes Metric so special, the song starts off like an Anthems of a 17-Year-Old Girl sequel before settling into a finger-picked ballad and then exploding into an dance-rock epic soaring on a crunchy guitar, double-time drums and synths aimed squarely at the outer solar system.
Right around the time the music industry was painting Neil Young as the godfather of this newfangled "grunge" movement in 1992 he pulled a swerve and put out the decidedly not-grunge country album "Harvest Moon." Young collaborators Pearl Jam have covered the title track during their shows.
Long before every pop starlet broke free of her pop and/or Disney past with a racy new image and a leaked nude photo, Ottawa’s Alanis Morissette, formerly known as Alanis, ditched her neon crop tops and mall pop past with this blisteringly angry, confessional, and raunchy alternative hit in 1995. Dave Coulier has both confirmed and denied that he is the subject of the song’s woman scorned fury.
This single from cowpunk rebel-turned-grand dame of Canadian song K.D. Lang’s 1992 album, "Ingénue," topped the charts in Canada, the U.S. and U.K and earned Lang a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and an MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Music Video. If imitation is, indeed, the best form of flattery, then The Rolling Stones flattered the crap out of Lang and “Constant Craving” with their 2007 song, “Anybody Seen My Baby?” The Stones later gave her and her songwriting partner a writing credit for the tune.
Before Drake's OVO and its crew love, there was Baby Blue, a DJ collective that came out of the party and mixtape scenes. In 2001, they put out their second compilation album containing this criminally underrated gem featuring Can-Hop legend Choclaire and American rapper Mims. It's a surprisingly street-focused club jam with an indelible pinging beat and anthemic rhymes showing up the haters with sheer dexterity.
Joel Plaskett's old band Thrush Hermit were victims of bad timing, having been signed to a major label after alt-rock's mid-90s decline and then releasing their CanRock masterpiece "Clayton Park" just before the early-00s indie rock revival. But while that impacted sales, it didn't affect songs like this East Coast neo-retro riff-rocker which to this day make me bummed out that they broke up.
Late country legend Stompin' Tom Connors' ode to hard-living Northern Ontario miners remains one of his best known songs. Connors knew the north well, having scored his first big singing break at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ontario, home of Shania Twain.
There is no bottom lower in hip-hop than the one reserved for a half-white, Jewish, Canadian child star, even if he grew up in a good neighbourhood, but "Started From the Bottom" isn't Drake's song anymore. It belongs to everyone now, and much like "Hold On, We're Going Home" boasts his best singing turn, this is Drake in his fiercest rap form. We will be hearing this song forever.
The meta nostalgia of Bryan Adam's greatest hit runs deep--from "Got my first real six-string" onward, it inspires warm feelings for the 80s and the 60s, for any summer anytime, really. Despite its propulsive riffs and soaring guitar solos, it's actually a bleak song about growing up and realizing that your dreams didn't come true, that "nothing can last forever." And yet this 1983 song somehow has, and that incongruity gives it an optimism it didn't have at the time.
Orillia folk legend Gordon Lightfoot reached the top of the Canadian charts and the top 5 of the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1970 with this beautifully ponderous song, inspired by his divorce, from the album "Sit Down Young Stranger." It’s probably the only folk song that sounds almost as good as a disco number.
Arcade Fire have never been shy about crafting anthems, but none have been quite as anthemic as "Rebellion (Lies)" off their breakthrough debut album, "Funeral." As the song gathers momentum, you can almost imagine Win and Regine leading an uprising against the liars-that-be.
One of the best songs of all-time according to Rolling Stone magazine, this narrative tale from '68 was inspired by Band member Levon Helm's connection to the American Deep South. Artists from Diana Ross to Panic At The Disco to The Muppets have covered it.
Taken from the electro-rock duo's 2011 album "Sound Kapital," the SOCAN Prize-nominated song "When I Get Back" chronicles a traveler's need to find their way home even as it induces culture shock with its synthesized sound.
A North American number one hit for The Guess Who in 1970, this song has been interpreted as anti-American over the years, though songwriter Jim Kale denies that assertion. Lenny Kravitz's 1999 cover of the song hit number three on the rock charts.
