Friday, abandoned;

Poveglia  a beautiful Island, I would live there; make it an Island of roses for all the dead and let them rest in

peace for ever!

Poveglia Island is one of many island in the lagoons of Venice, Italy but instead of being a place of beauty, it is eerie, regarded as evil and haunted! Many people like to believe in haunted places, make up stories and add to it to make it more piquant and  interesting.

The dark history of Poveglia Island began during the Roman Era when it was used to isolate plague victims from the general population.  Centuries later, when the Black Death rolled through Europe it served that purpose again.   The dead  were dumped into large pits and buried or burned.  As the plague tightened its grip, the population began to panic and those residents showing the slightest sign of sickness were taken from their homes and to the island of Poveglia.   Men, women, children... all left to die.  It's estimated that the tiny island saw as many as 160,000 bodies during this time.

 The island has become a putrid area indeed.  The soil of the island combined with the charred remains of the bodies dumped there creating a thick layer of sticky ash.  The core of the island is literally human remains that has given the island a loathsome reputation, but appears to be very good for the grapevines that are planted there.
In 1922 the island became home to a psychiatric hospital complete with a large and very impressive bell tower.  The patients of this hospital immediately began to report that they would see ghosts of plague victims on the island and that they would be kept up at night hearing the tortured wails of the suffering spirits.  Because they were already considered mad by the hospital staff, these complaints were largely ignored.

To add to the anguish of the poor souls populating this island hospital, one doctor there decided to make a name for himself by experimenting on his subjects all to find a cure for insanity.  Lobotomies were performed on his pitiable patients using crude tools like hand drills, chisels, and hammers.  Those patients and even the ones who were not privy to the doctor's special attentions were taken to the bell tower where they were tortured and subjected to a number of inhumane horrors.

According to the lore, after many years of performing these immoral acts, the evil doctor began to see the tortured plague ridden spirits of Poveglia Island himself.  It is said that they led him to the bell tower where he jumped, or was thrown to the grounds below.  The fall did not kill him according to a nurse who witnessed the event, but she related that as he lay on the ground writhing in pain, a mist came up out of the ground and choked him to death.  It's rumoured that the doctor is bricked up in the hospital bell tower and on a still night, the bell can be heard tolling across the bay.  The hospital closed down.

For a time, the Italian government owned the island, but it was later sold.  That owner abandoned it in the 1960's and was the last person to try and live there.  A family recently sought to buy the island and to build a holiday home on it but they left the first night there and refused to comment on what happened.  The only fact that we do know is that their daughters face was ripped open and required fourteen stitches.

Today Poveglia is uninhabited and tourism to the island is strictly forbidden.   Every now and then daredevils dodge the police patrols to explore the island, but everyone who has made it there have refused to return saying that there is a heavy atmosphere of evil and they the screams and tortured moans that permeate the island make staying there unbearable.

One report from a misguided thrill seeker who fled the island says that after entering the abandoned hospital, a disembodied voice ordered them, "Leave immediately and do not return."


Rumours are like an avalanche once they are started they can do nothing else but grow. 
A place like this would be THE PLACE for smugglers or for anybody to hide anything.  

Thursday; smell;

Photo Ts

Lignin prevents trees from adopting a weeping habit. Lignin is a polymer that is in its make up closely related to Vanillin. When it is made into paper and kept for years, it breaks down and smells good.  "Divine Providence" seems to have provided second-hand bookshops to smell of good Vanilla, subliminally influencing a hunger for knowledge in us. 

Camilla's Bookshop is a large secondhand/antiquarian bookstore situated in the resort town of Eastbourne.We have over 250,000 books in almost all categories.

Lignin

Chemical Compound

Lignin or lignen is a complex chemical compound most commonly derived from wood, and an integral part of the secondary cell walls of plants and some algae

Formula: C9H10O2,C10H12O3,C11H14O4

The term was introduced in 1819 by de Candolle and is derived from the Latin word lignum meaning wood. It is one of the most abundant organic polymers on Earth, exceeded only by cellulose, employing 30% of non-fossil organic carbon and constituting from a quarter to a third of the dry mass of wood. As a biopolymer, lignin is unusual because of its heterogeneity and lack of a defined primary structure. Its most commonly noted function is the support through strengthening of wood, xylem cells in trees.

Highly lignified wood is durable and therefore a good raw material for many applications. It is also an excellent fuel, since lignin yields more energy when burned than cellulose. Mechanical, or high-yield pulp used to make newsprint contains most of the lignin originally present in the wood. Lignin is responsible for newsprint's yellowing with age.

