Welcome back to our home away from home! Great to see you here again, my friend! :D
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Welcome back to our home away from home! Great to see you here again, my friend! :D
I am very glad to be here, in fact I am glad to be anywhere but it is somehow special to be with all of you.
Thank you God for this days you are giving me, I will try my best to deserve your gift.
Thank you to all my friends for the kind words and even more for the good thoughts, that when serious, are listen from all universe, in which I am this raindrop living in the Ocean of life.
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Sep 19, 1995:
Newspaper publishes Unabomber manifesto
The Washington Post publishes a 35,000-word manifesto written by the Unabomber, who since the late 1970s had eluded authorities while carrying out a series of bombings across the United States that killed 3 people and injured another 23. After reading the manifesto, David Kaczynski realized the writing style was similar to that of his brother, Theodore Kaczynski, and notified the F.B.I. On April 3, 1996, Ted Kaczynski was arrested at his isolated cabin near Lincoln, Montana, where investigators found evidence linking him to the Unabomber crimes.
Theodore John Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago. A talented math student, he entered Harvard University at age 16. In 1967, after receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Kaczynski was hired as an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley. However, he resigned abruptly in 1969 and eventually began living as a hermit in a small Montana cabin that lacked electricity and running water. Kaczynski received occasional financial support from his family.
From 1978 to 1995, the Unabomber carried out 16 bombings and mail bombings across the U.S. and became the subject of a massive F.B.I. manhunt. The F.B.I. code named him UNABOM because his targets included universities and airlines. Over the years, his victims included professors, scientists, corporate executives and a computer store owner, among others.
In June 1995, the Unabomber sent a 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto to The New York Times and Washington Post and said if it wasn't published he would continue his bombing campaign. On September 19 of that year, after discussions with the F.B.I. and Attorney General Janet Reno, the Post, in collaboration with the Times, published the manifesto, which railed against industrialized society. David Kaczynski suspected his older brother might be the Unabomber after comparing the manifesto to some documents written by Ted that David found in their mother's home.
In 1998, Kaczynski agreed to plead guilty and received four life sentences without the possibility of parole. He is serving his sentence at the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens.
GAO XINGJIAN, Nocturnal Wanderer
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
Confucius
“Too many locks, not enough keys.”
― Sarah Dessen
Sep 23, 1944:
FDR defends his dog
On this day in 1944, during a campaign dinner with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, President Franklin D. Roosevelt makes a reference to his small dog, Fala, who had recently been the subject of a Republican political attack. The offense prompted Roosevelt to defend his dog's honor and his own reputation.
After addressing pertinent labor issues and America's status in World War II, Roosevelt explained that Republican critics had circulated a story claiming that Roosevelt had accidentally left Fala behind while visiting the Aleutian Islands earlier that year. They went on to accuse the president of sending a Navy destroyer, at a taxpayer expense of up to $20 million, to go back and pick up the dog. Roosevelt said that though he and his family had "suffered malicious falsehoods" in the past, he claimed the right to "object to libelous statements about my dog." Roosevelt went on to say that the desperate Republican opposition knew it could not win the upcoming presidential election and used Fala as an excuse to attack the president. He half-jokingly declared that his critics sullied the reputation of a defenseless dog just to distract Americans from more pressing issues facing the country.
Roosevelt was indeed attached to his dog. Fala, a small, black Scottish terrier, accompanied Roosevelt almost everywhere: to the Oval Office, on official state visits and on long, overseas trips including one to Newfoundland in 1941 during which Fala met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt's cousin, Margaret Suckley, had given Fala to the president in 1940 when Fala was still a puppy. Although Eleanor Roosevelt disapproved of having a dog in the White House, Roosevelt adamantly kept the dog by his side. Fala slept at the foot of his master's bed and only the president had the authority to feed him; the White House kitchen staff sent up a bone for Fala every morning with Roosevelt's breakfast tray.
After FDR's death, Fala lived with Eleanor and, when the dog died in 1952 at the ripe old age of 12, he was buried near the president at his family home in Hyde Park, New York.
