The Bunker.. with a little green.

The Bunker

For my photography, I prefer dirty places; they just have so much more colour than a clean, well-lit place. Don't you think?

Happy Birthday Belinda

I know it's a bit early

But I write today

so you will know

I'll think about you tomorrow

The Waterfall by Megan

Waterfalls are beautiful in every little way,
They help us out by cleaning out the places where we play.
It always keeps on rushing, tomorrow and today,
It makes us feel beautiful too, in every little way.

Clouds and Steel

My third attempt at HDR. The storing towers at Moordrift Dairy, Limpopo.

Moordrift Dairy is the oldest Dairy in The limpopo province. The entrance to the Dairy is directly opposite the spot where the Moordrift massacre occured more than a 150 years ago. 23 boers including their children were murdered. The trees surrounding the present memorial are also national monuments. It is said that the heads of the children were bashed against the tree stumps until they were dead.

"In 1854 Mokopane, who was known as a rainmaker and a sangoma, wanted the intestines of a big white hunter to make traditional medicines for his own hunters. He attacked a white hunting party at Moorddrift and killed everyone except Hendrik Potgieter whom he captured and later skinned alive".

Back in Time..

I finally received my confirmation from Botshabelo http://www.botshabelogamelodge.co.za/ for the week after Xmas, and well.. I'm rather unsure how I'll cope with going away on my own again. It does however give me the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts and hopefully inject some inspiration into my Photographic aspirations.

Since given up on writing anything sensible on this here blog, I can perhaps offer to make my photos speak the words that are just milling around aimlessly in my head.

Gnarled and twisted but always strong.

Rally with a view

It was my first time staying in a chalet at a rally. Honestly, never again. I'd rather take the tent again. All the buddies and their buddies and their extended family wanted to use the shower, toilet, wash basin, bed, table, fridge etc, etc. Not worth the money or hassle.

Anyway, this was the view from our chalet. About two hundred meters down was the Rally site. Walked myself silly. Up.. and bloody down, the whole weekend.

Poison Rally

One of a few hundred biker clubs represented at this year's Poison Rally in Rustenburg. The Poison is one of the 'milder' of the Rally's; not quite Church fair, but relaxing nevertheless.

The Loft

Constitution Hill

A poster I made for Deviant Art

You left me at the gate..

The moment you saw the playground

the swings and slides, you left me behind

The maze

I came here to heal, and found a maze
Instead of confusion, I found comfort

I’ll stay here for a while..

Dark spaces

I’m walking in dark spaces
No longer sense, feel.. hear

Just one step at a time, feeling
my way, blindly I grope.
Another night, another day.

All the pain from the past,
becomes the comfort that I crave.

The sweetest Love

For a moment..

Saudi Woman..

Saudi woman to fight ruling.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071122/wl_afp/saudiwomenrightsjustice_071122011552

The ghost of wedding past.

My sister reminded me this morning that it is my brother-in law's wedding anniversary today. I wrote some time back about his wife who was thought to have commited suicide, but instead she had just passed away quietly in her sleep. She was 20 years his senior and they were very much in love. I know this will be a difficult time for him.

Float away..

B and blue (Writers club topic - Abuse against women)

One evening after an especially heated argument, I stood up and headed for the door. I needed to breath, and I needed to slow my pulse down.

It was at that moment that she stepped in front of me, defiant. Hands on her hips and mouth moving rapidly. I could no longer hear anything. My brain had gone into self-preservation mode. Everything slowed down and all I could see was my arms coming up. My hands flat forward, and I wanted to scream No!, but it was too late. I saw her fall away from me and out of my vision.

B fell down the steps to the lounge and made heavy contact with the chair.

It was the worst moment in my life. No matter how much I tried to console her. I new things can never be the same. The one time when I should have gripped her in my arms and hugged her till she calmed down, I chose to become a barbarian.

I trust she will never forgive me for that, and she shouldn't. I know I will never.

Exploring darkness (Writer's club topic: Voilence against women, or a child in this case)

I'm sorry guys, but this entry has been removed. I felt it was just a bit to Risque. I'll try something later

From London To Salem.. a journey of justice.

Courtesy of Christian Today

LONDON - A British-born woman, who liked to use the name the "Lyrical Terrorist", became the first woman to be convicted in Britain under new security laws after being found guilty of possessing terrorism-related documents.
Samina Malik, 23, wrote a series of poems calling for "Jihad" (holy war) and collected a library of material for terrorist purposes including the Al Qaeda manual and the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, the Old Bailey heard.
"Malik liked to be known to some people as the Lyrical Terrorist, or Stranger Awaiting Martyrdom," said prosecutor Jonathan Sharp.
"She had a library of material she had collected for terrorist purposes ... It may have been culled from the Internet but it has not just been idly viewed, it has been searched for, downloaded, saved and preserved," he added.
Malik, from Southall, west London, used to work at a newspaper shop at Heathrow airport until her arrest.
During the trial, the court heard one of Malik's militant poems "How to Behead," describing in detail how to slice off a hostage's head.
The prosecution also told the court that Malik wore a bracelet with the word "Jihad" inscribed on it and had Osama bin Laden's "Declaration of War" on her computer.
Other material on her computer referred to car bombs, her hatred of all non-Muslims and bomb-making.
Police said she had tried to join extremist subscription-only Web sites and had attempted to donate money to the Mujahideen.
"Malik held violent extremist views which she shared with other like-minded people over the Internet. She also tried to donate money to a terrorist group," said Peter Clarke, head of Britain's Counter Terrorism Command.
Malik was found guilty of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist, an offence brought in under the Terrorism Act passed in 2000.
Judge Peter Beaumont however granted her strict conditional bail -- in effect house arrest -- until early December, after calling for more information into her family background.
He said Malik remained an "enigma" to him, and called for more information into "her family circumstances and in particular the influence her brother has had in the family".
Beaumont warned Malik, who sobbed in the dock, that "all sentencing options remain open".