Pitchfork considers Constantines 2003 album "Shine A Light" one of the best of the 2000s. The marquee track for the album was the urgent "Nighttime Anytime (It’s Alright)."
Countless Cohen songs could have made this list, and many might call for would want "Hallelujah" or "Suzanne" but "Everybody Knows" it's hard to deny Cohen as beat apocalyptic prophet. Presumably with a black turtleneck on, he pessimistically baritones that the boat is leaking, the fight is fixed, the good guys lost and the plague is coming over synth stabs and flamenco guitar licks.
First there's that sample-n-scratch-bolstered breakbeat, which places the song in its historical era long before Maestro proclaims that "it's 89 y'all, not Beethoven's 5th." Yet it sounds as fresh today as it did a quarter century ago, and can just as quickly fill a dancefloor. Then there are the rhymes, a tough yet erudite demonstration that not only was Maestro "a hip-hop tic-tac-tician" but that he was "not American." That may seem like an obvious line now, but back then Canadian rappers were loathe to admit such on wax in hopes of crossing over down south. Maestro stayed true to his northern roots, broke into the US top 40 anyway, and held the best-selling Canadian hip-hop single title for two decades. Yes, it's still a throw down.
Share
|
i don't know
|
In Greek mythology who was the sister of Helen and wife of Agamemnon?
|
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra
See More Clytemnestra Pictures >
In Greek mythology, Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon , king of Mycenae or Argos . She was the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda , rulers of Sparta , and sister of Castor , Polydeuces , and Helen .
When her sister Helen and wife of Agamemnon 's brother, Menelaus , was abducted by Paris and was taken to Troy , Agamemnon decided to help his brother and bring his wife back, thus starting the Trojan War . Before the army left for Troy , Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia , as he had caused the wrath of Artemis . While he was away, Clytemnestra started an affair with Aegisthus , with whom she plotted against her husband. Clytemnestra was angry with her husband, both because of her daughter's sacrifice, as well as because Agamemnon had killed her first husband and taken her by force.
Upon his return from Troy , Agamemnon was welcomed by his wife. When he went to take a bath, Clytemnestra threw a net on him and stabbed him. Agamemnon 's concubine, Cassandra , who was outside the palace, had foreseen the plot, but as she was cursed by the god Apollo , no one believed her and she reluctantly accepted her fate and was slain.
Aegisthus and Clytemnestra took the rule of Mycenae for seven years, until Orestes , the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon , returned and killed his mother and her lover as revenge for his father's death.
Clytemnestra Is also called Clytaemnestra.
|
Clytemnestra
|
Who designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome?
|
Agamemnon | Myths of the World Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
Myths of the World Wiki
Share
Ad blocker interference detected!
Wikia is a free-to-use site that makes money from advertising. We have a modified experience for viewers using ad blockers
Wikia is not accessible if you’ve made further modifications. Remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected.
Template:Cleanup
This article is about a character in Greek mythology. For other uses, see Agamemnon (disambiguation) .
In Greek mythology , Agamemnon ( Ancient Greek : Template:Polytonic ; modern Greek : Αγαμέμνονας, "leader of the assembly") was the son of King Atreus of Mycenae and Queen Aerope ; the brother of Menelaus and the husband of Clytemnestra ; mythical legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos , thought to be different names for the same area. When Helen , the wife of Menelaus, was abducted by Paris of Troy , Agamemnon was the commander of the Achaeans in the ensuing Trojan War .
Upon Agamemnon's return from Troy he was murdered (according to the fullest version of the oldest surviving account, Odyssey Book 11, l.409f.) by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife Clytemnestra, who herself slew Cassandra , Agamemnon's unfortunate concubine, as she clung to him. In old versions of the story: "The scene of the murder, when it is specified, is usually the house of Aegisthus, who has not taken up residence in Agamemnon's palace, and it involves an ambush and the deaths of Agamemnon's followers too". [1] In some later versions Clytemnestra herself does the killing, or they do it together, in his own home.