Hyde Park is just across the Hudson from the village of New Paltz, where generations of my ancestors and other family members ae buried! I'm remotely related to the Teddy Roosvelt family by a marriage... That part of New York is very close knit and very old, having been settled in the mid to late 1600's. I'm sure more pets that just Fala are buried around that area!
"I am happy because I have everything I want and never consume what I would want. I was able to make infinite the universe - whom everyone calls infinite, but it's for almost all a narrow field and very well fenced. "
Someone
In minds crammed with thoughts, organs clogged with toxins, and bodies stiffened with neglect, there is just no space for anything else.
~Alison Rose Levy, "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life," Yoga Journal, Jan/Feb 2002
Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.
Daniel Ellsberg
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2...pers-snowden-s
The next time you have a thought... let it go.
Ron White
"That I can say from the love (I had):
That is not immortal, since it is fire
But that is eternal while it lasts. "
Vinicius de Moraes
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
Plato
Welcome back, my friend! I've missed your thoughts! :D
Thanks George, it is good to be here and make some posts. I know that I need to go slowly for a time.
That is the spirit zombie67. We have so many weapons in our world that maybe we don't need the so called weapons and usually known for that name.
Bad people will find a way to change a car, a truck or a plane in attack weapons, bad people will find a way of changing manure into explosives while good people will find a way to use real weapons on construction tools for a better world.
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
Aristotle
A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
Arnold H. Glasow
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Modern stupidity means not ignorance
but the nonthought of received ideas.
Milan Kundera
In a world of so much instant information, we have a urgent need of screening all information before we use it.
Information without criterion is the most dangerous of things.
Informed words that makes us look smart are a matter of vanity and for sure a lie about what we are.
Ric
Housework is what a woman does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it.
Evan Esar
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
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More on: http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/funny-movie-quotes/
“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
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Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, at that time a self-governing colony in Magna Graecia. The date of birth is based on a statement by the Byzantine Greek historian John Tzetzes that Archimedes lived for 75 years. In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing is known. Plutarch wrote in his Parallel Lives that Archimedes was related to King Hiero II, the ruler of Syracuse. A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure. It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children. During his youth, Archimedes may have studied in Alexandria, Egypt, where Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene were contemporaries. He referred to Conon of Samos as his friend, while two of his works (The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Cattle Problem) have introductions addressed to Eratosthenes.
Archimedes died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse after a two-year-long siege. According to the popular account given by Plutarch, Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, and was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items. General Marcellus was reportedly angered by the death of Archimedes, as he considered him a valuable scientific asset and had ordered that he not be harmed.
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The last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles" (Greek: μή μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε), a reference to the circles in the mathematical drawing that he was supposedly studying when disturbed by the Roman soldier. This quote is often given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos," but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch.
The tomb of Archimedes carried a sculpture illustrating his favorite mathematical proof, consisting of a sphere and a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Archimedes had proven that the volume and surface area of the sphere are two thirds that of the cylinder including its bases. In 75 BC, 137 years after his death, the Roman orator Cicero was serving as quaestor in Sicily. He had heard stories about the tomb of Archimedes, but none of the locals was able to give him the location. Eventually he found the tomb near the Agrigentine gate in Syracuse, in a neglected condition and overgrown with bushes. Cicero had the tomb cleaned up, and was able to see the carving and read some of the verses that had been added as an inscription. A tomb discovered in a hotel courtyard in Syracuse in the early 1960s was claimed to be that of Archimedes, but its location today is unknown.
The standard versions of the life of Archimedes were written long after his death by the historians of Ancient Rome. The account of the siege of Syracuse given by Polybius in his Universal History was written around seventy years after Archimedes' death, and was used subsequently as a source by Plutarch and Livy. It sheds little light on Archimedes as a person, and focuses on the war machines that he is said to have built in order to defend the city.
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Time to sleep
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Michelangelo
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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo (Italian pronunciation: [mikeˈlandʒelo]), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.
Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At the age of 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.
In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries.
In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.
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In 1505, Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II. He was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years.
