Podcasts about incidentally

But what if Mr Malcolm had written a more interesting list? Mr Malcolm's List Year: 2022 Written by: Suzanne Allain Based on the novel by: Suzanne Allain Directed by: Emma Holly Jones Stars: Zawe Ashton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Sope Dirisu, Theo James, Freida Pinto, Ashley Park   Show notes: We love this film. Seriously. Full marks for performances, set, locations, score, costumes and more where this month's film is concerned. Nevertheless, we have some notes on language & mores, our all-important B couple and the eponymous list. If you would like to skip the plot summary for this month's film you can skip forward 11 minutes into the episode. In this episode we mention the TV shows Pride And Prejudice (1995) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112130/), Bridgerton (2020-) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8740790/) and Downton Abbey (2010-2015) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606375/) as well as the film Gosford Park (2001) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280707/). We also mention the novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice) and the play Much Ado About Nothing (1598?) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing). Incidentally, the Mozart opera Charles Adrian was mostly likely thinking of is The Marriage Of Figaro (1786) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_Figaro) and you can find out more about “the world's first purpose-built public art gallery”, aka the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811), here: https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/.    Next month we are planning to watch The Apartment (1960) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053604/). If you would like to suggest films for future episodes, you can tweet Lisa: @LisaStowaway. We record these episodes over the internet. Sometimes the audio is not perfect. We apologise for that. Music in this episode is by Martin Zaltz Austwick (martinzalzaustwick.com). Artwork is by Lisa Findley. Thank you for listening! 

Remember when the pandemic was in full swing? Everybody was buying masks and medical gloves. Well, I found some medical gloves for a great price. So I ordered. When they came, I checked the box front. Sure enough - one size fits all. Not true! Those gloves were big enough to fit a professional basketball player who can "palm" the ball! So, I was stuck with these huge gloves. Incidentally, there was so much room in each glove finger, I could have packed snacks in there. So much for one size for everybody! Still - there IS a "one size for everybody.' It's amazing! Let's explore together . . . Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

You know the story from Lord of the Rings. Beautiful Arwen loves Aragorn. However, Aragorn left to protect Frodo on his quest. Incidentally, he'll end up fighting a war. Unfortunately, He may never return. As a result, Arwen is overcome. And she lingers in middle earth rather than join her kin to travel to their forever home. Having remained, she has a conversation with her elf-father. Interestingly, Arwen clings to hope. And she wants to know how to live in hope. Here is the excerpt: Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

Where does your mind go when you read the phrase, "The money changed everything"? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I want to share points from our recent Haven discussion when we used this prompt to chat and play. Where did the money come from? What difference did it make? Before our gathering, I stumbled on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called "Reward to Finder". The story is about Carl, who finds some money in a gutter on his way home from work. Instead of returning it to its rightful owner (in exchange for an unspecified reward), as he promised his wife, Anna, he keeps it hidden in his attic. Eventually, Anna discovers that he is counting the money and demands a share. She threatens to go to the police if Carl doesn't comply. As she spends the money, the situation escalates. Ultimately, they both decide to take action. This changes everything. It was like poison; it got into our bloodstream.Normal life became something obscene.We couldn't see straight. I lost you in the haze.Neighbours hear banging through the walls of this doorless maze.A dark cloud hanging like a fur coat.In limbo, awaiting the verdict. Words inspired by Reward to Finder The story highlights a familiar scenario we may have encountered in various situations. The arrival of money can often trigger possessiveness, control, greed, and envy, causing relationships to crumble. This can happen dramatically, as depicted in the story, or gradually over time. Over time, resentments build up, stories take hold in the characters' minds, beliefs shift, values change, and people stop seeing people. Instead, they see obstacles, hindrances, opportunities, and gold mines. But perhaps, instead of bringing about fundamental changes, money reveals what was already there. But The Money Can Make a Positive Difference It was interesting to notice how my personal response to the prompt had a negative flavour. This attitude might be called "Why does money always ruin good things?" There are many examples of this. But I wanted to explore how money can positively change everything. That would be the first place people go in response to the prompt. An unexpected gift that took the pressure off or saved the day, approval for the loan that got the business off the ground, or the grant that transformed the community. What Would You Choose To Do If Money Wasn't an Obstacle? What Would You Choose To Do If Money Wasn't an Obstacle? is a classic coaching question. But it's also an interesting one to dissect. The responses seem to vary depending on whether having a vision precedes the availability of funds or vice versa. On one hand, we may ask, "What is something you would love to do but can't due to a lack of resources?" Perhaps there is a particular project you would love to undertake, a place you would like to visit, or changes you would like to make. In other words, if you had the money, you would know exactly what to spend it on. For me, it's finishing my album. Incidentally, if you have £5000 lying around (or know someone who does), gimme a shout! The other way of reading the question is, "If you suddenly came into a chunk of money, what would you do with it?" It's the "What would you do if you won the lottery?" question. Responses tend to be more vague. We would "probably" buy this or that, replace some stuff, give it away, or invest it. The possibilities are broader, but they are also potentially less focused. A Highly Sensitive Drive To Enable There was a thread in our discussion as we imagined the difference money could make in enabling desirable stuff to emerge in the world around us. Once the bills are taken care of and there's enough yarn to knit with, we might look beyond our personal situation and into families, neighbourhoods, and communities, where money could change things for good. Unconditional Giving This opened a conversation about gifts. Some people love giving but are uncomfortable receivi...

Try This On For Size... it is Episode 82 with special return guest, Shami Bery! In this quarter's ep, we name where we are all at (1:30), before discussing our main topic: Optimism (14:50)! Incidentally, we ask how we are approaching optimism in our 30s (16:00), how delusional we are (17:00), connecting with younger people (23:00), investing in our relationships (28:00), and finding some bright spots currently (36:00). Finally we close with our Dressing Room (46:50). We hope you enjoy!