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town on June 2, 1692, with William Stoughton, the new Lieutenant Governor, as Chief Magistrate, Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney prosecuting the cases, and Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop's case was the first brought to the grand jury, who endorsed all the indictments against her. She went to trial the same day and was found guilty. On June 3, the grand jury endorsed indictments against Rebecca Nurse and John Willard, but it is not clear why they did not go to trial immediately as well. Bridget Bishop was executed by hanging on June 10, 1692.
In June, more people were accused, arrested and examined, but now in Salem Town, by former local magistrates John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin and Bartholomew Gedney who had become judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Roger Toothaker died in prison on June 16, 1692.
At the end of June and beginning of July, grand juries endorsed indictments against Sarah Good, Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Procter, John Procter, Martha Carrier, Sarah Wilds and Dorcas Hoar. Only Sarah Good, Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin and Sarah Wilds, along with Rebecca Nurse, went on to trial at this time, where they were found guilty, and executed on July 19, 1692. In mid-July as well, the primary source of accusations moved from Salem Village to Andover, when the constable there asked to have some of the afflicted girls in Salem Village visit with his wife to try to determine who caused her afflictions. Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr., and granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. all confessed to being witches. Anthony Checkley was appointed by Governor Phips to replace Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney when Newton took an appointment in New Hampshire.
In the beginning of August, grand juries indicted George Burroughs, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, and George Jacobs, Sr., and trial juries convicted Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, Elizabeth Procter, and John Procter. Elizabeth Procter was given a temporary stay of execution because she was pregnant. Before being executed, George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly, supposedly something that was impossible for a witch, but Cotton Mather was present and reminded the crowd that the man had been convicted before a jury. On August 19, 1692, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard and John Procter were hanged.

Petition for bail of 11 accused people from Ipswich, 1692
In September, grand juries indicted eighteen more people: Ann Pudeator, Alice Parker, Mary Bradbury, Giles Corey, Abigail Hobbs, Rebecca Jacobs, Ann Foster, Sarah Buckley. Margaret Jacobs, Mary Lacey Sr., Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Rebecca Eames, Margaret Scott, Job Tookey, Mary Witheridge, Mary Parker, and Abigail Faulkner Sr. The grand jury failed to indict William Procter, who was re-arrested on new charges. On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead at arraignment, and was subjected to peine forte et dure, a form of torture in which the subject is pressed beneath an increasingly heavy load of stones, in an attempt to make him enter a plea. Dorcas Hoar, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Martha Corey, Mary Bradbury, Mary Esty, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott and Abigail Faulkner Sr. were tried and found guilty. Abigail Hobbs, Ann Foster, Mary Lacey Sr., and Rebecca Eames pled guilty. On August 22, 1692, only eight of those convicted were hanged: Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Martha Corey, Mary Esty, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott, reported called by Salem minister Nicholas Noyes, "Eight firebrands of Hell." Dorcas Hoar was given a temporary reprieve, with the support of several ministers, to make her confession before God. Aged Mary Bradbury escaped. Abigail Faulkner Sr. was pregnant and given a temporary reprieve.
Mather was asked by Governor Phips in September to write about the trials, and obtained access to the official records of the Salem trials from his friend Stephen Sewall, clerk of the court, upon which his account of the affair, Wonders of the Invisible World, was based.
This court was dismissed in October by Governor Phips.

Room No 5

People live on the floor of this toilet in an old derelict building. The smell was so overpowering I just stuck the camera through the window to take this pic.

Room No 3

Route 103

Thirteen times in two weeks, I counted. That is how many times I awoke with a startle, almost rushing up to go check up on the sound that raised me from the dead. Only to find it was my cell phone’s alarm. Yes, that would also be thirteen times I slept through the night. The whole night. Not waking once, not to check why the dogs were barking, nor even to reach to my left and find B by my side; ready to reassure her that I’m ‘onto it’. Those nights I would walk from window to window and check to see that all was okay outside; get back into bed, and forget about getting to sleep until just 5 minutes or so before my alarm went off.

Only, it was Saturday, and I had forgotten to switch the alarm off. What am I to do with myself today? I lay my head back on the pillow and stare at the ceiling. An altogether wonderful feeling rises from somewhere near my toes, and slowly makes it’s way to the side of my brain that deals with the unfamiliar. Time is on my side. I have no one to answer to but myself. Two days to Monday. Two days of freedom.

A nice hot shower soon points the way, and road trip comes out right on top. Above morning coffee and people watching at the mall, washing the car (oh really?) and visiting mother. I dress hurriedly and shove camera, money, cell, and all into my one-by-one (small Student Prince backpack I’ve had for yonks), afraid some other stupid idea might pop into my mind, leaving me stranded. ‘Hurry now’, I urge myself on as I dig into an old box to find my ‘Weekend Getaways” booklet I normally have handy.
No luck! Stuff it; I’ll get on the road and figure something out.