Under the patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction.[34] It is located in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for the tomb, two known as the Heroic Captive and the Dying Captive, are now in the Louvre.
During the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Condivi's account, Bramante, who was working on the building of St Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the Pope's tomb and convinced the Pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task.
Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling, and cover the central part of the ceiling with ornament. Michelangelo persuaded Pope Julius to give him a free hand and proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The composition stretches over 500 square metres of ceiling, and contains over 300 figures. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's Creation of the Earth; God's Creation of Humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of Humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus. They are seven prophets of Israel and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Prophet Jeremiah and the Cumaean Sibyl.
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Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances.[20] Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a polychrome wooden Crucifix (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, which had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought a block of marble, and carved a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime circa 18th century. On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici, commissioned a snow statue, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici.
In the same year, the Medici were expelled from Florence as the result of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. In Bologna, he was commissioned to carve several of the last small figures for the completion of the Shrine of St. Dominic, in the church dedicated to that saint. At this time Michelangelo studied the robust reliefs carved by Jacopo della Quercia around main portal of the Basilica of St Petronius, including the panel of The Creation of Eve the composition of which was to reappear on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Towards the end of 1494, the political situation in Florence was calmer. The city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici. During the half year he spent in Florence, he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping Cupid. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome...pass [it off as] an ancient work and...sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.
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Michelangelo arrived in Rome 25 June 1496 at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god Bacchus. Upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden.
In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a Pietà, a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarized by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." It is now located in St Peter's Basilica.
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Michelangelo, with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, is one of the three giants of the Florentine High Renaissance. Although their names are often cited together, Michelangelo was younger than Leonardo by 23 years, and older than Raphael by eight. Because of his reclusive nature, he had little to do with either artist and outlived both of them by more than forty years. Michelangelo took few sculpture students. He employed Francesco Granacci, who was his fellow pupil at the Medici Academy, and became one of several assistants on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo appears to have used assistants mainly for the more manual tasks of preparing surfaces and grinding colours. Despite this, his works were to have a great influence on painters, sculptors and architects for many generations to come.
While Michelangelo's David is the most famous male nude of all time and destined to be reproduced in order to grace cities around the world, some of his other works have had perhaps even greater impact on the course of art. The twisting forms and tensions of the Victory, the Bruges Madonna and the Medici Madonna make them the heralds of the Mannerist art. The unfinished giants for the tomb of Pope Julius II had profound effect on late-19th- and 20th-century sculptors such as Rodin and Henry Moore.
Michelangelo's foyer of the Laurentian Library was one of the earliest buildings to utilise Classical forms in a plastic and expressive manner. This dynamic quality was later to find its major expression in Michelangelo's centrally planned St Peter's, with its giant order, its rippling cornice and its upward-launching pointed dome. The dome of St Peter's was to influence the building of churches for many centuries, including Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome and St Paul's Cathedral, London, as well as the civic domes of many public buildings and the state capitals across America.
Artists who were directly influenced by Michelangelo include Raphael, who shamelessly imitated Michelangelo's prophets in two of his works, including his depiction of the great master himself in the School of Athens. Other artists such as Parmigianino and Pontormo drew on the writhing forms of the Last Judgement and the frescos of the Capella Paolina.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling was a work of unprecedented grandeur, both for its architectonic forms, to be imitated by many Baroque ceiling painters, and also for the wealth of its inventiveness in the study of figures. Vasari wrote:
The work has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness. Indeed, painters no longer need to seek for new inventions, novel attitudes, clothed figures, fresh ways of expression, different arrangements, or sublime subjects, for this work contains every perfection possible under those headings.
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
Genie (feral child) is found in Los Angeles, California - November 4, 1970
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Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of a feral child who was the victim of extraordinarily severe abuse, neglect and social isolation, making her one of the most well-known cases recorded in the annals of abnormal child psychology. Born in Arcadia, California, Genie was locked alone in a room from the age of 20 months to 13 years, 7 months, usually strapped to a child's toilet or bound in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized. During this time she was almost never exposed to any speech, and as a result she did not acquire a first language. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles child welfare authorities on November 4, 1970.