The UK recently hit a huge milestone, according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the UK have reduced their Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 50% between 1990 and 2022.  The UK are the first major economy to achieve this, however we've still got a lot of work to do to meet our 2030 target of a 68% reduction. Over the past few years there have been a number of schemes aimed at businesses to help tackle their impact, specifically their energy consumption. Here in the UK, ESOS (The Energy Savings Opportunities Scheme) was introduced as an implementation of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive and has been a mandatory undertaking for large organisations that fit the criteria. Recently, that scheme has been updated and a number of changes have come into effect for Phase 3.  Ian Boylan, Chief Executive Officer at ISO Baseline, joins Mel to explain the recent changes to ESOS, how they affect organisations in the UK and EU and how ISO Baseline's software can help businesses consistently manage their energy consumption in alignment with ISO 50001 (The Energy Management Standard). You'll learn ·      Who are ISO Baseline? ·      What is the Energy Savings Opportunities Scheme (ESOS)? ·      What are the changes to ESOS? ·      How do the changes affect those who currently comply using ISO 50001 ·      What are the changes to the ESOS eligibility requirements? ·      How can ISO Baseline help businesses with their ISO 50001 and ESOS compliance?   Resources ·      ISO Baseline ·      Isologyhub ·      ISO 50001   In this episode, we talk about: [00:30] Join the isologyhub – To get access to a suite of ISO related tools, training and templates. Simply head on over to isologyhub.com to either sign-up or book a demo. [02:05] Episode summary: Today Mel is joined by guest Ian Boylan, Chief Executive Officer at ISO Baseline, to discuss the changes to The Energy Savings Opportunities Scheme (ESOS), and how the changes will affect the European Directive on energy management and energy reporting. [03:20] Who is Ian and ISO Baseline?  – Ian has been involved with ISO Standards for a number of years, starting with the technical aspects of building Management Systems, to working with Certification Bodies as an auditor for Management Systems. From this experience, Ian really got to understand the challenges that organisations face when implementing ISO Standards. Challenges such as maintenance to ensure they are achieving their requirements and objectives. Which is where the concept for ISO Baseline was born. Targeted specifically towards the Energy Management Standard ISO 50001, ISO Baseline's software allows organisations to manage their energy processes and provide evidence that you are meeting your energy objectives. [05:30] What features are included in ISO Baseline's software? – Features include: Energy reporting: Information can be displayed in graph or Sankey diagrams to help visualize your energy performance. Identification of opportunities: Any opportunities for improvement found in the provided energy report will be recorded in an ‘Opportunities Register' Financial Assessments: Work out life-cycle costs for assets, which can be used as a guide to establish possible savings by implementing suggested improvements. [07:25] What is ESOS?: ESOS was introduced when we were still a part of the European Union, when there was a European Directive on energy efficiency. It placed a requirement on member states in the EU to put together schemes for ensuring that large organisations undertake energy audits on a regular 4 yearly basis. In the UK this was adopted as the ESOS regulations. For many years, if a business's ISO 50001 certification scope covered all of its energy usage, then your business was considered compliant with ESOS. If you didn't have an ISO 50001 Management System in place, you would have to undertake energy audits once every 4 years, and have that reviewed, approved and signed off by a lead ESOS assessor. At the time, this had to cover 90% of your energy usage. One of the more updated inclusions into these regulations was the introduction of transport as a source of energy consumption. ESOS also included the requirement to identify significant energy consumption and propose a logical way to reduce energy consumption to improve energy performance. [11:30] Main changes to ESOS: Accounting for your energy consumption  – Instead of accounting for 90% of your total final energy consumption, you're now required to account for 95% of your total final energy consumption. The de minimis component of it has been reduced by 50% [012:30] Main changes to ESOS: Activity Metrics – All organisations will be required to develop activity metrics and as part of your audits you'll be required to submit those activity metrics. The aim of this is to allow the UK to effectively assess organisations over established periods (i.e. from Phase 3 to phase 4) to see if and how they are actually reducing their energy consumption. This could potentially lead to benchmarking, where organisations can be measured against each other. [14:45] Main changes to ESOS: Submitting Actions Plans – Previously, you just had to submit your completed audits and overall savings potential, now you will be required to submit a proposed Action Plan to improve your energy performance. You will also be required to report annually on your progress towards that Action Plan. So no longer can companies coast on simply paying to complete an Energy Audit exercise once every 4 years, now you will have to produce publicly available information that will hold organisations to account. Essentially a name and shame for organisations that choose to do nothing. [16:55] Making Actions Plans publicly available – Incidentally, it always has been a requirement that everything that has been reportable regarding resources should be accessible, but previously you were not required to produce Action Plans. So essentially now that will also become part of the publicly available information. [17:30] Making ESOS fit for purpose – When ESOS was introduced, there was already so much other legislation around in the UK, so the main focus then was to align them with one another and to ensure that they were all working towards a common purpose. In this update, it hasn't ultimately required you to determine your energy savings potential in carbon reduction, but quite obviously that would be a little bit ludicrous if an organisation went down this route and not to look at it from a carbon perspective, as It's only a tiny little additional step when you're doing it from a money perspective and an energy perspective to figure out what the carbon impact is. [18:30] Do you need help with your Carbon Reporting? – If you need assistance with GHG emission or SECR reporting, contact our sister company Carbonology®. [19:20] Join the isologyhub – Don't miss out on a suite of over 200+ ISO tools, templates and training, sign-up to become a member of the isologyhub [21:25] Main changes to ESOS: Confirming your compliance – There are different approaches that you will need to be aware of when submitting your evidence of compliance, and which one you use will depend on which route you're taking. For the full ISO 50001 route, you will need to complete the Annex 1 approach, which is a reduced reporting requirement where you do not need to use an ESOS lead Assessor to submit it on your behalf, the organisation can do it themselves. If you going down either the energy audit route or do not have 100% of your energy consumption covered by ISO 50001 – you will be reporting using the Annex 2 approach. This is where you still require a lead ESOS Assessor to work with you and provide final sign-off on that reporting. [24:15] Are there any changes in the eligibility requirements? – There aren't any major changes in ESOS's eligibility requirements. They have now updated the turnover amounts from Euro to Pound Sterling following our exit from the EU. [25:35] How will these changes impact organisations? – Organisations will have to adapt to a more proactive approach towards their energy reporting and management. No longer can you get away with doing an energy audit once every 4 years and then forgetting about it until the next Phase. You need to start looking at it from the perspective of annual reporting, as all this information is going to be publicly available every year, which is going to be scrutinized if you're seen to not be taking any significant action. Large organisations will be compared against each other, and if one is taking action every year to reduce its impact and another is doing nothing for 4 years, which do you think will gain a more favorable reputation? This level of accountability is long overdue, and will be of benefit to organisations in terms of potential cost savings through reduction of energy use, and also more importantly to the environment.   [30:00] How can ISO Baseline ISO 50001 help organisations with their ESOS compliance? – ISO Baselines tools and software are going to be the most benefit to organisations that have a real objective to improve energy performance. If you're just doing the bare minimum to meet requirements, then it's no for you. ISO Baseline ISO 50001 is a tool to help systemise your organisations approach to energy management. It can help to avoid a lot of the bureaucracy that can hold up progress, so you can spend your time focusing on the objectives and what the Management System is meant to lead to. Their software will guide you through the required processes involved with ISO 50001 Energy Management, including Internal Audit planning and completion, Management review, logging and addressing non-conformities and corrective actions. If You'd like to learn more about ISO Baseline and their software, check out their website. If you'd like to book a demo for the isologyhub, simply contact us and we'd be happy to give you a tour. We'd love to hear your views and comments about the ISO Show, here's how: ●     Share the ISO Show on Twitter or Linkedin ●     Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one. Subscribe to keep up-to-date with our latest episodes: Stitcher | Spotify | YouTube |iTunes | Soundcloud | Mailing List