My dream library; 

courtesy of my favourite painter Jacek Yerka

♥

Wednesday; fascinating;

A book is born;

Enjoy!

Tuesday; orange;

Orange rhymes with Sporange, a botany term  meaning “spore case.”

sporangium 

plural sporangia

 A single-celled or many-celled structure in which spores are produced, as in fungi, algae, mosses, and ferns.

I do like the colour orange in my garden, alas,  I have not that many plants in the colour orange;

This one arrived in my garden,  many years ago, without a name;

Old Tangiers, evokes  a  fiery sundown, a slow tango, cigarette smoke, gin fizz, casual sips, eyes half closed, come to the cinema of a time past...

 

Kwanso, I received more then 30 years ago from a friend in Yamba.

"Starflower" Geranium;

.....always welcome a beautiful sunrise;


©Photos/Text Ts

Monday; sweet...

Mandarin Ice cream;

Ingredients:

A Mandarin tree in the garden;

A simple ice cream churner;

2 Mandarins, juice and  grated peel;
2 fresh eggs from your chooks,
 use 2 eggyolks and keep the egg whites to make meringue.
300 ml cream and 200 ml milk
120 g white caster sugar.

Mix all the ingredients together until smooth, pour into the ice cream churner and churn until thick, around 40 minutes. Freeze, take it out of the freezer 10-15 minutes before serving.

Delicious!

©Photos /Text Ts

Thursday; Cabinet;

Who would not wish for a cabinet like this one?

The Roentgens' Berlin Secretary Cabinet

David Roentgen 1743–February 12, 1807), was a famous German cabinetmaker of the eighteenth century, famed throughout Europe for his marquetry and his secret drawers and mechanical fittings. His work embraces the late Rococo and the Neoclassical styles.

In 1753 his father Abraham Roentgen, who had trained in London in the workshop of William Gomm, migrated to the Moravian settlement at Neuwied, near Coblenz, where he established a furniture manufactory. David learned his trade in his father's workshop, and succeeded to the paternal business in 1772, when he entered into some kind of partnership with the clockmaker Kintzing. At that time the name of the firm appears already to have been well known, at all events in France; but it is a curious circumstance that although he is always reckoned as one of the little band of foreign cabinetmakers and workers in marquetry who, like Jean-François Oeben and Jean Henri Riesener, achieved distinction in France during the last years of the Ancien Régime he never ceased to live at Neuwied, where apparently the whole of his furniture was made, and merely had a shop, or show-room, in Paris.
Roentgen was first and foremost an astute man of business, and Paris was the style center of Europe. Before very long Marie Antoinette appointed him her ébéniste mechanicien. He appears, indeed, to have acquired considerable favor with the queen, for on several occasions she took advantage of his journeys through Europe to charge him with the delivery of presents and of dolls dressed in the Paris fashions of the moment; they were intended to serve as patterns for the dressmakers to her mother and her sisters.
He appears at once to have opened a shop in Paris, but despite, and perhaps because of, the favor in which he was held at court, all was not smooth sailing. The powerful trade corporation of the maîtres ébénistes disputed his right to sell in Paris furniture of foreign manufacture, and in 1780 he found that the most satisfactory way out of the difficulty was to get himself admitted a member of the corporation to which all his great rivals belonged. By this time he had attracted a good deal of attention by the introduction of a new style of marquetry, in which light and shade, instead of being represented as hitherto by burning, smoking or engraving the pieces of veneer, were indicated by small pieces of wood so arranged as to create the impression of pietra dura.