In the first several years after Genie's life and circumstances came to light, psychologists, linguists and other scientists focused a great deal of attention on Genie's case, seeing in her near-total isolation an opportunity to study many aspects of human development. Upon finding that she had not learned a language, linguists saw Genie as potentially being an important way to gain further insight into the processes controlling language acquisition skills and linguistic development. Extensive observation of their new-found human subject enabled them to publish academic works testing theories and hypotheses identifying critical periods during which humans learn to understand and use language.
Upon being removed from her parents' house, Genie gradually started to acquire and develop new language skills. On broader levels her language development followed some normal patterns of young children acquiring a first language, but researchers noted many marked differences with her language acquisition. The size of Genie's vocabulary and the speed with which she expanded it consistently outstripped both researchers' anticipations, and many of the earliest words she learned and used were focused on observable properties of people or objects, very different from those of a typical first-language learner. However, she had far more difficulty with acquisition of basic grammar and syntax, resulting in her vocabulary being much more advanced and sophisticated than most people in equivalent phases of learning and using these rules, and her acquisition of them remained far slower than normal. In addition, tests on her brain found discrepancies far larger than any prior observations of people with fully intact brains, which affirmed existing postulations on brain lateralization and gave rise to many new hypotheses on lateralization and its effect on language.
Genie's case has been compared extensively with that of Victor of Aveyron, an eighteenth-century French child who similarly became a classic case of late language acquisition and delayed development.
After her rescue, Genie was cared for initially at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Her subsequent placements eventually gave rise to rancorous debate. After approximately eight months at Children's Hospital, she was moved to one foster home for a month; the first of several moves. Upon removal she was then placed with the scientist heading the research team studying her, where she lived for almost four years and where most of the testing and research on her was conducted. Soon after turning 18 she went back to live with her mother, who could not adequately care for her; after a few months she was then placed in a series of at least six institutions for disabled adults, where she experienced further physical and emotional abuse. Cut off from almost all of the people who had studied her, her newly acquired language and behavioral skills regressed rapidly.
As of 2008 ABC News reported that Genie was living in California, "in psychological confinement as a ward of the state — her sixth foster home. And again, she is speechless."
Genie was the fourth and last child of parents living in Arcadia, California. Her father worked in a factory as a flight mechanic during World War II and got a job in the aviation industry after the war ended; her mother had come to California as a teenager with family friends fleeing the Dust Bowl. Neither one of them had any meaningful education. Her mother's family and friends had strongly opposed their marriage because Genie's father was twenty years older than her mother. The couple seemed happy to some who knew them, but others thought of Genie's father as something of a distant loner. Her mother began suffering increasingly frequent beatings at his hands, which progressively became more severe. Genie's mother already had vision problems, the result of neurological damage from a childhood accident. After she married, her eyesight became progressively worse, due to the pre-existing damage, severe cataracts and a detached retina. Her diminishing vision forced her to become increasingly dependent on her husband.
From the outset of their relationship, Genie's father made it very clear that he neither liked children nor wanted to have any. Still, after about five years of marriage his wife became pregnant. Genie's father continued to beat her through her pregnancy, and near the end apparently attempted to beat and strangle her to death. She was in the hospital recovering from this when she went into labor, but gave birth to a daughter who appeared to be healthy. Disturbed by the girl's crying, her father placed her in the garage; as a result, at 10 weeks old she died of pneumonia. Their second child was a boy diagnosed with Rh incompatibility who died at two days of age, allegedly from choking on his own mucus. Another son was born three years later, once again with Rh incompatibility. He was slow to develop, and late to walk and to talk. When he was four, his paternal grandmother grew concerned about her son's increasing instability and took over her grandson's care; he made good progress with her for several months before eventually being returned to his parents. Around the time Genie was born, her father began to isolate himself and his family from those around them.