The only clear direction I have is to go south. Well actually Southeast; towards the coast. Harrismith being the goal, and anything further depends on how big the itch becomes. Just after Heidelberg I turn onto the R103, a familiar route to me; having driven it to and from Durban for many years. Every time I took this route I had a different car, driving new model cars for an importer, and notching up almost 200 000 km’s a year. I know the route by heart, and not too surprised when I realise where I am.

Somewhere past Frankfort, next to the N3, I stop at a diner called Makietie, and while sipping on an ice cold beer, the itch wanes to nothing, and no matter how I try to conjure up the images of the road trips of yore; it does not return.

I think the wandering heart is still in me; it just needs to be dug up, a spade-full at a time.

Makietie

'Machismo isn't that easy to wear'

Norman Mailer

January 31 1923 - November 10 2007

The best way for me to do justice to the man that was Norman Mailer is offer you an interview done by Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian. Although I have only read one of his books; The Executioner's Song, as with Hemmingway, It was his life that interested me the most. I've read almost every interview and had alerts posted for any news that popped onto the net about the man.

'Fistfights, headbutts, drunken brawls, attacks on feminism: Norman Mailer's reputation as a bruiser has overshadowed his life - and fuelled his writing. Oliver Burkeman meets the hard man of American letters Tuesday February 5, 2002 courtesy of The Guardian'

"Would you like a drink?" asks Norman Mailer. There was a time when the way that you answered the question might have determined whether he would bother to carry on talking to you at all. Drinking - like writing, fighting and womanising - is a sport he has pursued with reckless force ever since he crashed on to the literary landscape at 25, and it has led to fistfights in the street, headbuttings of hostile reviewers, and a vicious clubbing from a policeman whose car he was trying to hail as a taxi.

Well into his 60s, he stumbled drunk on to stages and television shows, all the time railing against feminism, friends and fellow writers; he famously helped sink his 1969 run at the New York mayoralty with a speech to unpaid campaign aides telling them they were "nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs" who should go fuck themselves.

Now 2 days before his 79th birthday, in the sun-drenched living room of his redbrick house in Provincetown, Cape Cod, with its breathtaking view of sand dunes and the glistening Atlantic beyond, he hurriedly qualifies the question: "Coffee or tea?"

Mailer shares the house with his sixth wife, Norris, a painter and writer, though he has lived here with several of the others. Bright portraits decorate the walls and there are cut flowers everywhere, the remains of a birthday party they threw for a neighbour the night before. If you were to have a drunken brawl here, you would knock over tens of framed photographs of Mailer's nine children and countless grandchildren.


Norris brings tea and profiteroles and then vanishes. The profiteroles don't seem very Mailer, somehow, either. And Provincetown is the last place you might expect to find the leading proponent of machismo in American literature: the vast majority of its population is gay, and the colourful, laid-back cafes and restaurants of Commercial Street, the main seafront road where Mailer lives, are hardly the Brooklyn bars of his young adulthood. There was a time when Mailer was notorious for lunging at those who questioned his heterosexuality; once, his biographer Mary Dearborn records, he beat up a sailor in a Manhattan street because he thought he had questioned the heterosexuality of his dog. But he has lived in Provincetown, on and off, for three-quarters of a century; he writes well here. He is working on another book - two hours' writing in the morning, two in the evening before dinner - but only Norris knows what it's about. "I tell no one about it," he says. "One of the reasons for that is the joy of telling no one about it."
He walks painfully and arthritically, with the aid of two canes; he sits with his back to the sea view because he's had operations on his eyes, he explains, and the strong, pure, Provincetown light bothers him. The pockets of the blue denim shirt encasing his barrel chest are stuffed with several pairs of glasses. He is going deaf. To look at him you might think the fight had gone out of him, but you would be wrong.


Take the whining chorus in the media about Mike Tyson: "As long as I can remember, people have been hating boxing because something in the rational, corporate vision of existence doesn't like people hitting each other," he says, the gravel voice accelerating like an engine. "That's just too brutal. Destroy them spiritually, but don't beat 'em to a pulp."


Some of Mailer's most acclaimed writing captures the choreography of his idol Muhammad Ali in the ring, and he thinks of the sport as an artful safety-valve for male aggression. "The very people who are complaining about the brutality of boxing would be screaming when they got mugged on the street by some of these guys," he says.


Then there's the Enron scandal: "I'm sure those guys in the corporate high-rise said: 'Let's call it End Run, and we're gonna make an end run around that whole stupid fucking money business that's so backward, we're gonna really show them how to make money out of money!' And they did, for a while."


And then, of course, there is the war on terror. War is the subject that made Mailer; in 1945, aged 21, he was drafted to fight in the Philippines, and the novel he wrote on his return, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted him to disorienting celebrity. It is a pounding, unflinching study of men in war; of strength and sadism and masculine rivalry amid the colossal waste of conflict. It was also, according to the Sunday Times, a book that "no decent man could leave... lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it." It was energetically obscene - even though, at the publisher's behest, it was full of "fugs" and "fugging" - and that was what made its heroes heroic, Mailer argued. "What none of the editorial writers ever mentioned," he later wrote, "is that the noble common man is as obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity... was in his humour; his humour was in his obscenity."
Manliness is what is missing from the current conflict, he says: America is behaving like a timorous giant. "What would we think of someone who was seven-foot tall, weighed 350 pounds, was all muscle, and had to be reassured all the time? We would say that fella's a mess!" The sentimental patriotism engulfing the country appals him. "My feeling is that you're patriotic about America if you're obsessed with America because it's a democracy, and its obligation is to improve all the time, not to stop and take bows and smell its armpits and say 'Ambrosia!'"
In the 30 books that followed The Naked and the Dead, machismo was never far from the centre of Mailer's preoccupations. That must lend a special poignancy to growing older and more frail? He laughs, a gritty chuckle. "I'm laughing because I'll be 79 in a coupla days - machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill. But listen: machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead. So I'm quite happy to have machismo behind me now. There are pleasures in being macho, but there are great anxieties. It was a great load to carry. I was never macho enough to enjoy being macho. I don't know. I'd fight if it came to it, but people don't go looking for fights with men my age."


