Peter Solarz
RMH
occasionally subtle
NASA
JVL
cherry valley forever
Product Placement
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
roma★
taylor price
we're not kids anymore.
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Kaledo Art
Game of Thrones Daily
⁂
art blog(derogatory)
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia
seen from Indonesia
seen from Jordan
seen from Kyrgyzstan
seen from France
seen from Brazil
seen from Austria
seen from Spain
seen from Chile
seen from Taiwan
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Brazil
seen from Brazil
@randomactsofhistory
Japanese Tobacco Box, circa 18th Century
What makes this box particularly ironic is that at the time, no one knew tobacco’s connection with cancer and ill-health. It was just an interesting box that happened to be for holding tobacco!
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Fresco of a fisherman from the Minoan period, ca. 1600 BCE, in Akrotiri, Santorini, Greece. The settlement at Akrotiri was a major spot for sea travel and trade, as it was in between Cyprus and Crete, the core of Minoan culture. A volcanic eruption destroyed much of the island in the 1500s BCE; the climate change resulting from the eruption is suspected to have begun the decline of Minoan civilization.
Merry Xmas Everyone!
Today it’s not uncommon for people to abbreviate the word “Christmas” into Xmas, something I am certainly guilty of when I mail out dozens of Xmas cards out to my friends and family. Some others are irked by this abbreviation, claiming that it’s part of some plot by secularists to take Christ out of Christmas. In 2009 Rev. Franklin Graham, son of televangelist Billy Graham stated,
“for us as Christians, this is one of the most holy of the holidays, the birth of our savior Jesus Christ. And for people to take Christ out of Christmas. They’re happy to say merry Xmas. Let’s just take Jesus out. And really, I think, a war against the name of Jesus Christ.”
This brings up a good question, how did X become an abbreviation for Christ? What is the truth of the matter?
In the earliest days of Christianity Greek was a common language in the Roman Empire, and many of the first Christians had a Hellenic or Hellenistic heritage. In the Greek alphabet Christ was spelled “Χριστος” which many Christians shortened to merely “X” or “XP”. Since Christianity was frowned upon in the Roman Empire at best, and actively persecuted at worst, both symbols became a secret code used by Christians to identify each other, much like the popular “Jesus Fish”. Eventually “XP” was merged into one symbol called the Chi Rho, which also became popular.
In 312 AD Roman Co-Emperor Constantine was fighting a civil war against his rival, Co-Emperor Maxentius for control of the Roman Empire. On October 27th, the armies of Constantine and Maxentius faced off at the Milvian Bridge for a final showdown. On the night before the battle, Constantine received a vision from God telling him to have his soldiers paints a Heavenly divine symbol on their shields. That symbol was the Chi Rho. Or maybe not, it could have been a similar symbol called a staurogram, the sources don’t agree. Anyway, Constantine’s army won the battle the next day, Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire with Constantine becoming the first Christian Roman Emperor. Or so the story goes, historical evidence suggests Constantine made the whole “heavenly symbol” thing up after the fact for propaganda purposes.
Regardless, the Chi Rho or became an official symbol of the Roman Empire and the later Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Today it is still used by the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Chruch, and many Protestant denominations. Use of the Chi Rho as an abbreviation for Christ continued throughout the Middle Ages. Then in the 16th century English scribes and writers began to use X as an abbreviation not only for Christ, but for anything with Christ in it. Christmas became Xmas, Christians became Xtians, even names like Christopher and Christine became Xtopher and Xtine. Hence why Christina Aguilera sometimes goes by the names Xtina. The use of the word Xmas especially became popular during the 18th and 19th century as a way for rich nerds to show off how they know their Greek. At the time cool people studied classical Greek. Today the tradition continues, a tradition which comes in handy when you have dozens Xmas cards to mail out.
