Short & Sweet Treats discussion
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great picture Jen. I wonder why there is a smaller person on the second row of the pyramid?
LOL, it's a woman, Laura :-) And Jen, I LOVE that graphic--thanks!
I'm reading a fascinating book Great Barrier Reef by David Doubilet. He talks about the box jellyfish, which I'd never heard of. Here's what National Geographic says:"The infamous box jellyfish developed its frighteningly powerful venom to instantly stun or kill prey, like fish and shrimp, so their struggle to escape wouldn’t damage its delicate tentacles. Their venom is considered to be among the most deadly in the world, containing toxins that attack the heart, nervous system, and skin cells. It is so overpoweringly painful, human victims have been known to go into shock and drown or die of heart failure before even reaching shore. Survivors can experience considerable pain for weeks and often have significant scarring where the tentacles made contact.
Box jellies, also called sea wasps and marine stingers, live primarily in coastal waters off Northern Australia and throughout the Indo-Pacific. They are pale blue and transparent in color and get their name from the cube-like shape of their bell. Up to 15 tentacles grow from each corner of the bell and can reach 10 feet (3 meters) in length."
Doubilet warns strongly about these deadly creatures--but then says the main protection is PANTYHOSE! "If you're planning on summer adventuring in a locale known for jellyfish—surfing in Australia perhaps?—you can protect yourself from jellyfish stings with the most unlikely of tools—pantyhose."
http://lifehacker.com/5560147/use-pan...
However, I'm sure most people might prefer this instead:
http://www.stingersuits.com/
These warning signs are all over, plus if stung, you should rinse (NOT rub) with vinegar.
I was stung by a jelly fish while snorkeling in the Bahamas, fortunately the first aid station was equipped with a spray bottle of vinegar. I'm so glad it was a small jelly fish, I can't imagine the pain involved with a larger one leaving its imprint on more skin.
Jen, I won't post the picture--but at this site, the wounds to a 10 year old girl are awful: http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/deadly-j...The scariest part of that article to me was this:
"The slippery stingers normally reign terror over two summer months in far north Queensland waters, but times are changing. "Thirty, forty, years ago the length of the season was a month and a half. Now it's about 5-6 months and it's increasing .. as water temperature goes up," Seymour says.
Scientists say a further half a degree rise in the ocean temperature will see the tentacle trouble make its way south threatening tourist playgrounds such as the Gold Coast."
Yet another side effect of climate change!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scho..."The School of Athens" is one of the most famous paintings by the Italian renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1510 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate with frescoes the rooms that are now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
"The School of Athens" shows the greatest philosophers, scientists and mathematicians of classical antiquity. Plato and Aristotle, the Greek philosophers that were considered most important, are standing in the center of the composition at the top of the steps. Plato is pointing up, since he believed the "Truth" lay in his World of Forms, grasped only by the mind. Aristotle is pointing out; he held that truth lay in the study of THIS world of the senses. The two main threads of philosophy descend from these men--Plato's "idealism" and Aristotle's "materialism".
The Wikipedia article identifies more of the figures; there are several youtube entries about "The School of Athens" as well.
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Hmm, Ashley--I always run things like this through snopes.com, where they have a detailed article on all the lions used in the MGM logo. An excerpt from that article says:"Simply put, none of the several lions filmed by MGM for use in their logos was involved in incidents that killed their trainers. All of those animals were handled by professional trainers who were well known in show business circles and whose deaths in any lion-mauling attacks would have been prominent news."
http://www.snopes.com/movies/other/mg...
Snopes.com is an excellent site for debunking some of these "urban legends". Another excerpt from the article says that the "claim about the original MGM lion's having "killed its trainer and two assistants" the day after he was filmed for the first MGM logo was promulgated by Factropolis.com, one of a number of sites whose raison d'être was passing off fictional factoids as real information. This claim is clearly not true, as the trainer of Slats, the lion first used by Goldwyn Pictures in 1917 (and subsequently by MGM) was Volney Phifer, a prominent animal trainer who long outlived Slats and passed away in retirement in the 1970s."