The hero's journey traces a main character who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Country artist, philanthropist, veteran, and North Carolina native Rockie Lynne's life story is truly a hero's journey. From his humble beginnings of being left at the door of Barium Springs Home for Children, to touring the world, selling hundreds of thousands of records, and writing songs recorded by superstars, you can say Rockie's narrative is the stuff of American folklore.  Rockie grew up in Statesville, North Carolina, and was adopted by a Southern Baptist family of limited means. He grew up on Statesville's dirt roads, and they led him to anthemic success in the entertainment world as a triple threat: a world-class songwriter, a captivating performer, and a diversely accomplished instrumentalist.  Where I Belong deftly merges a musician's quest for authentic self-expression with a touching search for familial lineage. There's Rockie's all-consuming love of the guitar which spans picking out licks on a second hand record player to his post-Army dreams of becoming the next Eddie Van Halen. Incidentally, these finely-honed chops remain intact, and they are a staple of Rockie's music, dazzlingly displayed in his live-show duels with his fiddle player, Dirk Dowell. A profound chapter in Where I Belong is Rockie meeting his biological father, Clyde Holloway. The pair share a powerful moment when Clyde gifts Rockie with his prized Martin D35, a guitar that he had owned most of his adult life. “When he gave me that guitar, I felt a closeness to him that didn't exist before,” Rockie says. Clyde's guitar has since become an integral part of Rockie's artistry as a player and a composer because of the significance of its lineage. The newly-penned “My Father's Guitar,” a single from Love, out March 29th, commemorates this moving moment.After hundreds and hundreds of watering-hole one-nighters, Rockie got his big break being signed personally by then Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris. He issued his self-titled solo debut in 2006, and landed three singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts. After Universal South folded, Rockie, an accomplished engineer, producer, and owner of his own recording studio, Tone Studios in Statesville, pushed ahead releasing nine solo albums to date.  Rockie has generously harnessed the expanse of his public platform in service of others. He is a veteran, having served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, and this legacy is close to Rockie's heart. He often performs for patriotic and military events, and his original songs are regularly licensed for use in conjunction with veteran and patriotic-themed programming. In 2004, Rockie co-founded the Tribute to the Troops motorcycle ride to raise funds and awareness for America's fallen soldiers and their families. Today, Rockie is back in Statesville where he has a stable and loving family and his own recording studio in which he nurtures local talent, and around town he's mythologized as an Elvis-like figure with his chiseled-face handsomeness, his down-to-earth charms, and his immense artistic gifts. Looking back on his journey, and through the process of making the documentary and connecting with his biological family for the first time, Rockie reflects: “I went from feeling unloved to knowing I'm loved, and that I've always been loved. I found my roots—I am somebody from somewhere.”https://www.rockielynne.com/Support the showThanks for listening for more information or to listen to other podcasts or watch YouTube videos click on this link >https://thetroutshow.com/