Genie's birth was a standard Caesarean section with no complications. The next day, showing signs of Rh incompatibility, she required a blood transfusion, but she was otherwise a healthy weight and size. A medical appointment at three months showed that she was gaining weight normally, but found a congenital hip dislocation which required her to use a highly restrictive Frejka splint for the next seven months. Due to the splint Genie was late to walk, and researchers believed this led Genie's father to start speculating that she was mentally retarded. At subsequent appointments, up until the age of 11 months, records indicate that she was alert and sitting up on her own, but falling behind in weight gain; at birth she had been in the 50th percentile for weight, but at 11 months she was down to the 11th percentile. Genie's mother later recalled that Genie was not a cuddly baby, did not babble much, and resisted solid food, but by six months she was reportedly in overall good condition and, "taking food well."
When Genie was 14 months old, she came down with a fever and was taken to a pediatrician. Upon examining her, the doctor said that although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded. He also suggested that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present; Rh incompatibility is a significant risk factor for kernicterus, and severe cases can lead to serious brain damage. Her father took this opinion to mean that Genie was severely retarded, using it as justification for isolating and abusing her.
When Genie was 20 months old, her paternal grandmother was killed when a pickup truck ran her over in a hit-and-run traffic accident. As a child, Genie's father was not very close to his mother, having only had limited contact with her while mostly growing up in orphanages. During most of his adult life, they constantly argued about her unsuccessful efforts to convince him to adopt a less rigid lifestyle. However, according to Genie's mother and brother, her father was almost singularly fixated on his mother, always treating his marriage as ancillary, at best. He already had difficulty controlling his anger, and his mother's death deeply affected him; when the truck's driver subsequently received only a probationary sentence for both manslaughter and drunk driving, he became nearly delusional with rage. He then quit his job and further increased the family's isolation. They moved into the two-bedroom house his mother had lived in, and left her bedroom untouched as a shrine to her. Genie was increasingly confined to the second bedroom, while the rest of the family slept in the living room.
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From the time Genie was born, her father displayed hostility toward her, discouraging his wife and son from paying her any attention. His instability had steadily increased after she was born, and researchers later speculated that his mother's death, and the outcome of the subsequent trial, made him feel as if the outside world had completely failed him. This convinced him that he would need to protect his family from the outside world. He still thought that Genie was severely retarded and would therefore need his additional protection, and believed the best way to provide this for her was to hide her existence entirely.
During the day, Genie was tied to a child's toilet in a makeshift harness which, according to Genie's brother, their father had forced his wife to make. The harness was designed like a straitjacket to prevent her from moving her arms or legs, and while in it Genie wore only diapers and could only move her extremities. At night, when her father remembered her, she was bound in a sleeping bag and placed in a crib with a metal-screen cover, her arms and legs immobilized. Researchers concluded that, if Genie vocalized or made any other noise, her father beat her with a large plank he kept in her room. To keep her quiet he would bare his teeth and bark and growl at her like a wild dog, sometimes making Genie's brother do this as well, and he grew his fingernails out to scratch her. If he suspected her of doing something he did not like he would make these noises outside the door to intimidate her, and beat her if he believed she had continued to do it. The exact reason for his dog-like behavior was never definitively discerned, but at least one scientist who studied Genie speculated he may have viewed himself as a guard dog and was acting out the role. This instilled an intense fear of cats and dogs in Genie that persisted long after she was freed.
Apart from her father's beatings, Genie's only meaningful human interaction occurred during the few minutes when she was being fed. She was not given any solid food; instead, she was fed baby food, cereal, pablum, an occasional soft-boiled egg, and liquids. Food was spooned into her mouth as quickly as possible, and if she choked or could not swallow fast enough it would be rubbed into her face. Although Genie's mother claimed Genie was fed three times a day, she also said that when hungry Genie would risk a beating by making noise to get attention, leading researchers to believe Genie's father often refused to feed her. Bowing to pressure to keep contact with his sister to a minimum, her brother was often forced to feed her in this manner. The few minutes per day she was being fed were normally the only times Genie's father allowed his wife to be with Genie, but she could not feed Genie herself. Later she claimed that, when possible, at around 11 PM she surreptitiously tried to feed Genie; this led to Genie developing an unusual sleep pattern, which continued for several months after she was freed. Once, when Genie was suffering from constipation, her father forced her to drink an entire bottle of castor oil. The ensuing effect on her health was so serious that Genie's father allowed a doctor to examine her, and she ultimately barely survived.