Hittite sources mention Template:Hittite , ruler of Template:Hittite (land of Achaeans) in the fourteenth century BC. [2] [3] This is a possible prototype of the Agamemnon of mythology.
Early life
Edit
Agamemnon's life was shadowed under prophecy. Atreus, Agamemnon's father, murdered the children of his twin brother Thyestes , excepting Aegisthus , and fed them to Thyestes, who vowed gruesome revenge on Atreus' children. Aegisthus took possession of the throne of Mycenae and ruled jointly with Thyestes. During this period Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus , took refuge with Tyndareus , King of Sparta . There they respectively married Tyndareus's daughters Clytemnestra and Helen . Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had four children: one son, Orestes , and three daughters, Iphigenia , Electra and Chrysothemis . Menelaus succeeded Tyndareus in Sparta, while Agamemnon, with his brother's assistance, drove out Aegisthus and Thyestes to recover his father's kingdom. He extended his dominion by conquest and became the most powerful prince in Greece.
Agamemnon's family history had been marred by rape , murder , incest , and treachery , consequences of the heinous crime perpetrated by their ancestor, Tantalus , and then of a curse placed upon Pelops , son of Tantalus, by Myrtilus, whom he had murdered. Thus misfortune hounded successive generations of the House of Atreus , until atoned by Orestes in a joint divine-human court of justice.
The Trojan War
Main article: Trojan War
Agamemnon gathered the reluctant Greek forces to sail for Troy. Preparing to depart from Aulis , which was a port in Boeotia , Agamemnon's army incurred the wrath of the goddess Artemis . There are several reasons throughout myth for such wrath: in Aeschylus ' play Agamemnon , Artemis is angry for the young men who will die at Troy, whereas in Sophocles ' Electra , Agamemnon has slain an animal sacred to Artemis, and subsequently boasted that he was Artemis's equal in hunting. Misfortunes, including a plague and a lack of wind, prevented the army from sailing. Finally, the prophet Calchas announced that the wrath of the goddess could only be propitiated by the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia . Classical dramatisations differ on how willing either father or daughter were to this fate, some include such trickery as claiming she was to be married to Achilles , but Agamemnon did eventually sacrifice Iphigenia. Her death appeased Artemis, and the Greek army set out for Troy. Several alternatives to the human sacrifice have been presented in Greek mythology. Other sources, such as Iphigenia at Aulis, claim that Agamemnon was prepared to kill his daughter, but that Artemis accepted a deer in her place, and whisked her away to Taurus in Crimea . Hesiod said she became the goddess Hecate .
Agamemnon was the commander-in-chief of the Greeks during the Trojan War. During the fighting, Agamemnon killed Antiphus and fifteen other Trojan soldiers. [4] Agamemnon's teamster , Halaesus , later fought with Aeneas in Italy . The Iliad tells the story of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the final year of the war. Agamemnon took an attractive slave, one of the spoils of war, Briseis from Achilles. Achilles, the greatest warrior of the age, withdrew from battle in revenge and nearly cost the Greek armies the war.
Although not the equal of Achilles in bravery, Agamemnon was a dignified representative of kingly authority. As commander-in-chief, he summoned the princes to the council and led the army in battle. He took the field himself, and performed many heroic deeds until he was wounded and forced to withdraw to his tent. His chief fault was his overwhelming haughtiness. An over-exalted opinion of his position led him to insult Chryses and Achilles, thereby bringing great disaster upon the Greeks.
After the capture of Troy, Cassandra , doomed prophetess and daughter of Priam , fell to Agamemnon's lot in the distribution of the prizes of war.