The Gold Star Ride Foundation will actively support, comfort and provide education benefits to Gold Star Families throughout the United States and will provide these things directly with personal visits via motorcycle; and we will support those other organizations that work to assist in these same activities. We do the work that our fallen heroes would do it they hadn't fallen for all our freedom. In 2016, The Gold Star Ride Foundation began with a simple idea: Remember the families of the fallen. Now we are approaching the end of our seventh year of doing just that. We met Joe, who didn't know he was a Gold Star Dad, when he stopped to help us with a broken motorcycle near the New York state line. We met Mary, who was told she didn't earn a Gold Star because her daughter, a US Marine, was killed when the Humvee, in which she was training, rolled over and killed her. "They" said she wasn't a Gold Star Mom. We said she was. We met a 12 year old who never got to know his dad. We did what his dad would have done, and helped with tuition. We helped more than 60 families in 2018, when we met with them in person on our national motorcycle Ride for Gold Star Families. In 2019, we logged another 15,000 miles or so, raising the number of families that we helped to nearly 100! In 2020, 2021, and so far in 2022, we've continued to meet with families. We've now met with more than 450. Sometimes, all we had to do was show up. Sometimes, we paid the rent so a family who had given a life for all of us to be free would not go homeless. In one case, we got a house for a homeless family. In another case, we found nursing care for an aging Gold Star Dad. Another family said they didn't want anything, but we filled their refrigerator and helped them get some new clothes. Yet another Gold Star Family received a grant to help them get a new car. The Gold Star Ride Foundation averages 10 Gold Star Families a month, every month. And we have honored families made Gold Star by every conflict since WWII. We are not bogged down by red tape. If there is a need for a Gold Star Family, we do all we can to fill it. We try to do it on a motorcycle, so we can meet the family in person, and make some noise with our bikes. We keep working. With your continued support, we will meet everyone's needs. If you know a family, tell them about us. We do not seek to violate the privacy of any Gold Star Family, and we are here to help. Half or more of the families we met requested that we keep it quiet. We're happy to do that. As you know, The Gold Star Ride Foundation is a 501(c)3 organization, which works to honor and support Gold Star Families across the United States. In 2020, 73% of ALL CONTRIBUTIONS went directly to helping Gold Star Families: during Covid. In 2021, we made it to 78%. In 2022, we hit 82.1% of all money coming in going out. But our goal is 85% or better. By comparison, WWP collected $287.6M and paid out $57M in grants, while another $75.6M went to corporate salaries, which translates to less than 20% of their money paid to veterans. This information was taken from their TAX RETURN. Their website, by contrast, says they spent $197M on veterans. That's a 140 Million Dollar difference. Should you believe them (what their website says), or them (what their tax return says), because they can't both be right, can they? Folds of Honor, according to their tax documents, collected $35M in contributions and paid out $16M in grants to vets families and $5M in corporate salaries which translates to a little over 40% going to help the families they say they support and nearly 15% going into their pockets. How is it that we can put 78% out to the families during a Covid year when all income was down? Simple. We are all volunteers. We have no internal salaries to support. (Incidentally, the executive director of the Gold Star Ride Foundation is, himself, a disabled warrior. When applying for benefits from WWP, he was summarily denied any help because he served during the First Gulf War (Dessert Storm). Apparently, you have to have served after 9/11 to qualify.) After five years of riding, the Gold Star Ride Foundation has logged over 123,000 miles on a motorcycle; we've stopped in all 48 of the lower United States at least 4 times each; we've crashed twice; and We've personally met with 498 Gold Star Families. That's an average of 100 per year; nearly 10 per month - that we've met in person. Imagine what it is like to personally meet 10 people every month who you have never met before, who have all suffered a death in the family, and you are there to remember that fallen hero. More Info: Donation to Support: https://www.goldstarride.org/donate Website: https://www.goldstarride.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/goldstarride2017/about YOUTUBE:  @goldstarridedotorg1690  (Like & Subscribe).

Incidentally, Subscribe to my channel if you want the occasional video/Youtube experience for non paywalled articles…Tom Haberstroh has written an explosive article in The Finder about just how improbable the NBA's post All-Star break scoring drought is. I think it's impossible to look at these numbers and reach any conclusion other than that the NBA directed referees to call games differently. But does Tom himself think this? Discussion includes but is not limited to…* A wild free throw stat, unseen in 2000 games, happens twice on the same night* Tom gets into the numbers on a dramatic drop in fouls called* GMs don't believe the league's position that this is random and non directed* I say it really really really really looks like the NBA is lying* Why would the NBA lie about something so (allegedly) obvious?* Tom reveals a sneaky big benefit to the lack of foul calls * “Trying to get pregnant” is a funny euphemism.House of Strauss is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.houseofstrauss.com/subscribe