The only sensory stimulation Genie experienced from outside her home came by way of two windows, through which she could hear some traffic noises and see both the side of a neighboring house and a couple inches of sky, and could also occasionally hear birds and airplanes flying over the house. Even these stimuli were extremely limited, as the windows were almost entirely blacked out and the house was well away from the street. On rare occasions, her father would also allow her to play with plastic food containers, old spools of thread, TV Guides with many of the illustrations cut out, and two plastic raincoats. He had an extremely low tolerance for noise, to the point of refusing to have a working television or radio in the house. He almost never allowed Genie's mother or brother to speak, and viciously beat them if he heard them talking; their conversations were therefore always very quiet and out of Genie's earshot. They were particularly forbidden to speak to or around Genie, preventing her from being exposed to any meaningful amount of language besides her father's occasional swearing. He almost never permitted anyone to leave the house, only allowing Genie's brother to go to and from school; even he had to prove his identity before entering the house, as Genie's father wanted to be absolutely sure the family was completely isolated. To discourage disobedience, he frequently sat in the living room with a shotgun in his lap. He did not allow anyone else in the house, and at night would frequently leave the outside lights on to help prevent anyone else from coming; in case someone did come, he always kept his gun nearby.
Genie's mother was almost completely blind by this time, and was essentially passive by nature to begin with. Her husband threatened to kill her if she attempted to contact her parents, close friends who lived nearby, or the police. He also forced Genie's brother into silence, giving him instructions on how to keep his father's actions secret and beating him more often and more severely as he grew older. Genie's brother felt completely powerless to do anything to stop his father, as he knew his mother could not put up any resistance and feared severe retribution for attempting to intervene. Completely convinced that Genie would die by age 12 her father promised that, if she survived past that age, he would allow his wife to seek outside assistance. When Genie turned 12 he reneged on that promise, and Genie's mother took no action for another year.
In late October 1970, Genie's mother and father had a violent argument in which she threatened to leave if she could not call her parents. He eventually relented, and shortly thereafter Genie's mother left her husband to live with her parents in Monterey Park and took Genie with her; Genie's brother, by then 18, had already run away from home to live with friends. A 2002 episode of the television series Body Shock said they got away while Genie's father was buying groceries. Three weeks later, on November 4, Genie's mother brought Genie along while seeking disability benefits in nearby Temple City, California. On account of her near-blindness, she inadvertently entered the general social services office next door. The social worker who greeted them instantly sensed something was not right when she saw Genie; she was shocked to learn Genie's true age was 13, having estimated from her appearance and demeanor that she was around 6 or 7 and possibly autistic. She notified her supervisor, and after questioning Genie's mother and confirming Genie's age they immediately contacted the police. Genie's parents were arrested and Genie became a ward of the court, and a court order was immediately issued for Genie to be taken to Children's Hospital Los Angeles.
Upon Genie's admission David Rigler, a therapist and USC psychology professor who was the chief psychologist at Children's Hospital, and Howard Hansen, then the head of the psychiatry division and an early expert on child abuse, took direct control of Genie's care. The day after Genie's admission physician James Kent, another early advocate for child abuse awareness, examined her. He later stated this examination revealed by far the most severe case of child abuse he would ever encounter, and he came away from it extremely pessimistic about Genie's prognosis. The officer who arrested Genie's parents questioned them with his partner, and found that Genie's mother would not speak about her family—and particularly not her children—and Genie's father never seemed to acknowledge anything said to him. When officers interviewed people in the neighborhood, they found no one knew Genie's parents ever had a child besides their son, and their neighbors were stunned and horrified when police informed them of Genie's existence and of the abuse Genie's father had inflicted on his wife and children. In the house the family had been living in, police found several devices which had been used to restrain and hit Genie. They also discovered detailed notes Genie's father had written, chronicling both his mistreatment of his family and his efforts to conceal it; after reading through them, the lead detective on the investigation said, "Hitler could have taken lessons from [Genie's father.]" Rigler said the hospital could not get Genie's developmental history, and largely had to rely on the police investigation to piece together Genie's childhood.