Sad that people actually invest time and energy into spreading such rumors.
So glad for sites like Snopes and Fact Check.
Me too! One of my good friends told me once that Mars was coming close enough to earth that it would be the size of the moon! Snopes unveiled the truth--and she hasn't forwarded me anything else without checking there first. Place like Facebook perpetuate and spread this dis-information like wildfire :-(
Thank you Julia, I will have to check Snopes out:)
It's a great source, Ashley--I've become pretty suspicious of anything that "goes viral", and Snopes helps uncover some of these "fictional factoids" :-)
Julia wrote: "Me too! One of my good friends told me once that Mars was coming close enough to earth that it would be the size of the moon! Snopes unveiled the truth--and she hasn't forwarded me anything else wi..."One reason I take many breaks from Facebook!
True, Laura--Steinbeck's son, Thomas, wrote this: "J. Edgar Hoover hated my father with an abiding passion, and believed he was a full-blown Red communist, which, if you knew my father, would be found ridiculous on the face of it. But since J. Edgar had nothing he could pin on Steinbeck, he used his power to encourage the IRS to audit my father's taxes every single year of his life, just to be politically annoying.""John Steinbeck, Michael Moore, and the Burgeoning Role of Planetary Patriotism", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-...
"SAN JOSE, CA (Sept 21, 2010) — Academy Award-winning filmmaker and best-selling author, Michael Moore, has been named the recipient of the Steinbeck Award by the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Moore will formally receive the "In the Souls of the People" award on Thursday, October 14, at 7pm. The Steinbeck award is given to writers and artists whose work captures the spirit of Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes."
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mus...
Jen ƸӜƷ wrote: "Julia wrote: "Me too! One of my good friends told me once that Mars was coming close enough to earth that it would be the size of the moon! Snopes unveiled the truth--and she hasn't forwarded me an..."One of the many reasons I refuse to join Facebook!
Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology) 1835"Ostara, and Easter customs"
"This Ostarâ, like the [Anglo-Saxon] Eástre, must in heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries....
Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian's God....Then, through long ages there seem to have lingered among the people Easter-games so-called, which the church itself had to tolerate : I allude especially to the custom of Easter eggs."
"Eastre, Hymn to the Sun", Brass, 1924 CE
John Duncan Fergusson
The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland
I love the notion of welcoming spring :) Thats my favorite part of Pesach, is the welcome of spring and being grateful of the earth's bounty.
"The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft continue exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Launched in 1977, they each are much farther away from Earth and the Sun than Pluto. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network (DSN). Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away from earth; data from the spacecraft takes 16 hours and 38 minutes to reach Earth. Based on new data from the craft, NASA announced last week that Voyager 1 was nearing the "heliopause," which scientists believe is the border between our solar system and interstellar space, says NASA research scientist Eric Christian in Greenbelt, Md.
In about 200,000 years or so, one of the craft might come close to another star, Christian says. Though they will lose the power to transmit data back to Earth sometime between 2020 or 2025, both will continue their journey into deep space.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/...
Voyager's Special Cargo: The Golden Record
This image highlights the special cargo onboard NASA's Voyager spacecraft: the Golden Record. Each of the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 carry a 12-inch gold-plated phonograph record with images and sounds from Earth. An artist's rendering of the Voyager spacecraft is shown at bottom right, with a yellow circle denoting the location of the Golden Record. The cover of the Golden Record, shown on upper right, carries directions explaining how to play the record, a diagram showing the location of our sun and the two lowest states of the hydrogen atom as a fundamental clock reference. The larger image to the left is a magnified picture of the record inside.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/d...
The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
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"In 1931, the governor of Hunan province in China banned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because ‘animals should not use human language’."
I remember reading this Laura, struck me as odd, but it's a cultural difference.
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I think it's a cultural difference because other countries that have banned the book, have banned it because of the drug implications. I've never heard of any Western countries banning books because animals were able to talk using human language. I wonder what other books were banned for the same reason.