If you haven't seen what is happening in Haiti, it is horrific. There is actual footage of a man, who is now running Hati, eating human body parts. The Mockingbird Media had unanimously made fun of President Trump for calling the country a sh*thole. Now, the Washington Post is reporting on the horrors happening there. Incidentally, we'll talk about why all this is happening. But, that's just Haiti. It couldn't happen here, right? I will show you scenes from Seattle of a bearded “woman” going on a naked rampage and a taxpayer funded heroin den. And, we look at perversion in the schools of Oklahoma. This show is for anyone who still thinks the collapse of society is localized.What does God's Word say? Proverbs 6:16-1 There are six things the Lord hates,    seven that are detestable to him: 17         haughty eyes,        a lying tongue,        hands that shed innocent blood,18         a heart that devises wicked schemes,        feet that are quick to rush into evil,19         a false witness who pours out lies        and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.Episode 1,463 Links:Cannibalism, murder, and fall of Haiti shouldn't shock anyone — they were the first nation founded on DEI…What a day in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood. Total whack job draped in an LGB”T”Q Pride flag blocks traffic with his [scrotum and penis] out for everyone to see. Mental illness is real.UPDATE: Witnesses say a "bearded ‘woman'" went on a rampage Friday in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood, trashing cars and a guitar store. So the suspect is not a dude.Inside a “safe” injection site. It was the most chaotic environment I have ever been in. People passed out in bowls of cereal, women screaming behind doors guarded by others, overdoses, crying etc. Staff were nowhere. It was horrifying. Pittsburgh police will no longer respond to certain calls including theft, harassment, criminal mischief, and burglary alarms. Between 3AM-7AM there will be no officers at any police stations. Buy guns. Buy ammo. The police will not protect you.UNBELIEVABLE. @EdmondSchools has been holding feet licking and armpit licking events for years where students lick chocolate and peanut butter off of staff. After video surfaced last week of another school in Oklahoma holding a feet licking event, these videos were uncovered.Thirty five years ago Biden gave the response to one of George Bush's speeches. Republicans should have just played this and let Joe Biden respond to Biden's SOTUSan Francisco is covered in garbage and human feces. You would never see anything like this in Singapore or Japan. It does not have to be like this.We're about to lose another embassy on Biden's watch. Haiti is in total crisis. They're now evacuating the US Embassy. Is this all we do under Biden? Rinse and repeat.4Patriots https://4Patriots.com/Todd Stay connected when the power goes out and get free shipping on orders over $97.   Alan's Soaps https://alanssoaps.com/TODD Use coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price. Bioptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/todd Use promo code TODD for 10% of your order and get up to 2 travel size bottles of Magnesium Breakthrough free.     Bonefrog  https://bonefrogcoffee.com/todd Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.   Bulwark Capital  Bulwark Capital Management (bulwarkcapitalmgmt.com) Call 866-779-RISK or visit online to get their FREE Common Cents Investing Guide.     GreenHaven Interactive Digital Marketing https://greenhaveninteractive.com Your Worldclass Website Will Get Found on Google! Liver Health https://GetLiverHelp.com/Todd Try Liver Health Formula today and claim your FREE bottle of Nano Powered Omega 3 and bonus gift.  

On Episode 147 of the RETROZEST podcast, Curtis kicks off a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the premiere of FOOTLOOSE! This film is a 1984 American musical drama directed by Herbert Ross. It tells the story of Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon), a teenager from Chicago who moves to a small town, where he attempts to overturn the ban on dancing instituted by the efforts of Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow), while entering into a romantic relationship with his daughter Ariel (Lori Singer). Assisting Curtis in this part 1 endeavor in an exclusive interview is DR. KIM JENSEN ABUNUWARA, the supporting actress who portrayed Ariel's friend Edna in the film. Kim also appeared on three episodes of Touched By An Angel, and in the films Shot in the Heart, Plainsong, and Fire Creek. She is currently an Associate Professor of Integrated Studies and Director of the Humanities Program at Utah Valley University. She was awarded Instructor of the Year (April 2010) by Trio Student Support Services at UVU, as well as the Award of Merit in Using Technology to Engage Distance Students (May 2008) from the Utah System of Higher Ed. Curtis and Kim had a great discussion about the making of the film, and how it is her first and biggest acting role. Check out Kim's current project (as of March 2024), In Good Faith. Also, please connect with her on Facebook, Twitter (X) and Instagram. Incidentally, you may help the RetroZest podcast by purchasing a unique Retro T-Shirt or two (many different designs and colors!) from our online store at store.retrozest.com/home. You may also help the RetroZest Podcast by purchasing a Celebrity Video Message gift for a friend/family member from CelebVM! Choose from celebrities like Barry Williams, Gary Busey, Ernie Hudson, Robert Fripp, Right Said Fred, etc.! Simply enter their website through our portal store.retrozest.com/celebvm, and shop as you normally would; it's no extra cost to you at all! Contact Curtis at podcast@retrozest.com, or via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Also, check us out on TikTok!

You've heard the saying - "I feel like a fifth wheel." Really - a fifth wheel is not much good . . . unless you're driving a big rig - and then you need 18 wheels - all in good shape. Today's content explores what it's like to be the fifth king. Incidentally, this guy was exceptional! We can all learn from his choices, integrity, and passions. So - let's take a look . . . Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

Our Head of Corporate Credit Research cites near-term and long-term factors indicating that investors should expect a major boost in merger and acquisition activity.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape, and how we put those ideas together.It's Friday, March 8th at 2:00pm in London.Usually, company activity follows the broader trends in markets. But last year, it diverged. 2023 was generally a strong year for economic growth and the stock market. But Mergers and Acquisition activity was anemic. By our count, global M&A activity in 2023, adjusted for the size of the economy, was the lowest in 30 years. We think that's going to change. There are both near-term and longer-term reasons why we think the buying and selling of companies can pick up. We think we're going to see the return of M&A.Near term, we think corporate confidence, which is essential to any large transaction, is improving. While stocks and the economy were ultimately strong last year, a lot of 2023 was still dominated by fears of rising yields, elevated inflation and persistent expectations of recession. Recall that as recently as October of 2023, the median stock in the S&P 500 was actually down about 5 per cent for the year.All of those factors that were hitting corporate confidence, today are looking better. And with Morgan Stanley's expectation for 2024, and economic soft landing, we think that improvement will continue. But don't just take our word for it. The companies that traffic directly in M&A were notably more upbeat about their pipelines when they reported earnings in January.Incidentally, this is also the message that we get from Morgan Stanley's industry experts. We recently polled Morgan Stanley Equity Analysts across 150 industry groups around the world. Half of them saw M&A activity increasing in their industry over the next 12 months. Only 6 per cent expected it to decline.But there's also a longer run story here.We think we can argue that depressed corporate activity has actually been a multi-year story. If we think about what factors historically explained M&A activity, such as stock market performance, overall valuations, volatility, Central Bank policy, and so on – the activity that we've seen over the last three years has undershot what these variables would usually expect by somewhere between $4-11 trillion. We think that speaks to a multi-year hit to corporate confidence and increased uncertainty from COVID and its aftermath; as that confidence returns, some of this gap might be made up.And there are other longer-term drivers. We believe Private Equity firms have been sitting on their holdings for an unusually long period of time, putting more pressure on them to do deals and return money to investors. Europe is just starting to emerge from an even longer-drought of activity, while reforms in Japan are encouraging more corporate action. We are positive on both European and Japanese equity markets. And other multi-year secular trends – from rising demand in AI capabilities, to clean energy transition, to innovation in life sciences – should also structurally support more M&A over the next cycle.Mergers and Acquisition activity has been unusually low. We think that's changing, and investors should expect much more of this activity going forward.Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you.