Things that have killed an English Monarch
Unknown
Murder
Tummy troubles
Unknown
Unknown
Murder
We're not sure
Unknown
Same dude as We're not sure
Assassinated on the toilet
Jaundice
It's a mystery
Too much alcohol
Banishment and strokes
Arrow to the eyeball
A saddle
Old age
Too many lamprey eels
That bitch John
Accidental crossbow bolt
Dysentery
Old age again
Dysentery again
Untimely mystery
Stroke
Starved by bullies
Some nasty disease
Dysentery again again
Murder most foul
General ill health
Murder (not by Richard III I'll fight you on that)
Died on the battlefield
Tuberculosis
So so so many health problems
Fatal illness
Cancer
Old age
Dysentery again again again
Beheaded
Kidney problems
Brain hemorrhage
Smallpox
Pneumonia
Stroke again
Stroke again again
Thoracic aortic dissection
Dementia
Obesity related conditions
Old age
Old age
Heart attack
Morphine and cocaine injections
Laryngeal cancer
Lung cancer
SHE'S STILL KICKIN FOLKS
This is my sweet baby chuncky monkey. Who knew you could love something so small so much ❤❤❤💕 #breastfeedingmom #breastfeeding #babyboy #3monthsold #EzekielThomasHendricks #littlelove https://www.instagram.com/p/B5jTlHHgpxn/?igshid=17whrekj3clac
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“Pope St. Leo the Great died on Nov. 10, 461. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XIV in 1754. A large collection of his writings and sermons survives, and can be read in translation today.”
Source: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint.php?n=651
62 years ago today Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. became the first African American general in the United States Air Force. He retired in 1970 as lieutenant general. He published an autobiography in 1991 titled “Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American: An Autobiography”
10 Things I Tell Myself When I Don’t Want To Study
1. You are very lucky and privileged to have access to almost unlimited knowledge and you should appreciate that.
2. Be one of those rare people who step over their insecurities and succeed.
3. You will know what to do as soon as you start. Ideas never appear from inactivity.
4. Make yourself proud.
5. It’s not supposed to be easy. Nothing good ever is.
6. One hour every day doesn’t feel much but its 365 hours a year. You can’t not succeed after so much work.
7. If you give up now, you’ll have to return to this later anyway but from the very beginning.
8. Maybe you think you can never find something to use your skills and mindset for. But if you continue investing in what matters to you, it will find its way out there.
9. Every moment you thought your fears would suppress you has become the time you made it.
10. Make yourself proud.
Needed reminders. Knowledge is the best path to take.
It is so common for things to get removed and thrown away seasonally in US cemeteries. Most of the cemeteries I've gone to even have big trashcans filled with flowers and wreaths and stuff people have put out. I rubs me the wrong way sometimes, but it is really typical. And yeah, having a bulldozer in an active cemetery is pretty par for the course.
we have entire areas meant for trash, too, but I have never seen anyone else throwing things out that the people taking care of their own loved ones’ graves - unless it was a lot of broken glass after storm, or trash people left on the paths.
the way our cemetries look and are… “planned”… there is no way for any heavy machinery to get even close to a grave, unless the graveyard is brand new and just a field for now.
In the USA, a lot of the flowers left at graves tend to be the artificial kind, which are left until they get faded and ragged, and then often the cemetery caretaker will go around with some sort of mechanized vehicle and a wagon behind it, collect all of them, and throw them away.
I find artificial flowers at cemeteries rather wasteful and distasteful myself, and kinda defeating the whole ephemeral point, but I suspect I’m in the minority in the USA.
It’s not uncommon to see heavy machinery leveling big hills to expand a cemetery, but I’ve not seen any save for a lawn mower in the middle of one.
I suspect that it varies place to place in the USA. Some places I’ve been seem to mostly have sort of flat grave markers that you could drive over. Like this.
But in my area, the classic raised gravestones seems to be just as popular, and you can’t really drive machines over those.
our graveyards can barely fit people - dead or alive - let alone any machinery, other that lone trucks driving through the main alley, hearses, and wheelbarrows pushed by gravediggers.
and taking care of old plastic trash I can kind of understand - I wish it was the case here, more often, just as I wish ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS weren’t a thing at all, especially not at cemeteries - but the discussion was more about what this post mentioned, so just… taking decorations and glass things off of graves.
the markers give me shivers, just as the sheer thought of stepping over someone’s grave.
