Tuesday thoughts; privileged to be a billboard.

How extremely blasé and obsessed has our society become with Designer merchandise. We are supposed to wear the right shoes, dresses and all the rightly named accessories.

Without thinking nations have become billboards for Nike, Pike, Sike, Like and whatever all these names mean or the merchandise produced behind it. 

The name cults go much further. Simple everyday day tap ware must have the right name. I must laugh when they show a  home and the owner describes proudly a tap in all its glory as a Vola 131. I am not disputing that the Vola 131 is an extremely, beautiful and handsome tap, and had its birth I think in Scandinavia in the 1950s 60s,  who cares.  I am amazed that people have come so far in the 21st century to be proud to have a branded tap in their bathroom or kitchen.

Photo/ Malawi charity water.

 We are not just happy anymore, that we have water hot and cold and all shades in between to come out of a tap. No, this  is certainly not enough for many. They need the glory of branded tap ware. A showerhead made by Gucci. The bathtub tried first by Prada and a toilet straight out of the designer guild of Mr. Crapper.

Long live the living billboard masses,  very useful for advertisements.

© Text Ts 

Heaps of books to read.

Dust; Yvonne Adhiambo Owour;  Africa, Kenya comes alive.

Civilisations of Ancient Iraq; Benjamin R. Foster; Karen Polinger Foster.

 How dare our modern, western  civilisation go in there and destroy this ancient world. They did with impunity calling it a cake walk, such barbarians.

A most dangerous book; Christopher B. Krebs.  Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. It is said that history is always written by the victor powers.

How to manage your slaves; Marcus Sidonius Falx with Jerry Toner. Slavery was a core institution in the Roman world. It almost never occurred to anyone, that slavery might be dispensed with or that it was morally reprehensible. If this would have been published 2000 years ago it would have topped the management charts. Are today's "wage slaves" really so much different? How different are we from the Romans?

The dark side of Love; Rafik Schami. Above St.Paul's Chapel in Damascus,  a body hangs in  a basket over the city wall...

The Towers of Samarkand; James Heneage. ...torn away from all he loves,  Names like Tamerlane, Mongolia, Constantinople, the world in the 14th century.

The Drowning Lesson; Jane Shemilt; I am in yesterday's clothes...a year on Emma remains haunted....

The Stylist's guide to NYC; Sibella Court.  Probably THE Eden for unusual merchandise. Haberdashery; oddities and Curiosities; Kitchen and Table Paraphernalia, and more and more, what does exist is available. 

Now go and read.

Where I live...

I live where the sun shines.

©Photos/Text Ts 

Sepia Saturday 16th July 2016

Pictures, palaces, and bingo numbers are amongst your possible themes this week for Sepia Saturday 339 …

I want to showcase the Eclecticism, a mixing of various architectural styles and ornamentation of the past. Eclecticism in architecture was very popular in the second half of the 19th century.

Here a variation of rooflines from Australian country towns in Queensland and New South Wales.

Stucco

A plaster used as a coating for walls and ceilings, and often used for decoration; it is common to many parts of the world.

Frieze

A band of richly sculpted ornamentation on a building.

Bundaberg

The part of a building that rises above the building’s eaves. Rooflines can be highly decorative, with balustrades, pediments, statuary, dormer windows, cross gables, etc.

Township of Maclean NSW still steeped in Art deco. Hopefully, all these old buildings will be restored to their former glory and the tangle of wires put underground.

Maclean NSW

Bourke is a town in the north-west of New South Wales, Australia. The administrative centre and largest town in Bourke Shire, Bourke is approximately 800 kilometres north-west of the state capital, Sydney, on the south bank of the Darling River.

©Photos/Text Ts 

Good News.

May I introduce Boo, the homepot;

a great helper,

vacuums and dusts,

cleans windows and bathrooms,

lives happily ever after in a cupboard.

Do not ask, no cooking, but might do the kitchen afterwards if you order one with an extra button.

The war machine scientists have changed course. They have abandoned the production of killing machines  and are now producing very welcome helpers for the household.

For sale now at  any arms industry.

©Text/Photo Ts

Sepia Saturday 9, July 2016; Mesmerized;

In the 1870s,  New Yorks Department stores started to display Christmas cheer.
The elaborate displays  were loved and appreciated  by young  and old, waiting with anticipation for the unveiling of Christmas window displays. Many department stores  have been well-known for their impressive Christmas window spectacles for generations. The availability of large sheets of plate glass in the nineteenth century  led to the concept of using department store windows to attractively display the store's merchandise.

CHILDREN LOOKING THROUGH THE GLASS WINDOW OF MACY’S IN 1907.