Picture the scene with me. It's from C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian. The four children, Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy are traveling in unknown places, trying to get their bearings. Basically - they're lost. But Lucy keeps seeing Aslan when no one else does. They think she's making it up . . . or maybe she's crazy. Nevertheless, Lucy is the one who gets messages and directions from Aslan. In fact, Lucy and Aslan are friends. It seems she's nurtured the ability to see what others don't. Incidentally, this ability opens the whole universe to her imagination and her life purpose. Let's explore how to be more like Lucy. Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

Many parents of infants place a monitor near the baby's crib and a speaker in another room so they will hear if the baby wakes up. The question was posed to Hacham Ovadia Yosef as to whether parents may set up the monitor before Shabbat, such that on Shabbat they will hear the baby's cries in the speaker in their room when the baby wakes up. Hacham Ovadia penned a lengthy essay on the topic, in his work Halichot Olam, addressing the more general issue of the status of microphones on Shabbat. He explains that it is clearly forbidden to use a microphone on Shabbat, however, the prohibition involved is only "Mi'de'rabbanan" – a violation of a Rabbinic enactment. When a person speaks into a microphone, he certainly does not do anything that could be considered "kindling" or "extinguishing" in any halachic sense. At most, he increases the flow of electricity, which would be forbidden only "Mi'de'rabbanan." Addressing the specific case of a baby monitor, Hacham Ovadia notes that the fact that the baby's voice activates the monitor's system is certainly of no concern, because the infant obviously does not intend to activate anything. And as for the fact that the speaker loudly sounds the baby's voice in the house, Hacham Ovadia notes that this poses no problem according to Sephardic practice. The Shulhan Aruch allows setting up the millstones before Shabbat even though they will make noise on Shabbat, because in his view, there is no prohibition against having noise in the home on Shabbat. One could argue, however, that using the monitor should be forbidden because the parents might talk to the baby or to each other in the baby's room, and they would then be activating the monitor's system through their speech. Hacham Ovadia dismisses this argument, however, noting that this situation falls under the category of "Pesik Resheh De'lo Ichpat Leh" – an action which inadvertently results in a Melacha which one has no interest in whatsoever. Although the parents' speech would inevitably increase the flow of electricity in the monitor, this is neither their intention nor their desire – and therefore, since the prohibition at stake is "Mi'de'rabbanan," and not a Torah violation, speaking is allowed. As such, Hacham Ovadia permits the use of a baby monitor that was set up before Shabbat, and even permits the parents to speak in the baby's room over Shabbat. He notes, however, that some monitors are sold with an apparatus that covers the monitor so one can speak when it is on without their voice being detected, and it would be preferable to use monitors with such a system. But even without this apparatus, the use of a monitor on Shabbat is permissible. Incidentally, Hacham Ovadia in this context also discusses the status of a hearing-aid on Shabbat, and concludes that one may wear a hearing-aid on Shabbat, despite the fact that a hearing-aid essentially works as a microphone, amplifying sound. Hacham Ovadia writes that he consulted on this matter with technology experts, as well as with Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (Jerusalem, 1910-1995), who was widely considered among the leading experts in the field of electricity in Halacha. He concluded that since speaking to the hearing aid at most increases the electric current, it does not entail any Torah violation, and thus may be permitted, as discussed above in regard to a baby monitor. Summary: It is permissible to set up a baby monitor before Shabbat to hear the baby in a different room, and it is even permissible to speak on Shabbat in the room where the monitor is placed.