We have seen that Roentgen had been appointed ébéniste-mechanicien to Marie Antoinette, and the appointment is explained by his fondness for and proficiency in constructing furniture in which mechanical devices played a great part. The English cabinetmakers of the later eighteenth century often made what was called, with obvious allusion to its character, harlequin furniture, especially little dressing tables and washstands which converted into something else or held their essentials in concealment until a spring was touched. David was a past master in this kind of work, and unquestionably much of the otherwise inexplicable reputation he enjoyed among contemporaries who were head and shoulders above him is explained by his mechanical genius. The extent of his fame in this direction is sufficiently indicated by the fact that Goethe mentions him in Wilhelm Meister. He compares the box inhabited by the fairy during her travels with her mortal lover to one of Roentgen's desks, in which at a pull a multitude of springs and latches are set in motion. For a desk of this kind Louis XVI paid him 80,000 livres. Outwardly it was in the form of a commode, its marquetry panels symbolizing the liberal arts. A personification of sculpture was in the act of engraving the name of Marie Antoinette upon a column to which Minerva was hanging her portrait. Above a riot of architectural orders was a musical clock (the work of the partner Peter Kinzing), surmounted by a cupola representing Parnassus. The interior of this monumental effort, 3.4 m high, was a marvel of mechanical precision; it disappeared during the First Empire.
Roentgen did not confine his activities to Paris, or even to France. It has been said that he traveled about Europe accompanied by furniture vans, and undoubtedly his aptitude as a commercial traveler was remarkable. He had shops in Berlin and Saint Petersburg, and himself apparently twice went to Russia. On one of these visits he sold to the Empress Catherine furniture to the value of 20,000 roubles, to which she added a personal present of 5000 roubles and a gold snuff-box in recognition, it would seem, of his readiness and ingenuity in surmounting a secretaire with a clock indicating the date of the Russian naval victory over the Turks at Cheshme, news of which had arrived on the previous evening. This suite of furniture is believed still to be in the Palace of the Hermitage, the hiding-place of so much remarkable and forgotten art.  The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which so speedily followed, eclipsed Roentgen's star as they eclipsed those of so many other great cabinetmakers of the period. In 1793 the Revolutionary government, regarding him as an émigré seized the contents of his showrooms and his personal belongings, and after that date he appears neither to have done business in Paris nor to have visited it. Five years later the invasion of Neuwied led to the closing of his workshops; prosperity never returned, and he died half ruined at Wiesbaden on 12 February 1807.

According to his biography in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition of 1911, Roentgen was not a great cabinetmaker: "His forms were often clumsy, ungraceful, and commonplace; his furniture lacked the artistry of the French and the English cabinetmakers of the great period which came to an end about 1790. His bronzes were poor in design and coarse in execution; his work, in short, is tainted by commercialism. As an in-layer, however, he holds a position of high distinction. His marquetry is bolder and more vigorous than that of Riesener, who in other respects soared far above him. As an adroit deviser of mechanism he fully earned a reputation which former generations rated more highly than the modern critic, with his facilities for comparison, is prepared to accept. On the mechanical side he produced, with the help of Kintzing, many long-cased and other clocks with ingenious indicating and registering apparatus. Rontgen delighted in architectural forms, and his marquetry more often than not represents those scenes from classical mythology which were the dear delight of the 18Th century." He is well represented at the V&;A Museum in London, and other collections.

Tuesday; Animal farm;

My Kitchen's Animal Farm;

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland,

 Beasts of every land and clime,

 Hearken to my joyful tidings

 Of the Golden future time.

Soon or late the day is coming,

 Tyrant Man shall be o'erthrown,

 And the fruitful fields of England

 Shall be trod by beasts alone.

Rings shall vanish from our noses,

 And the harness from our back,

 Bit and spur shall rust forever,

 Cruel whips no more shall crack.

Riches more than mind can picture,

 Wheat and barley, oats and hay,

 Clover, beans and mangel-wurzels

 Shall be ours upon that day.

Bright will shine the fields of England,

 Purer shall its waters be,

 Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes

 On the day that sets us free.

For that day we all must labour,

 Though we die before it break;

 Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,

 All must toil for freedom's sake.

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland,

 Beasts of every land and clime,

George Orwell

Animal Farm is an allegorical novel by George Orwell, published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, especially after his experiences with the NKVD and the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of 

personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin", and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946), he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he had tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".

The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, though the subtitle was dropped by U.S. publishers for its 1946 publication and subsequently all but one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime omitted it. Other variations in the title include: A Satire and A Contemporary Satire. Orwell suggested the title Union des républiques socialistes animales for the French translation, which recalled the French name of the Soviet Union, Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques, and which abbreviates to URSA, the Latin for "bear", a symbol of RussiaOrwell wrote the book from November 1943–February 1944, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was at its height and Stalin was held in high esteem in Britain among the people and intelligentsia, a fact that Orwell hated. It was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers.. Its publication was thus delayed, though it became a great commercial success when it did finally appear partly because the Cold War so quickly followed World War II.

The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders, but also the ways wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed, and myopia corrupt everything in a country. It portrays corrupt leadership as the flaw in revolution, rather than the act of revolution itself. It also shows how potential ignorance and indifference of the people to problems within a revolution could allow horrors to happen if a smooth transition to a people's government is not achieved.

click here for more  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

©Photos Ts