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LaLaLa Laura wrote: "" When Agatha Christie killed him off, Hercule Poirot was given a full front-page obituary in the New York Times.""People get pretty attached to their literary detectives! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was once forced by public pressure to bring Sherlock back from the dead after killing him in a story :) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ad...
My husband had told me that Doyle never intended for Sherlock to be the hero type, nor was he expecting to write as many stories about him. I believe I recall my husband telling me that Doyle preferred Watson.
Jen ƸӜƷ wrote: "My husband had told me that Doyle never intended for Sherlock to be the hero type, nor was he expecting to write as many stories about him. I believe I recall my husband telling me that Doyle pref..."I think you're right - I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Doyle was sick of Sherlock by the end. Perhaps that's why he kept trying to kill him :)
From PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/essay..."Did Doyle really spend many years writing about a character he ultimately came to dislike? It's a problem that has fascinated many biographers. For an answer, I turned to Daniel Stashower, author of an acclaimed 1999 volume, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
'Conan Doyle felt very strongly that Sherlock Holmes was, as he put it, taking him from better things," said Stashower, who added that Doyle also was exhausted from coming up with the complex plots required for each Holmes short story. "So, there came a time when he decided, for the sake of his health if not for his bank balance, that it was time to kill Sherlock."
Stashower told me the protests depicted in "Murder Rooms" are rooted in fact.
"The public, to put it mildly, was not amused," said Stashower. "The legend goes that black arm bands were seen in London, that a woman approached Conan Doyle on the street and struck him with her umbrella. He got incredible hate mail."
For the Strand magazine, the venue for most new Holmes stories, it was a disaster. Circulation fell off dramatically and for years afterward the publication of Holmes' "death" story was referred to as "The Dreadful Event" around the editorial offices.
Ultimately, Doyle succumbed to the awesome financial offers to resume Holmes' adventures -- and the pleadings of his editors, his friends and even his mother to bring him back alive from Reichenbach Falls. But Stashower has found many indications that Doyle wasn't totally happy about it, at least at first.
One example of Doyle's attitude about Holmes can be seen in his correspondence with the American stage actor William Gillette, who wrote an immensely popular play about Holmes and asked permission to have Holmes get married in the drama.
"Doyle sent him a telegram back that said: 'You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him,'" said Stashower.
However, in his book, Stashower also recounts Doyle's reaction when he first read the text of Gillette's play, which was produced before the author brought Holmes back to life. Doyle's comment: "It's good to see the old chap again."
Youtube has a delightful 11 minute interview with Conan Doyle--love the lilt of his accent :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWjgt...
Thanks Julia! I remembered vaguely, but I love the details of the "legend", the black armbands, the umbrella strike, etc. And thanks for the link to the interview!
Thank you, Julia :)His works are still on my TBR pile. Perhaps now that I finished my latest book, I'll dive into one this evening. :)
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Reason was banned due to an illustration that might encourage kids to break dishes so they won't have to dry them?
No I didn't know that was the reason, very strange...
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I must try this
LaLaLa Laura wrote: ""Voltaire would pretend to faint in order to get rid of guests that bored him."I must try this"
Haha!
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"In 1994, Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton became the only person ever to top television, film, and book charts simultaneously."
Alicia wrote: "LaLaLa Laura wrote: ""Actors who have played Hamlet over the years include Sarah Bernhardt, Ethan Hawke, Keanu Reeves, Frances de la Tour, and John Wilkes Booth." From Interesting Lit"Don't forg..."
I actually just watched this version of Hamlet. Anyone else else get the chills during Hamlet and Gertrude's bedroom scene?
Bobby wrote: "Alicia wrote: "LaLaLa Laura wrote: ""Actors who have played Hamlet over the years include Sarah Bernhardt, Ethan Hawke, Keanu Reeves, Frances de la Tour, and John Wilkes Booth." From Interesting L..."I personally think the Mel Gibson Hamlet is by far the most natural and honest production of the play that has been done on film. He and Glenn Close made that scene so very intense--and Helena Bonham Carter was the most heartbreaking Ophelia I've seen. I always used this version in my classes.