It is so expensive to have a kid in the United States. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries worldwide with no federal paid parental leave; it offers functionally no public childcare (and private childcare is wildly expensive); and women can expect their pay to take a hit after becoming a parent. (Incidentally, men's wages tend to rise after becoming fathers.) But outside the U.S., many countries desperately want kids to be born inside their borders. One reason? Many countries are facing a looming problem in their population demographics: they have a ton of aging workers, fewer working-age people paying taxes, and not enough new babies being born to become future workers and taxpayers. And some countries are throwing money at the problem, offering parents generous benefits, even including straight-up cash for kids. So if the U.S. makes it very hard to have kids, but other countries are willing to pay you for having them....maybe you can see the opportunity here. Very economic, and very pregnant, host Mary Childs did. Which is why she went benefits shopping around the world. Between Sweden, Singapore, South Korea, Estonia, and Canada, who will offer her the best deal for her pregnancy?Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.comThe conclusion to the five-part Lower Columbia River soundwalk series brings us back to the Washington shoreline, three miles upriver from where we last visited, at a place called Frenchman's Bar. Though it takes an hour by car to drive from Willow Bar to Frenchman's Bar, they are literally just around the corner from each other on the water. And of course, this is how the birds experience it. Sandhill Cranes, Snow Geese, Canada Geese and others often overnight on Sauvie's Island and forage by day across the river in The Vancouver Lowlands. There are plenty of opportunities to capture fly-bys and fly-overs in field recordings here, but there is also plenty of competition in the soundscape from industrial sources. In addition to the planes, trains, and autos, you'll often hear hulking cargo ships chugging by. If you listen closely you'll hear a crew pounding on the hull of one such ship in the distance, close to the end of our soundwalk. I left it in, half because it was an interesting sound, and half because there's only so much noise one can get rid of without messing it up. Incidentally, I also left in the subtle sound of me setting up a stationary recording rig. I'll share that field recording next week on Soundscape, the companion podcast to Soundwalk, all linked up with this Substack newsletter. I visualize it like an H2O atom! And maybe now is a good time to catch you up, since I don't send emails as often as I'm posting. Recently I shared A Brief History of Soundwalks, taking a look at a couple examples of soundwalks, new and old, and arriving at a tentative answer to the question what is a soundwalk? (In the words of Christopher Robin, "It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear and not bothering.”) Also, I shared a soundwalk through the Black Artists of Oregon Exhibit at Portland Art Museum and field recordings of the charming American Dipper at Wildwood and some Trumpeter Swans and allies at Ridgefield NWR. Subscribers enjoy 5 min excerpts while premium subscribers get the complete recordings (10-90 min). Available in your podcast app and here.For the Frenchman's Bar Soundwalk score I used a lot of the same voices that we've been hearing in this batch. In particular, I try to follow the swells of sound from the abundant geese and cranes with synth pads and vibrating drones. This time I swap out the electric pianos for the intimacy and warmth of an acoustic piano and celeste. It's both quiet and loud; a dynamic outing!Frenchman's Bar was named by Donald and David Scherruble who grew up in the area, heirs to the 120 acre farm that would become Frenchman's Bar Park in the late 1990's. The Scherrubles listened to their colorful "Old Frenchman" neighbor speak of his adventures when they were kids on the farm. Don Hamilton penned this story with an ear for the brothers' lively storytelling for The Oregonian September 9, 1985:Frenchman's Bar really has a French connection. That connection is the late Paul Haury, a Frenchman who once deserted a doomed ship,Well before the turn of the century Haury, then 15, was an apprentice river pilot in France hoping to make his living on the sea. He signed on as a cabin boy on a wooden saling ship bound for Vancouver, British Columbia, via Cape Horn. It was to pick up a load of lumber and take it to the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii. But the cabin boy who hoped to make his life sailng was treated poorly."He jumped ship, he did," David Scherruble said. "He used to come to the house and tell my mom and dad about how there was this big old hollow cedar tree and he hid in it while the searchers (from the ship) looked for him. They walked right past him, they did, and didn't even see him. That's the story he told."After about three days the searchers gave up the hunt for their cabin boy and set off for Hawaii. In mid-Pacific the ship hit a fierce storm and went down with all hands.For five years Haury's parents in France believed he was dead. By the time he wrote to tell them he hadn't perished, he had made his way north from Vancouver and was working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.In 1915 Haury bought five or six acres along the Columbia and moved to the Vancouver area…Interestingly, Haury, who died in 1937 while in his 70s, never saw the stretch of beach named for him. The bar was created by dredge spoils when the Columbia River channel was deepened by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1940s.It might also be worth mentioning that Frenchman's Bar is about a mile upriver from Tena Bar, which in 1980 provided a break in the infamous D.B. Cooper skyjacking mystery. A kid found $5800 in bundles of decomposing cash in the sand. Serial numbers on the bills matched those in the $200,000 ransom. (Funny how that seems like not so much today.) How did these bundles end up buried in the sand at Tena Bar? The FBI put a lot of energy into trying to answer that question but apparently few definitive conclusions could be drawn. There is absolutely no shortage of conjecture online. In 2020, a scientist ruled out quite a few timeline scenarios by testing the bills for diatoms. “Because the bills only had one season of diatoms on them, and did not have diatoms that bloom in the winter, Kaye theorizes that the money came out of the water and landed on the bank of Tena Bar after only a few weeks or months.”Today the Tena Bar area, bound by a sand and gravel company, has No Trespassing signs posted every 10 meters. Well, I guess that's about it for this one. Thanks for being here with me.

An old acquaintance, an Australian bishop, has been quoting recently from a popular cartoonist and kind of pop philosopher "Down Under" named Mike Leunig. The bishop quoted an aphorism from Leunig in relation to his long-term hopes for the Anglican Church in Australia: "Nothing can be loved at speed". When I heard my old colleague quoting Mike Leunig, a 1975 disco hit by Tavares flashed instantly into my mind: "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (To Fall in Love)". What this sudden flash told me was: It's not true -- it is not true that "nothing can be loved at speed". One's heart in fact always loves at speed. Almost every big decision you've ever made was made "at speed"! The heart moves no other way. The heart loves at speed. Incidentally, people rarely say this, at least where they could be heard. You don't want to be thought to believe that "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl". That sounds un-wise, un-"nuanced" -- the worst possible thing you could ever be regarded as being -- and imprudent. Nevertheless, it is the way life is. When you review your life, how many decisions you made were actually made in a flash, in a lightning-like "AHA" ('Take on Me') moment? Please tell me. You didn't choose the college you went to based on ... thoughtful ratiocination. You didn't choose the profession you chose based on... weighing all the pros and cons. You didn't marry the gal/guy you married on the basis of... thought. (Did you?) This cast is about inward (heartfelt) truth vs. outward (rationalizing) truth. When you are dying, I believe you will only know the former. LUV, PZ