He races through the thoughts as they strike him, compelled to externalise, to confess. It is a compulsion that has been the motivating force behind his writing, generating works of genius and patchy disappointments alike. He has "this habit of exposing himself in all his weakness and all his anxiety", his old foe, the essayist Vivian Gornick, has written. "He freely, happily, repeatedly, confessed to envy, greed, insecurity, raging competitiveness. What is curious is how little affect this confessionalism achieves... the way those sentences are accumulating: that is Mailer's self on the page, and the aggression in them never lets up."


Off the page, his aggression has been just as inexhaustible. So: when did he last headbutt somebody? "It's been a while. A long time. I did - oh, my lord - maybe it was when [the New York/Newsday columnist] Jimmy Breslin wrote about it. That was the best headbutting. Breslin and I butted heads, and a couple of days later he wrote in his column that Norman immediately lost the next two chapters of his novel and he was no longer in possession of his name and address... But there were probably a couple of episodes after that."


The literary feuds are over, too, he says - "they're so very expensive. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only 18 elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." When Tom Wolfe made a clumsy attempt to initiate a new battle a year ago by dismissing Mailer, John Updike and John Irving as "the three stooges" ("it must gall them a bit that everyone - even them - is talking about me") Wolfe told a TV interviewer - Mailer says he couldn't be bothered to respond. "I was laughing. I was thinking, God, he's vulnerable. And the mean side of me thought, if I'd realised how vulnerable he was, maybe I wouldn't have been so nice to him." Nor does he take an interest in the jostlings of younger generations of writers. He doesn't have any literary heirs, he says, and he doesn't care. "You get very selfish about writing as you get older," he says. "You've got only so much energy and you want to save it for your own work. I'm much more interested in being able to do my own work than bringing a wonderful new writer into existence. Because my feeling is that if he or she is truly a wonderful new writer, they're going to come into existence on their own."
For many, though, the writerly feuds - and even the writing - were a distraction from the matter for which Mailer has incurred more opprobrium than any other in his career as a literary celebrity: his battles with feminism. "In the 1970s," Gornick recalls, "women in their 20s and 30s knew what he meant, at whose permanent expense 'feeling alive' was to be had. And when we said so, out loud and in print, Mailer turned vicious. The anti-feminism was pathological, a thing we turned away from in fear as well as rage."


It was never entirely clear from Mailer's goading public pronouncements - most famously, that "all women should be locked in cages" - just how much he was in earnest, and whether they mattered less if he wasn't. Today, he pleads misquotation, misunderstanding, and the bandwagon-jumping of publicity-seeking feminists.
I was on a television show once with Orson Welles, and at a certain point he got very pious about women - Orson Welles, who was married to Rita Hayworth, of all people! And so I made a totally stupid remark. I said, 'Oh, come on, Orson, women are low sloppy beasts'. Now I was going to add, with a great twinkle, and they are also goddesses . But you make a remark like that and you don't get any further. Well, the feminists took over. They used that remark and ran with it. They enjoyed that remark... of course, part of your character is dictated by the nature of your foe, and a lot of those early feminists were just godawful people."


Altogether unexpectedly, he turns out to be a new convert to the works of John Gray: "People have been known to say that men and women come from different planets, and were landed here, and that to me is as reasonable a hypothesis as an other."


Mailer's rhetorical jousting made telegenic entertainment - but there was something else. In 1960, at 4am, drunk and stoned after an argumentative party, Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele, twice, in the back and chest with a pair of scissors. He only narrowly missed her heart. Adele did not press charges and Norman's literary friends rallied round; he spent 17 days in a psychiatric ward and got a probationary sentence. The couple did not separate for the best part of a year. Nobody in his circle seems quite to have addressed the incident at all, and the same seems to have happened when his fourth wife, Beverley Bentley Mailer, said he had physically attacked her, too. Uncomfortably, the episodes seems to have been swiftly filed away under Norman Being Norman, as if they were another spat with Gore or a barroom fistfight.
Forty-two years after the first incident, Mailer is certainly not going to let introspection disrupt the patrician calm which has settled over the Provincetown house. "It's a long time ago, and you really might say the worst elements of it have been digested over the years - by me, I mean. I can't speak for Adele. It's our children who suffered with it more than we did, when people whisper about it. All right, I deserved [condemnation], but it's them carrying the weight. Everyone alive carries the weight. It's a dull bruise. You don't go around fingering it."
What would the young Mailer, the 25-year-old bruiser, make of the 79-year-old patriarch, I ask. The explosive gritty laugh returns. "Hahaha! It's rank speculation. You think that's a good question? It's not a good question! Rank speculation is useless! It's like asking what would I do if I'd been a bathing beauty or a whale! A dolphin! A mountain climber! It's not a question I'd care to answer." But, of course, he has had an idea and he has to get it out. "At 25 I was terribly critical of my literary betters because they weren't doing enough. So I probably would be angry at me: why isn't Mailer doing this, why isn't Mailer doing that?