Julia wrote: "Bobby wrote: "Alicia wrote: "LaLaLa Laura wrote: ""Actors who have played Hamlet over the years include Sarah Bernhardt, Ethan Hawke, Keanu Reeves, Frances de la Tour, and John Wilkes Booth." From..."I agree. We actually just finished this film in my Shakespeare class. It was very faithful to the original story line. Do you have a version of Macbeth you would recommend? I own the Orson Welles version.
Bobby, I found this website of the 10 Macbeths on film:"This week news emerged that Michael Fassbender is attached to a new production of Macbeth, to be directed by Snowtown’s Justin Kurzel and with Natalie Portman set to be his Lady Macbeth. It seems like a good move for Fassbender who is, after all, So Hot Right Now and Portman’s reportedly been hoping to play Shakespeare’s ambitious Lady for ages. What’s more, while they’re following in the footsteps of some of the greatest actors of the last century – including several of Fassbender’s fellow mutants – there have been relatively few versions of The Scottish Play onscreen. Here we profile a few of the best…" http://www.empireonline.com/features/...
The one that sounds very interesting is from 1978, with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. "This is not a terribly cinematic outing; it’s more a camera pointed at an almost set-free stage version in order to capture what’s considered one of the great 20th century Macbeths, originally an RSC production staged in the round in a tiny theatre."
McKellen and Dench
The DVD is for sale on Amazon for just $7.69, and I'm ordering it. One of the reviewers posted this:
"Shakespeare's plays, I find, often tend not to come off too well on screen. The essence of these works is the language: it is Shakespeare's blank verse that contains the drama. But all too often, this gets lost on the screen. However, this much acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed by Trevor Nunn, gets it absolutely right. The sets are minimal; the lighting is imaginative, but dark; the camera movements and editing are unobtrusive: nothing distracts from the verse, which - needless to say, given this cast - is beautifully spoken. The costumes are taken from different periods in history, and so do not tie the action down to any particular time; but there is a unity both in design and in purpose.
The atmosphere is intense and claustrophobic from the very beginning. Judi Dench presents a Lady Macbeth who, right from the start, is terrified of the spirits she calls upon to possess her. Ian MacKellen presents us with a figure on the verge of insanity, and possibly beyond: this Macbeth has to convince himself that "all is but toys", for otherwise, he could not go on living with the burden of such guilt. It is terrifying to see these figures descend further into the depths of evil and madness. Somehow, all horror films seem a bit tame after this: the evil does not come from the monster outside, but from the monster within ourselves.
In brief, this is not prettified Shakespeare. If you are looking for spectacle and opulence, it would be best to look elsewhere. But if you are looking for an intelligent reading of one of the great undisputed masterpieces of drama, then you need look no further."
Julia wrote: "Bobby, I found this website of the 10 Macbeths on film:"This week news emerged that Michael Fassbender is attached to a new production of Macbeth, to be directed by Snowtown’s Justin Kurzel and w..."
Thank you so much Julia! I will definitely have to check these films out! I enjoy watching adaptations of Shakespeare to see if they are similar to his original stage version! I usually find that the best adaptations keep in mind the character constructs Shakespeare created. Usually when adapting a play to screen the characters will tell the plot, as they were created originally to be viewed live.
I'd like to see Portman play Ophelia.
Short & Sweet Treats
Books mentioned in this topic
Fifty Shades of Grey (other topics)Hamlet (other topics)
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (other topics)
Deutsche Mythologie (other topics)
Great Barrier Reef (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Daniel Stashower (other topics)Jacob Grimm (other topics)
David Doubilet (other topics)
Henry Beston (other topics)
Yann Arthus-Bertrand (other topics)
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"In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense..."
A wonderful quote, Julia.