News of Genie's rescue reached major media outlets on November 17, 1970, receiving a great deal of local and national media attention. That night, Walter Cronkite included a segment on Genie in the CBS Evening News. The Los Angeles Times ran two consecutive front-page stories on Genie, and continued to run prominent stories on her and her family for over a week. Newspaper reports showed several photographs of the other members of Genie's family, and local and regional television news networks shot extensive video of Genie's parents. However, only one picture of Genie was publicly released; this picture, shown in both the November 17 Los Angeles Times article and on the CBS Evening News report, significantly fueled public interest in Genie. Children's Hospital staff said reporters began regularly coming to the hospital hoping to see her, making it very difficult for them to maintain her anonymity. Acting at least partially on advice from his attorney, Genie's father refused to speak to the media. Genie's brother also made no public statements, but cooperated with the investigation and gave detectives important information on his father's abuse.
After the story reached the media, large crowds went to the family's house to try to see Genie's father, which he reportedly found extremely difficult to handle. On November 20, on the morning before a scheduled court appearance on charges of child abuse, Genie's father committed suicide by gunshot; his son was standing with a friend outside the house, with no knowledge of his father's intentions. When police arrived, they found two suicide notes from Genie's father. One, for his son, contained instructions for handling his body and a few of his possessions, and the other was directed at the police. One of the notes—police did not specify which—contained the declaration, "The world will never understand."
More on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29
The law is reason, free from passion.
Aristotle
November 6, 1854 - Composer John Philip Sousa was born.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7XWhyvIpE
John Philip Sousa (November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932) was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, known primarily for American military and patriotic marches. Because of his mastery of march composition, he is known as "The March King" or the "American March King" due to his British counterpart Kenneth J. Alford also being known as "The March King". Among his best-known marches are "The Liberty Bell", "The Thunderer", "The Washington Post", "Semper Fidelis" (Official March of the United States Marine Corps), and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (National March of the United States of America).
Sousa's father was Portuguese, and his mother of Bavarian ancestry. Sousa began his career playing violin and studying music theory and composition under John Esputa and George Felix Benkert. His father enlisted him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice in 1868. After departing the band in 1875, Sousa learned to conduct. From 1880 until his death, he focused exclusively on conducting and the writing of marches. He eventually rejoined the Marine Band and served there for 12 years as director. On leaving the Marine Band, Sousa organized his own band. He toured Europe and Australia and developed the sousaphone, a large brass instrument similar to the tuba. On the outbreak of World War I, Sousa was commissioned as a Lieutenant Commander and led the Naval Reserve Band in Illinois. Following his tenure, he returned to conduct the Sousa Band until his death in 1932.
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Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac
If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
John F. Kennedy
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Phoenix was a robotic spacecraft on a space exploration mission on Mars under the Mars Scout Program. The Phoenix lander descended on Mars on May 25, 2008. Mission scientists used instruments aboard the lander to search for environments suitable for microbial life on Mars, and to research the history of water there.
The multi-agency program was headed by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, under the direction of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program was a partnership of universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA) and other aerospace companies. It was the first mission to Mars led by a public university in NASA history. It was led directly from the University of Arizona's campus in Tucson, with project management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and project development at Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado. The operational funding for the mission extended through November 10, 2008.
Phoenix was NASA's sixth successful landing out of seven attempts and was the first successful landing in a Martian polar region. The lander completed its mission in August 2008, and made a last brief communication with Earth on November 2 as available solar power dropped with the Martian winter. The mission was declared concluded on November 10, 2008, after engineers were unable to re-contact the craft. After unsuccessful attempts to contact the lander by the Mars Odyssey orbiter up to and past the Martian summer solstice on May 12, 2010, JPL declared the lander to be dead. The program was considered a success because it completed all planned science experiments and observations.
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The course of true love never did run smooth.
William Shakespeare