I am VERY much with you on the artificial flowers thing, and I hate them doubly at cemeteries.
I’m with you on the markers too, to be honest.
And yeah. It’s always sorta sat with me wrong to have something that you put there on your loved one’s grave removed because the groundskeepers didn’t like it or someone else thinks they’re unsightly.
so the taking is actually a widespread practice?
oh no.
No wonder that country is so haunted.
There’s an odd obsession in the USA to have cemeteries resemble large public parks rather than, y’know, cemeteries.
Here’s a pic of a cemetery in my area.
Here’s another.
A third.
All three of these are less than five miles from where I sit right this moment.
Note the wide expanses of neatly clipped grass and rows of headstones without anything on them save for perhaps one bouquet of flowers (probably fake)? That seems to be the American Ideal of a cemetery and I have NO clue why. Deviate from this and well-meaning meddlers will take it upon themselves to ‘tidy up’ all those unsightly vases and bottles of beer or plates of food, and probably file a complaint against you.
You’re correct on all counts. No wonder our cemeteries are haunted as shit.
I wonder… your death culture aims for Preservation (which I think all here agree is… bad) and you do not tend to reuse grave plots too much..
there’s so many of you and you waste so much space on those vast empty fields, how do you manage to fit your dead? do you keep making new huge cemeteries? buying more land?
It does. There’s a huge disconnect between us and death, and most people are terrified of it and aim to ‘preserve’ and then pretend like it never happened at all. If you visit the grave of a family member more than once a year, you’re viewed as a little odd.
(There’s a wonderful youtube channel called “Ask a Mortician” run by Caitlin Doughty, a mortician who does a lot of very good work in trying to re-connect people with the death process and make it less sterile and frightening. She’s written two very excellent books.)
As to the second; yeah, pretty much. We’ve got a lot of space, and I mentioned earlier leveling hills for new cemetery land. Basically the attitude is pretty much “Just keep making new huge cemeteries. Buy some more land, level anything on it, it’s cemetery now.”
If you mentioned re-using a grave, most people around here would be outraged.
There’s only a very few places where they tend towards more sensible land use, such as New Orleans, which do have family crypts and re-used graves.
The only thing I’d like to add is that as a Mexican American who still practices a lot of our traditions, it really is a beautiful sight to see when all of the (yes, fake) flowers are covering the grounds of our ancestors.
But you want to know why we use fake flowers? In south Texas, that is the only thing that will kind of remotely stay put for more than a day. Those flowers they sell in stores would shrivel up within a few hours because guess what- it’s a desert. Literally.
And besides, the flower arrangements and bouqets and wreaths we make are directly reminiscent of our Day of the Dead decorations. They’re made to be vibrant and gorgeous and full of life (just how we remember our dead)! They’re made to withstand the sun.
I know this isn’t the norm in most American cemeteries but we also do go and have picnics in the cemeteries. We go and bring bluetooth speakers to blast the deceased’s favorite music, we bring meals and lawnchairs and umbrellas for the sun and we spend the day celebrating their life and love. So I don’t think that’s ‘wasteful’
I think we have a very different idea of fake flowers then - what we criticise are the ugly plastic flowers that people put on graves (very often out of laziness) and then forget about them completely, letting that plastic mess get dirty, ruined, and then just left to be cleaned by someone else or mix with soil.
and these are, inherently, wasteful, and not the example your brought up.
(I generally think that all plastic decorations are bad - especially aware of what our environment is going through - but Polish tradition uses glass and plastic ornaments too (mainly znicze and vases) and I recognise it is important culturally - if only we could learn to pay more attention to how we source the plastic and how we get rid of it)
and while I agree that graveyards should be better organised and have more space - for families who actually visit the place and spend time there - the vast field-like empty American cemeteries seem… lonely, and sad, and rather a waste of great plot of lands where now grass gets mowed and any life is discouraged.