Return to Greece
File:Aegisthus.jpg
After a stormy voyage, Agamemnon and Cassandra either landed in Argolis , or were blown off course and landed in Aegisthus' country. Clytemnestra , Agamemnon's wife, had taken Aegisthus , son of Thyestes , as a lover. When Agamemnon came home he was slain by either Aegisthus (in the oldest versions of the story) or Clytemnestra. According to the accounts given by Pindar and the tragedians, Agamemnon was slain in a bath by his wife alone, a blanket of cloth or a net having first been thrown over him to prevent resistance. Clytemnestra also killed Cassandra. Her jealousy of Cassandra, and her wrath at the sacrifice of Iphigenia and at Agamemnon's having gone to war over Helen are said to have been the motives for her crime. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then ruled Agamemnon's kingdom for a time, Aegisthus claiming his right of revenge for Agamemnon's father Atreus having fed Thyestes his own children (Thyestes then crying out "So perish all the race of Pleisthenes!" (Aeschylus, Aga., ln. 1602), thus explaining Aegisthus' action as justified by his father's curse). Agamemnon's son Orestes later avenged his father's murder, with the help or encouragement of his sister Electra , by murdering Aegisthus and Clytemnestra (his own mother), thereby enciting the wrath of the Erinyes (English: the Furies), winged goddesses who tracked down egregiously impious wrongdoers with their hounds' noses and drove them to insanity.
Genealogy
Edit
Athenaeus tells a story of how Agamemnon mourned the loss of his friend Argynnus, when he drowned in the Cephisus river. He buried him, honored with a tomb and a shrine to Aphrodite Argynnis. (The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis, Book XIII Concerning Women, p. 3) This episode is also found in Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus II.38.2), in Stephen of Byzantium (Kopai and Argunnos), and in Propertius , III with minor variations. [5]
The fortunes of Agamemnon have formed the subject of numerous tragedies , ancient and modern, the most famous being the Oresteia of Aeschylus . In the legends of the Peloponnesus , Agamemnon was regarded as the highest type of a powerful monarch, and in Sparta he was worshipped under the title of Zeus Agamemnon . His tomb was pointed out among the ruins of Mycenae and at Amyclae .
Another account makes him the son of Pleisthenes (the son or father of Atreus ), who is said to have been Aerope's first husband.
In works of art there is considerable resemblance between the representations of Zeus , king of the gods, and Agamemnon, king of men. He is generally depicted with a sceptre and diadem , conventional attributes of kings.
Agamemnon's mare was named Aetha. She was also one of two horses driven by Menelaus at the funeral games of Patroclus. [6] [7]
In fiction
Agamemnon is the subject of two novels by George Shipway; "Warrior in Bronze" (1977), about Agamemnon's rise to the throne of Mycenae, and its sequel, "The King in Splendour" (1979), about Agamemnon and the Trojan War.
Portrayals in film
Edit
Recent interpretations depict Agamemnon in a completely different light.
In the 2003 TV miniseries Helen of Troy , Agamemnon, played by actor Rufus Sewell , kills Paris and rapes Helen before being stabbed by Clytemnestra in his bath.
In Wolfgang Petersen 's film Troy (2004), in a severe contrast to the hero from mythology, Agamemnon is now the primary villain of the story, portrayed as a cruel and power-hungry warlord who seeks to control the Aegean Sea , for which he has to conquer Troy. He cares nothing for Menelaus's marriage and sees it as a mere excuse to go to war with Troy. In the end, during the Sack of Troy , he attacks Briseis, whose romance with Achilles nearly cost him the Trojan War, and tells her she will be his personal slave. In response, she stabs and kills him with a hidden stiletto. He was portrayed by Scottish actor Brian Cox .
In Terry Gilliam 's film Time Bandits , Agamemnon is played by Sean Connery . Historically somewhat incorrect, Agamemnon is shown as slaying the minotaur (who, according to legend, was killed by Theseus ).
Personality
Edit
Template:Refimprovesect Agamemnon possesses a strong temper and a prideful streak similar to Achilles. He is not as strong as Achilles, nor is he an exceptional warrior. Agamemnon clearly has a stubborn streak that one can argue makes him extremely arrogant . Although he takes few risks in battle, Agamemnon still accomplishes some progress for the Greeks. As a king Agamemnon, it can perhaps be argued, is loyal, as he insists upon leading a battle for his brother, Menelaus’ stolen bride; though this may well be only a pretext for a raid for booty. Unlike Achilles, Agamemnon’s deepest concern is for himself, and therefore he sees others, depending on how they relate to him.
See also
|
i don't know
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.