Dissatisfaction with the things I haven't done. Not with the things I have done."

The fool in the Rain

I met you at the gate
I touched your face
And my heart skipped
A beat

Your lips so soft and warm
And I prolong the touch
For as long as I could

How could I be
such a fool, to stand
alone in the rain

When I could be
Cosy and warm
in the arms of
the one I love.

When one lives together with a person for so long,
and the respect and love they deserve, dissolve into
fits of anger and despair. The only thought that
Crosses your mind is to get out as soon as is
Possible. If only for you to stop behaving like
A child and spare each other the endless tirades.

And now I find myself having left and gone my own way.
Can you imagine how much I miss her?

I’m just the fool in the rain..

The Fugitive

So far so good we still living today

But we don't know what tomorrow brings

In this crazy world

People dying like flies every day

You read about it in the news

But you don't believe it

You'll only know about it

When the man in the long black coat

Knocks on your door

'Cause you're his next victim

As you are living in

Living in this crazy world

Leaders starting wars anytime they want

Some for their own rights,

Some for fun and their own glory letting people die for the wrong that they do

Oh it's painful come on now little boy

Say your prayers before you sleep

Little boy went down on his knees

And he said:"Oh Lord Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

And if I die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take."

'Cause he's living in this crazy world

Oh Lord

Living in this crazy world

R.I.P.

Lucky Dube

1964 - 2007

The shining star of African Reggae

Here is wisdom..

“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

Revelation 13:18

I opened my blog yesterday morning to find that I’ve had 6666 visitors since May 2005. I had a sudden and frightening sense of hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. But since the feeling is equated to the number 666, it soon passed, and I decided to look into the myth and superstition surrounding the ‘mark of the beast’.

In reality the number 666 never really referred to the Devil, but instead lends itself to other less sinister interpretations.

In Hebrew writings the number 666 refers to the Roman Emperor Nero, whose name written in Aramaic, was valued at 666, using the Hebrew numerology of gematria, a manner of speaking against he emperor without Roman authorities knowing.

Old Testament

The number 666 appears several times in the old testament, including in 1 Kings 10:14-22 as the number of talents of gold received by King Solomon in one year. “Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents of gold”.

Scholars such as Dr. Ellen Aitken, Dean of the Faculty of Religious studies at McGill University, have speculated that the reference to this passage was a way of speaking in code about then contemporary figures about whom it would have been politically dangerous to criticize openly.

Interpretations

One interpretation is that 666 encodes the letters of someone’s name or title, identifying the Antichrist.

The German Protestant theologian Ethelbert Stauffer, arguing that gematria had been the most popular form of numerology not only among Jews but also in the Graeco-Roman world (Pergamon, Pompeii), conceived a Greek gematrical procedure to explain the number 666. Judging from the precise information that the Book of Revelation gives about the person behind the number 666, Stauffer concluded that the ‘Beast’ can in general only refer to a Roman Emperor and argued that this Emperor must be Domitian, because he had reigned during the proposed time of origin of the Apocalypse and supposedly was called ‘The Beast’ as a “secret derisive nickname” by Romans, Greek, Christians and Jews.

Some Protestant Bible commentators have equated the ‘Beast’ of Revelation chapter 13 with the Papacy. To this end, the letters of a title of the Pope, accepted as authentic from 18th – 16th century, Vicarius Filii Dei, are summed to total 666 in Roman numerals. The earliest extant record of a protestant writer on this subject is that of Professor Andreas Helwig in 1612 in his work Antichristus Romanus. The title was contained In the Donation of Constantine a forged document of Emperor Constantine the Great, by which large privileges and rich possessions were conferred on the pope and the Roman Church. Although occasionally found in Catholic publications as late as the 19th century, today the title is repudiated by the Vatican (Surprised?)

Mark of Commerce

Futurist Christian eschatology typically holds that the “Mark of the Beast” is one way in which the Antichrist will exercise power over the Earth during the period of Tribulation, because of the prophetic statement in Revelation 13:16-17 that “the Beast” will require all people to receive the mark (“branded mark or character”) in their right hands or foreheads in order to buy or sell, making survival for those on the run much more difficult. A possible translation of the meaning of the number 666 may be: the number 666 will be the number that all currency will be based upon.

Some support the barcode theory through reference to the three elongated end and middle symbols found in some common barcode symbolisms; they appear identical to the symbol used to represent the number six on the right hand segment of a barcode – 666 is the template from which barcodes are read.

Alternatively, some who take a historical view of the Book of Revelation identify the “Mark of the Beast” with the stamped image of the emperor’s head on every coin of the Roman empire: the stamp on the hand or in the mind of all, without which no-one could buy or sell.


Other interpretations

Seventh-day Adventists believe that the “mark of the beast” (but not the number 666) refers to a future, universal, legally enforced Sunday-worship. “Those who reject God’s memorial of creatorship – the Bible Sabbath – choosing to worship and honour Sunday in the full knowledge that it is not God’s appointed day of worship, will receive the “mark of the beast”.

Iranaeus suggested that the number indicates that the beast is the sum of all apostasy committed over the course of six thousand years. Iranaeus also wrote that 666 refers to the name Lateinos: “Then also Lateinos has the number six hundred and sixty six; and it is a very probable solution, this being the name of the last kingdom of the four seen by Daniel. For the Latins are they who at present bear rule: “I will not, however, make boast over this coincidence”.