1920's  a child's pleasure.

Wigs display in Paris.

A shop window display of underwear, c 1935.

 Photograph showing a display of underwear in a lingerie shop including the 'Body Belt'. 

The notice reads: 'For the Slim - We introduce the new Body Belt with a unique graduated all-way stretch'. 

The manufacturer appears to be J Roussel. (Daily Herald Archive / SSPL via Getty Images) 

Shop in Murano Italy, displaying Murano jewellery. (My daughter Lilli.) 2007

Photos/Text Ts
Old Photos pinterest

Thinking about thinking;

A mindless society worships  a cultureless shell of nothing, fast food, fast news, banality, mindless celebrities, fast consumerism, debts,  drugs  to forget their misery….a Kardashian  what’s the name,  has millions of mindless  worshippers .

What does this tell about the intellect of a society?

It is a like a religion to these people.

Sepia Saturday 25 June 2016

.... Our theme image is entitled "Woman Reads As Baby Sleeps"  It might seem like a "nice" bland and uncomplicated image but, believe me, there is a lot to discuss. Let's just see where Sepians go with it! 

The earliest images of mother and child found in the Catacombs of Rome, date from the Early Christian Church. After Mary was proclaimed Theotokos, Godbearer,  it became common to use her image in paintings and sculptures. 

Mary and child were the most used image through the Byzantine, Medieval and Early Renaissance for over a thousand years. Duccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Caravaggio, Rubens, have turned their artistic skills to create Mother and child images. 

Italian Mother and Baby, living in tenements of New York. He  captured the misery of urban poverty as well as the tenacity of life. This forlorn mother with her swaddled baby is evocative of Mary and of many paintings of "Madonna and Child." 

In the early 1960s, myself and my firstborn daughter Marie-Louise.

Photo/text Ts

Sepia Saturday, 18/06/2016 Koala in my garden;

Well here we are again - yawnnnnn - it's Sepia Saturday time....

A Koala in my garden not yawning but trying to rest in a palm tree. It must not have been very comfortable as it left the palm...

...and tried  a Paperbark, which was also not to its liking. 

It walked quite fast to the back garden, scrambled over the fence onto my neighbour's frangipani tree,

where it looked triumphantly at me and later settled back for another snooze

Photo/Text Ts 

Wonderful Australian trees...the Melaleucas;

Melaleuca  is a genus of nearly 300 species of plants in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, they are known by many common names, paperbarks, honey-myrtles or tea-trees. 

I have 4 large Paperbark/Melaleuca trees growing around my house. Some more are located in my bush garden. The trees are in full flower again and the Lorikeets come in swarms to feed on the nectar of the flowers.

At night, the bats gorge themselves on the flowers. The noise, the screeching  of the lorikeets and at night the squabbling of the bats, each one wants the best place. WONDERFUL NATURE.

©Photos my garden/Text Ts 

Sepia Saturday 11/June/2016 Ancient pools.

Plenty of healthy exercise and such...today's Sepia Saturday theme.

The “Great Bath” at  Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan might have been the first built swimming pool in the world and is one of the best-known structures among the ruins of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. It was dug during the 3rd millennium BC. The  pool is 12 metres x 7 meters, it is lined with bricks and was covered with a tar-based sealant. A hole  at one end of the Bath may have been used to drain the water into it.

Bath of  Caracalla; Caracalla was built between 212 and 216 AD under the reign of Emperor Caracalla. 

Pools  for bathing and relaxing were common in Roman cities and throughout the empire. The bath complexes  were not just a place for bathing  and relaxing but also for socializing. Rooms were provided  for reading and to relax. 

Typical features  in  a roman bath were;

apodyterium - changing rooms.

palaestrae - exercise rooms.

notatio - open-air swimming pool.

Laconica and sudatorium - superheated dry and wet sweating-rooms.

caldarium - hot room, heated and with a hot-water pool and a separate basin on a stand (labrum)

tepidarium - warm room, indirectly heated and with a tepid pool.

frigidarium - cool room, unheated and with a cold-water basin, often monumental in size and domed, it was the heart of the baths complex.

rooms for massage and other health treatments.

Additional facilities could include cold-water plunge baths, private baths, toilets, libraries, lecture halls, fountains, and outdoor gardens.

My granddaughter Fabrizia enjoys her swimming pool heated by sun power. (Photo Ts/ 2011)




Lake Constance/ Bodensee/ Uttwil on the Swiss side of the lake, where we used to swim in summer. This picture is from the early 1970s, It might look differently now, probably modernised.
Photo/sText Ts