More Christmas gift ideas…

Every home should have one of these…

What to get Granny for Christmas…?

This is amazing, unbelievable, fantastic…

Thought for today

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

Flannery O’Connor

Propaganda, Pollution and the Crucifix.

I thought I might share some world war two propaganda posters with you today. They seem strangely apt, with so much talk now days about waste and recycling.

The suggestion is, perhaps, a tad extreme for wasting that scrap of paper, still…

I can remember (in the UK) during the fifties taking bottles back to the shop in order to get the deposit money back. It was a good idea then…

Car sharing – as important today as it was all those years ago!

Finally, one for the EU court of Human Rights and their ruling that crucifixes should not be displayed in schools. Those wise, learned judges of Strasbourg obviously didn’t know about this when they made their ruling…

Irish witch in portrait…spooky!!

From the Irish Independent

Saturday October 31 2009

“IT SOUNDS like a spooky Halloween story but the author of a book about a medieval Irish witch has discovered an incredible coincidence linking her to her subject.

Some would say this eerie story surrounding Dame Alice Kyteler, who escaped being burned at the stake on witchcraft charges, is beyond belief.

Kilkenny woman Claire Nolan published a book in 2008 on the life of the notorious noblewoman who disappeared without trace in 1324.

She was thought to have supernatural powers and to have poisoned several men, including three of her husbands.

Some 3,000 miles away in the US midwest, back in 2003, an artist painted a portrait of Alice because he liked her story, having come across it in a library in New York.

Paddy Shaw had never heard of Claire Nolan or her book called ‘The Stone’ — he couldn’t have, because it wasn’t written until five years later.

At the time when he was exhibiting the painting in New York, Claire Nolan’s book was just an idea.

Earlier this year, Paddy was clearing out his studio and decided it was time to send Alice home. He gave the painting, without charge, to Nicky Flynn of Kyteler’s Inn on St Kieran Street in Kilkenny city. Where the pub now stands is where Alice once lived.

A few weeks ago, the painting was brought to the attention of Claire’s father, well-known genealogist Pat Nolan.

Pat was “flabbergasted” when he saw it. The resemblance to his daughter was “uncanny”. “I almost fell over with shock,” he said.

He rang Claire, who came down that weekend to see the image and was “physically shocked” when she first saw the work because there are no known photographs of Alice.

“It was looking at myself in the mirror — the eyes, face, posture, body shape, everything was like me, except for the malevolent look on Alice’s face,” she said.

It gets even more creepy. The dress in the painting is almost identical to the one that Claire wears when she is reading excerpts from the book.

Asked if it was the work of Alice up to her old tricks, Claire said it was definitely very strange and could not really be explained on the basis of fact.

Claire has never met the painter, Paddy Shaw. And he had no notion of her existence when he painted the picture.

“I’m genuinely puzzled. It’s a very strange coincidence that somebody would paint a picture about Alice that looks exactly like me when he’s never heard of me.

“I wasn’t working on the book when he did the painting. The more I think about it, the more creeped out I get,” she said.

“He painted a woman that looks exactly like me, even the way she wears her hair and the fact that she looks the same age as me, it’s everything else about it,” Claire told the Irish Independent last night.

The portrait also shows Aethiops in the background. He is a mythical figure and supposedly the founder of Ethiopia.

Claire is an administrator at the school of information and library studies at University College Dublin.

She wrote her book on Alice Kyteler in 2008, however, it received little attention and was relatively unknown until now.”

This hat tortures you unless you smile!!

Now this is technology in action – a hat that tortures you ‘till you smile! You’ve just got to see it to believe it (see the video of it in action), it senses when you’re not smiling and drives a nail into your head. In’t that cool? See it all HERE. It’s going to be the solution for all those Christmas gifts I’ve got to buy.

Tomb Raiders confront the Supernatural…

So the “black archaeologists” go digging for profit on the old world war two battlefields of Russia, and discover…STRANGENESS!

Like the six individuals near Luban who camped overnight beneath the skeletal ruins of Makaryevsky monastery ( the Germans totalled the place during the war). They were kept awake all night by wild screams from the swamps and the nearby woods – screams of people long dead?

And then there was the group who heard German voices calling and singing and laughing in the night; then the sound of tanks rumbling through the darkness. The following morning, fresh tank tracks were found beside their diggings.

See HERE for more detail.

Take my advice – leave the dead alone!

Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about!

It’s true, it’s true – see HERE to read the whole article from New Scientist. By combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are able to tell what decisions you are about to take, what pictures you’re looking at, and a whole lot more!

And guess what folks? This is only the beginning…

L’Art

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Ezra Pound

More Rilke

“The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.”

Rilke