Robert Graves suggested that DCLXVI, 666 in Roman numerals, is an abbreviation for the Latin sentence “Domitianus Caeser Legatos Xti Violenter Interfecit”, or “ The Emperor Domitian violently killed the envoys of Christ”.

In Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), the number 666 may be considered mystical and holy and may represent the physical universe.

Martin Luther wrote in a footnote to Rev 13:15-18: “Spirit means/ that it is active/ and not a dead image/ but that it has its rights and offices in its womb. There are six hundred and sixty six years. So long the earthy papacy remains”.

The number 666 is also believed to be symbolic, standing for imperfection. The number seven is interpreted as being a “perfect” or “complete” number based on the fact that it is used frequently in the Bible to signify completeness, for example Psalm 12:6 and the Genesis creation week. Just as six is one short of seven, imperfection is short of perfection, and hence six is interpreted as symbolizing imperfection. Six is repeated three times for emphasis, producing the number 666. (This is similar to Vines Expository Dictionary under “Sixty, Sixty fold,” which states: “The number is suggestive of the acme of the pride of fallen man, the fullest development of man under direct satanic control, and standing in contrast to ‘seven’ as the number of completeness and perfection.

In the writings of the Baha’I Faith, Abdul-Baha states that the numerical value given to the beast referred to the year 666A.D., when the Umayyad ruler Muawiyah I, who opposed the Imamate, arose.

The 6666 martyrs of the Theban Legion

The long-standing tradition of Christian hagiography regarding the Theban Legion – an entire Roman legion whose members had supposedly converted en masse to Christianity and were martyred together, in 286 – gives their number as precisely “six thousand six hundred and sixty six men”, which was not the normal number of soldiers in a Roman legion. This number is similar to the “Number of the Beast” though with an additional digit, but has precisely opposite connotations as the number of highly honoured and revered martyrs for the Christian cause.

And that folks is exactly what my 6666 visitors mean to this blog: Martyrs who suffered at the hands of the great Chihuahua, and who, hopefully will continue to place their needs beneath mine and continue to suffer towards the elusive 12121212 visits, long after my demise.

Title: The Martyrdom of Maurice and
the Theban Legion [c 1580-1582]
(Catholics say: Saint Maurice)

Artist: El Greco [Spanish, 1541-1614]

I raiseth my golden cup, (hic) to you all.
Cheers!

Not quite 15 minutes..

..but better!

Pallida mors (see entry below) received Weekly Choice recognition at Outdoorphoto.co.za for Visual Impact Photography.

I'm just a little bit more than chuffed.

Pallida mors

I am different now

I walk through the dry grass, hearing every crack and swoosh, the sounds distinctly separate, as if hours apart. The patches of green rising from what was burnt stubble only days ago. The most beautiful thing I see.
I lift my head, away from that blissful moment, reach out and start climbing. Rung-by-rung I rise. My body heavy, the strain on my arms feels as if I’m pulling the earth up with me. A thought not so displeasing, if it were possible.

Finally I reach the top. Standing high I shuffle inch-by-inch, closer to the edge. My eyes unable to focus, I close them instead, and try to remember how it felt in the dreams. Much better. A calm feeling descends over me and my ears close, shutting out any distractions from the task at hand.

My senses so acute, it’s as if the shout comes through my skin, from the other side of the world. Prying, clawing, trying desperately for me to stop. I cannot stop, even though primal instinct dictates that I should. I slowly fall forward.

“Please, don’t.”

“I forgive you.”

The strength pulling me back is more powerful than I could ever dream her to be.

Back on the ground, I lie exhausted in her arms. The tears streaming down my face. More tears than I have ever cried in my life.

I’m different now.

The answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything “

I woke on Wednesday last and remembered I have a birthday this Tuesday. You can’t forget your birthday. It’s impossible, because subconsciously we wait for 365 and a quarter day to get stuff for free.

At this age we no longer believe we’re getting free stuff from RCA, Reader’s Digest or Father Christmas. Yes, we still fill in the forms, go to the presentations and kick ourselves when we forget to read the fine print. Secretly however, we put ourselves through pain and torture, so that our birthdays can be all the more special, as we grow older.

This year I decided to take the day off and contemplate the meaning of life. My life.

Instead of finding the answer, I came to the conclusion that I get more rest at work. Especially on a birthday. Phone calls came from my Gran all the way down the family tree and back up to my mother, who forgot that she phoned at 6, and wished me happy birthday again. My Gran turned 87 this year, and after wishing me happy birtday, told me she's dying tomorrow. I told her I'll pray for her, as I do every year and we said our goodbeys.

The dogs knew I was in, so made me aware of every person who passed in the street. There was no rest.

So I decided to put the meaning of my life on the back burner for now, perhaps for revisiting at 43, and popped 300 into the Dvd player.
I especially love the colours in this movie. The subtle sepia tones and pastel colours mix well with the ample doses of blood, and the testosterone-filled dialogue is also quite pleasing. The stop-motion -action scenes are drawn out long enough for the eyes to focus, before slapping your senses with a brutal finality that had my palms sweating. You might think the analysis a tad over-the top, but I immersed myself completely in the film, and apart from the occasional walk to replenish my glass, enjoyed it from start to finish, without interruption.