Goodness knows I’d be the last to argue that American culture isn’t uncomfortable with death and decay and whatnot, but I would posit that one of the reasons that America does Halloween so hard is that it is our big death festival. We deal with it in ways that are, of course, deeply American: buying stuff, adding sex appeal where it didn’t need to be, and engaging with a tradition that originally belonged to one (1) immigrant culture and blowing it up so that everyone can join in without any requirements of background cultural knowledge or barriers for participation (cf. St. Patrick’s Day).
As for the vast, park-like open spaces of an American cemetery… damn if it ain’t American. We’re a nation that has a Daniel Boone-esque worship of the concept of everyone having their own private space. This entire damn country is a melting pot of generations upon generations of immigrants coming here to get land and physical space that was theirs and which they can call their own. It’s so hard-wired into our culture’s DNA that even today, the concept of the American yard (as opposed to the quintessential English garden) arguably still carries the echoes of a generations of land-hungry peasants. “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, upon their own immaculate lawn, next to their own barbecue, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4, also quoted by George Washington and so alluded to in Hamilton). Is it any surprise that we give our dead such a quintessentially American expression of what “home” should be? It’s a waste of land, arguably, but the whole point of America was that we have a lot of it. Anglophone Canada also seems to have a similar approach to the use of space for cemeteries (I have no idea what they do in Quebec).
The visual aesthetic of the dominant spiritual culture in the U.S. (and much, though not all, of Canada) is Protestantism, right? There’s a reason they had Catholicism as a theme at the Met Gala, and not Protestantism. And American Protestantism in particular is a design aesthetic that generally doesn’t do curlicues and any visual that could be described by words like “ornate”. The divine is approached in spaces that are uncluttered and clean. Even at the most batshit extremes of megachurch evangelical insanity, the visual aesthetic is still essentially what you’d get if a bunch of Puritans had access to beige paint. So of course this aesthetic is applied to cemeteries. You can describe them as “clean” or “sanitized”. You can say either “peaceful” or “lonely”. Depends on your context, yk?
I was in Poland for the first time only a few weeks ago (and @bachaboska now you know why I was so fascinated by the cemeteries), and I’d punch myself in the face before I passed judgement on another culture’s burial practices, but I can report that my knee-jerk, illogical, marrow-deep, instinctual, reaction to all the lanterns and flowers and the close quarters was very much an “Oh no! It’s so cluttered and crowded! They barely have room for trees! It must be so unpleasant to walk around all that.” I cannot overstress how much the following was a culturally-driven snap judgement that I do not in any way believe: but it felt disrespectful.
American cemeteries sure do use a lot of land, from a utilitarian perspective, but pretty much all our cultural values are focused on this one thing that we do when actively engaging with death and loss. When faced with the single greatest anxiety in mortal existence, we’re gonna give grandma a burial plot that looks like a suburban idyll.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the cemeteries of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, helping my mother catalogue every last grave for preservation. (A lot of them were quite old and deteriorated, so it was a job to read them all and keep the records alive.) We called it cemetery stomping.
American cemeteries vary a lot, but @tuulikki‘s picture of the cemetery plot as a suburban idyll is spot-on. The earlier post that mentioned re-using graves short-circuited my brain, which could not even compute such a thing. Still can’t, actually, not that that’s a commentary on the practice for people who do it.
America is so mind-bogglingly large. You have no idea. I can drive for an entire day and get to the next state over. It took me four days of straight driving, switching drivers constantly so we didn’t have to stop to sleep, to drive across this country when I moved to the West Coast. I think our relationship with space is a lot like Europeans’ relationship with history; it’s omnipresent, stitched into the cultural fabric, and completely incomprehensible to other cultures who don’t have it.
I love walking through big park-like cemeteries. I meet all kinds of new (dead) people and learn a little of their stories. You can put a lot together from dates and names and what people chose to have etched into their grave markers. I can see how they can look lonely, but they’re also a really peaceful place to retire to when you’re done with this world, and a great place to go for a meditative walk. I love a lot of different kinds of cemeteries, frankly, but these are mine.