And then B arrived back from a funeral, left briefly to fetch the midgets, and my day was over.

Hopefully I’ll have the answer for you next year, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

People

A collection of favourite photos I found on the net.
In some way or another they appeal to me.

The Chi-Sepia Effect - aka Dragan

Only the order in which the steps are done is important. The values of each step re: opacity, saturation, hues, sizes etc are near-as-dammit estimations, and your own ‘eye’ should guide you to what you feel is appropriate.
Open a photo in Photoshop. A headshot with some shadow is good to start with. Fit on screen and enlarge once.

I hope you are using Windows, as I do not know the Apple Mac shortcuts.

Step 1. Pour yourself a Whiskey and relax

Step 2.Duplicate layer – Ctrl J
Image-Adjustments-Invert
Go to Layer Window and select Overlay Blend
Adjust Opacity down until you’re satisfied with the result. I found 50-60% opacity to my liking.

Layer – Flatten Layer

The next two steps are critical to the final result and you should really apply a steady hand. They are also the steps that take the most time, so be patient and thorough for the best end-result.

Step 3. Duplicate layer
Select Burn tool in your tool window. (The hand) We’re going to enhance the shadowed areas, like wrinkles and such. The size of your brush depends on the width of the shadow-line. The range should be midtones, and exposure about 13 to 15%.
Using your mouse, brush over the shadowed areas. You will see the result after one or two runs over the same area, and this should give you an idea as to how far you want to ‘push’. If clothing is visible, do the creases as well. The more of the shadowed areas you do the better the final result. If you’ve overdone the Burn, adjust the opacity until you’re satisfied with the ‘look’.

Flatten Layer

Step 4. Duplicate layer – Again
Select Dodge tool from the Tool window. (The lollipop) Now we’re going to enhance the Highlighted areas. Like shiny parts on the forehead, nose and ears, and places where natural or studio lights catch the face. Again touch on the lighted areas of clothing as well. Use Opacity to get the desired level.

Flatten Layer

Step 5. Duplicate Layer
Image-Adjustments-Hue/Saturation or Ctrl U.
Select Colorize
My choice – Hue-35 Saturation 32
Select Softlight Blend in layer window
Adjust Opacity till satisfied
Select contrast and adjust until satisfied.

Flatten Layer

Step 6. Duplicate Layer
Image-Adjustments-Variations
My choice – More Yellow and Darker. Your choice here remains largely your own, but we are leaning towards the Dragan effect, and I’d use the same selections.

Select Hue blend - Adjust opacity if necessary.

Flatten Layer

Step 7. Duplicate Layer
Layer-New Fill Layer – Solid Colour
Make sure your foreground colour is set to Black
Click OK

Bring Opacity down to about 60%
Select Brush from tool window.
My choice – Mode – Colour, Brush 60%, Flow 100%

This is called ‘painting with light’ Use mouse as a brush and brush over the light areas. Let your eye guide you, and if you mess up, just redo.

Flatten Layer

Step 8. Almost there!
Duplicate Layer
Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur
Set Radius to +-45%. Select Opacity and bring down to about 35%.

Select the Eraser in Tool window. Mode – Brush, Opacity - +-50%, Flow – 60%+. Brush on the detailed areas or areas you want to accentuate.

Flatten Layer

Image-Adjustments-Levels
Set levels until you are satisfied.

Step 9. Pour another Whiskey and sit back. You’re either very satisfied with yourself, or need to play over the steps a few more times, until you are happy.
Please publish your first sample, no matter how bad. Each photo is different no matter how well you follow the steps, and that's what I feel makes the Dragan effect so, well.. effective!

This is the one I did while putting the steps to paper. I took the photo in Kimberley a few weeks ago. It was terrible and the light was quite bad, but through Dragan I managed to save a little of the atmosphere.

Chi's Dragan Attempt - The Chi-sepian effect

The Dragan effect is a method of photo manipulation using filters, blends and layers in Photoshop. I’m not sure exactly where the style originated, but Photographer Andrzej Dragan took Sepia toning to a higher level, made it unique and attached his name to it.

I remember my dad coming back from the photographic club, and experimenting for weeks in his little darkroom adjoining the garage. He had photos of similar effect, and the hues and tones in his photographs looked almost animated, which, together with the pastel colours gave his photos lots of ‘character’. I imagine it as the first time I saw the Dragan effect without putting a name to it.

Since going digital and ‘discovering’ Photoshop, a night doesn’t pass where I do not try and personalise an effect of some sort. But, with the initial idea originating from another artist or photographer, it can never be true, and so I continue hoping to replicate what I saw in my father’s darkroom many, many years ago. The images are right here in my mind, but I cannot seem to bring forth the character of those photographs onto my ‘canvas’.

Anyhow, eet kreef asked me to post the steps needed to create the Dragan effect. My attempts are by no means truly Dragan, and certainly much is lost in my interpretation of the steps. I will therefore not insult Andrzej by calling it Dragan, but only Chi’s interpretation of the Dragan effect.

The steps are long and require a lot of patience on your part. Also, please understand that you may not get the desired look immediately, and perhaps not even after many tries. It is necessary that you tweak the steps here and there, depending on the photo that you use. Furthermore, try and stay with the same photo until you feel you have mastered the ‘art’ to some degree.

It is possible to manipulate any photo, but I felt ‘soft light’ photos with varying degrees of light (highlights) and dark (midtones & shadows) work the best. Bright daylight photos are not suitable, nor are very dark photos with very little white areas, for contrast.
I will put the steps together in as easy a workable way as possible and post it tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a sample of what Andrzej did.

Not just another Roadtrip

B and I travelled around the Northern Cape this long weekend. Took more than 400pics. You can sample some of the photos by going to the Roadtrips Link.

More Dragan

I really love the Dragan effect. There's just so much you can do with it. It's a style I've tried to learn for very long, and through snippets here and there on the web, I've been able to create my own style of which I'm quite proud.

Here's a before and after photo of the Dragan effect for comparison.

Experimenting...

The Jim Beam and Iron Brew seem to bring out the best in me, and the resulting 'Art' is good at scaring the midgets as well.

I tried my hand at Draganizing, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

Vortex

This time when the argument started, I went into the Vortex, and came out the other side, bulletproof.

If it were Darker.

A friend of mine once said, when asked why she always wore black, that it was only because there wasn't a darker colour.I still smile when I think how they misunderstood her preference for the dark colour, and naturally asumed that she was either 'troubled' or a Goth. Some wiseass conspirators even rumoured her to be a drug pusher.

In fact she was a very intelligent woman, who had a deliberate affection for those with little education. As if they were playthings, not unlike a cat might toy with a mouse until it has died from pure exhaustion.

Less educated meant anyone silly enough not to understand the benefits of having passed matric with distinction and then continued to pursue a higher education at University. She would never dream of stopping there. After completing her second Honours degree she's currently residing in Paris, having already registered for her next degree at the Sorbonne in 2008. I think of her as I contemplate mainstream society's misconceptions.

But, as much as I'd love to tell you more about this wonderful woman, it is not the subject of the article which I meant to write. It's only a drifting thought as I ponder the subject of my article.

And what I do wish to write about is society's misconception of certain mediums of Art and the witch hunt that plays itself out by the damning to Hell, all those who create visual and sometimes tangible evidence of mankinds' darker psyche.

Bear with me as I attempt to offer my insight into society's fears of, and the alternate trebulation experienced by, 'Underground Artists'. I could start my analysis by offering Graffitti artists as an acceptable entry into underground art, but I'd rather dunk you in fire and dose you off with some petrol, so that we can jump right in with the shock factor.

As a means to a start I offer you an illustration by renowned underground artist Trevor Brown.

After the innitial shock, you might have taken a more analytical look, and perhaps drawn some conclusion as to what message (if any) the artist wished to convey. I for one, have not read the background on Trevor Brown, nor have I analysed his work in great detail. I merely wish to use a medium of underground art to get my point across.

Yes, my eye was drawn to the fact that the girl is very young and surrounded by an assortment of sex toys and an enormous amount of phalic symbols. I tried to make word of the different letters and numbers, and then tried to 'get the message' as you might have (if you're still here).

The one-eyed Mickey Mouse obviously (to me) refers to the one-eyed monster, the penis. At the same time he's wearing a condom portraying safe sex. weird? A Teddie Bear in a childs arms is normally associated with the safety factor/zone, as it might be with a child that has a favourite blanket or pillow. But here, I see the Pink Teddie as a symbol of molestation, disguised within the 'comfort zone' of the child. The lollipops and sweets can be a form of payment to silence the child or even to assure future 'playtimes'. Even the ejaculating penis is disguised as a jack in the box. A toy, perhaps to comfort the child with the thought that it's just a game.

I could continue and analyse every aspect of the illustration and come to a conclusion that might differ from your view, had you approached the subject matter from a different angle. But, if you had continued to read up to here and even analysed the illustration yourself, the innitial shock might have left you by now and you're looking at the picture more objectively. A few might still be shocked, maybe even more so because of the in-dept analysis.

The message that I'm trying to convey, is that if we take time to analyse or even get to know something better(however evil that might be), we are better able to have an objective view of our surroundings and the people we come into contact with every day. It's an educational journey that hopefully gives us a better understanding why there are both evil, and wonderful people in the world. The name of the above illustration is Nursery Crime. Changes your perception a bit, doesn't it?

However, I leave you with the sad and honest truth.

Girl with machine gun

Children go to war everyday, they're molested, killed and maimed. If we continue to walk around with our eyes closed to the realities of the world, we might never know, and never act against the true evil.

Do not condemn me as evil, just because I made you see.

Pixi Girl

My Photographic Inspiration - Final

Paul Politis

I guess I enjoy Paul Politis' photography because he explores so many different subjects and mediums. As an amateur it's inspirational, because I'm yet to find a niche for myself, a happy medium that I'm comfortable with in the photographic world. He's black and white photos seem lively almost, and the colour photos, pastel-like, and never too bright.

Looking at his photos have a calming effect on me, because they're never controversial or too in-your-face.

Here are a few of my favourites. Please visit his site for many more great Photographs.

And then I get my inspiration from a whole world of photographers at Hardcore Street Photography. Visit the Flickr site via my links on the right. The best site for candid street photography. My favourite subject.

My Photographic Inspiration #3

Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Father of Photojournalism and 'street style' photography

I would do the man a great injustice if I were to ramble off my thoughts about one of the greatest photographers the modern world has known. Few famous, and not so famous photographers can tell you with a straight face that they have not heard of the man.

Here is one article I found at Photo-seminars that touches on every aspect of this photographer's life and his work. It encapsulates all that I could wish to write about Mr. Cartier-Bresson. A modern hero.

Here are my favourite photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.







Next : Paul Politis - Alive and cooking!