That’s a really interesting addition, and you made me realise something that hadn’t occurred to me before. I sort of have been working on a theory that having these spaces be so sanitised and clean might suppress the ability to just fall down and start keening and sobbing and going through all the ugly mess that I, personally, have needed to do when going through loss. But that’s me. That’s what I would want. I was baptised Irish Catholic and am polytheistic af in general and Norse pagan in particular. So standard American cemetery culture is only maybe 60% tailored to my needs. That theory of mine is already an etic interpretation, lmao 😂 If I was a true WASP it’s entirely possible that those cemeteries would fully meet my emotional and spiritual needs. I come from the segment of America that probably wants its ashes scattered in [insert place of significance here], which is a-whole-nother kettle of funerary rites and death customs.
Human culture is so fucking cool
My sources are elsewhere because I’m about to go to sleep but according to my historic preservation and Death in German Culture classes*, American cemetaries began as park-like spaces to facilitate people visiting the graves of their loved ones. They’re not a sanitised escape from death, according to early American convention, but rather a pleasant spot for people to feel calm and comfortable mourning or remembering. Americans being as spread out as we tend to be, one reason you see wide rows is so that carriages, which you needed to use to get to the cemetary, had someplace to go. You were meant to come right up to the grave and have space to really spend time.
We have different space needs today, but you still see cemetaries you can drive through for similar reasons- the car has to go *someplace* and being able to drive as close to the grave as possible makes this accessible for a greater number of people.
I’m also uncomfortable with the idea of re-using graves, by the way! I’d never heard if it and it makes me wonder- and I swear I’m not trying to be rude here- how long must a person be dead before they don’t matter enough to deserve their own grave? Must the body be fully decomposed and, so to speak, have vacated on their own? Bodies do that, although how long it takes is variable. Or are they otherwise disposed of after a period of time? If your culture practices this, no judgement and you’re probably comfortable with it, but I feel weird about the idea of moving a body (less weird about simply re-using the space after decomposition, somehow).
Probably more cemetary stories tomorrow, I enjoy cemetaries a lot.
Precinct of Amun-Re
The royal touring party that accompanied “Bertie” (Albert), Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, to Egypt during 1861-62.
Photo: Francis Bedford
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Luxor Temple
An archaeological dig under way at the Ancient Egyptian Luxor Temple complex on the east bank of the Nile, Egypt, circa 1955.
Belgian colonial officials conduct a ceremony dedicating a statue of Belgian King Albert I in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), 1938. Albert’s predecessor, Leopold II, had presided over one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history, killing millions. Albert (who was not the direct ruler of the Congo as Leopold had been; the Belgian parliament had stripped the royal family of its colonial possessions) did try to visit Congo and make a few modest reforms, but the Belgian colony remained a place where education and material assistance for the native population were rare.
{WHF} {HTE}
“The righteousness of the blameless makes their paths straight, but the wicked are brought down by their own wickedness.”
— Proverbs 11:5 NIV
“A Manifesto by the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective in Radical History Review 131” by Su Lin Lewis https://link.medium.com/yYdebtCa2X
"we discuss the need for a collaborative approach to histories of decolonisation that move away from interstate diplomacy, focusing on the realm of non-state actors and transnational networks...the possibilities of digital humanities and open collaboration with both academic and nonacademic participants across the world."
Interesting read, recomended to read.
Egyptian boat model, ca. 2000 BC
In Ancient Egypt, it was a common custom to place models of boats in the tombs of kings and nobles, particularly during the 11th, 12th and 13th Dynasties.
This model was found in Tomb 868 of the 12th Dynasty necropolis at Beni Hasan and is nearly 4000 years old. The mast and sail were missing upon discovery, but have been replaced by replicas based on those belonging to other models of boats of the same date, which have since been found at Thebes. Now in the Science Museum, London.
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Temple of Ramesses II
The four 20 meter-high statues of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II at the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, Egypt, 1964. Work is due to begin on the relocation of the temples to a site clear of the rising waters of the Nile caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
The San Francisco Examiner, California, November 16, 1933