Grab your nearest Gregorian and summon up a sharpie - we've got some key dates for your calendar this week as we ask the question: why do some days have names? Not just Christmas, Halloween or Valentine's, we're talking World Marmot Day, World Pangolin Day and ... International Talk Like a Pirate Day? We dive deep into the calendar of the bizarre to go on a journey of all the strange days that are out there, looking at the many environmental days you've never heard of and end up trying to redeem a group of animals we've maybe been a bit harsh too. We're here for the hooved this week as we analyse antelopes, all thanks to that well known international holiday - World Hirola Day. It's not just a crusade through the calendar of course as we set out to identify the best animal gym buddy (animal knowledge high, gym knowledge low) and Roddy takes up arms against the Arabian sand boa.....or does he?  Incidentally, taking up arms is THE most mocking way you could describe fighting a snake.. And our show sponsors Birda take us back to Australia aka Nature's Thunderdome as we take a trip to the Barking Owl.   Check us out on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/howmanygeese/ Check out Birda the show sponsors here https://birda.org/  If you're feeling extra generous and want to help support the show, consider leaving us a tip at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/howmanygeese

Kathleen Parlow was one of the most outstanding violinists at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1912, she was signed by the Columbia Record Company in New York, and her first records for the U.S. label were brought out alongside those of the legendary Eugene Ysaÿe. Listen to her fascinating story and how she took the world by storm. From her devastating looks to the intrigue her priceless instrument created. You will hear rare recordings of this prodigious player as we retell her life and try to understand why such an incredible talent has been so forgotten today. Brought to you by Biddulph recordings   TRANSCRIPT   Kathleen Parlow Part 1  Welcome to this very first episode of the Historical Strings Recording Podcast.  A show that gives you a chance to hear rare and early recordings of great masters and their stories.  Hello, my name is Linda Lespets. I'm a violin maker and restorer in Sydney, Australia, and I'm also the host of another podcast called ‘The Violin Chronicles',  a show about the lives of historically important violin makers and their instruments. But today we have a different podcast and telling this incredible story with me is my co-host Eric Wen. Hello, my name is Eric Wen, and I'm the producer at Biddulph Recordings, which is a label that focuses upon reissuing historic recordings, particularly those by famous string players of the past.  I also teach at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where I've been for the past 24 years. In this first episode, we will be looking at an incredibly talented violinist called Kathleen Parlow, who, in her time, took Europe and the world by storm, giving even Fritz Kreisler a run for his money in the popularity department. She was described in the media as being ‘One of the phenomena of the musical world' on par with Mischa Elman, or the ‘greatest lady violinist in the world', and ‘the girl with the golden bow'.  She was treated with superstar status wherever she went, which begs the question as to why she is so little known today? Well, join us to discover her incredible story, the events of her career and her violin. A violin which would eventually financially ruin one man and divide his family. We will take a closer look at high hat kicking breakdancers, militant fascists, scandalous theatre directors, impossible love, a score ripping composer, and all this revolving around one of the world's most expensive violins and the incredible means one man went to get it into his hot little hands and then give it away. This is the story of Kathleen Parlow.  And all of the pieces you will be hearing in this podcast are of Kathleen Parlow playing her violin. Kathleen Parlow was born into a modest family in Calgary on the Canadian prairies in 1890.  Her mother, Minnie, was a violinist. So, at a young age at four, she gave her daughter a violin and started teaching her. When she was six years old, the family, Kathleen, Minnie, and her father, Charlie, they moved to San Francisco where her talent was immediately recognized. And well, this is probably because of the, the mom. And she was having lessons with her cousin called Conrad Coward in San Francisco.  Very soon, still aged six, she gave her first recital in San Francisco.  So is six, is six a reasonable age for a child to give a recital? What do you think? It's extremely young. In fact, that is truly prodigious. I mean, people don't even begin the violin till six and that's an early beginning of an instrument. Most people start around seven or eight, but to begin much earlier and to even be playing a concert at the age of six. That's really quite phenomenal. So with her burgeoning talent, she now started having lessons with Henry Holmes, who was a pupil of Louis Spohr, the well-known German composer and violinist. And he's a conductor and who he's the man who apparently invented the chin rest.  So where would we be without the chin rest, really? He's attributed with inventing it.  Well, Spohr was a fine violinist, German violinist. He was also a quite prominent composer. He was quite a conservative composer. So, I believe he wasn't that fond of the music of Beethoven. In other words, there were people like Spohr, Von Weber, and they represented a much more conservative branch of the sort of German composition.  of the German composers. And basically, they looked upon Beethoven as such a wild revolutionary in his music, so daring that I think they were almost a little offended by it. So Spohr, if you could say, is primarily a kind of conservative, very well-schooled, excellent composer. He wrote many, many violin concertos, the most famous of which is No. 8 in A minor, which is written in the form of an operatic scene. Full of violin solo recitatives and arias for the violin. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's interesting. So they were, there was like very shocked by Beethoven. They were, apparently. Was he a contemporary of Beethoven? Because I, because sometimes you go back pretty quickly, don't you? Like the teacher of the teacher of and all of a sudden you're in like the Well, Spohr was born 14, he's 14 years younger than Beethoven. Oh, okay. So, he was born in 1784, but he lived a lot longer. He lived over 20 years longer than Beethoven. Oh, wow. And that's fascinating. So, Henry Holmes, Kathleen Parlow's teacher, was taught by this guy who would have known Beethoven? Yes, absolutely. And objected to Beethoven.  Was shocked by his music. Well, I mean, I think sort of the, you might say the more mature Beethoven or the more daring Beethoven. But I think, you know, I'm sure maybe some of Beethoven's early works were much more acceptable. They were more normative, so to speak. Oh, okay.  So Kathleen's in San Francisco and her parents' marriage is breaking down. Her father, Charlie, moves back to Calgary where he dies of tuberculosis the year after. But Kathleen, she rockets on and is becoming more and more well known. Her new teacher sees real talent in the girl, and this teacher, Henry Holmes, he has contacts to make things happen. And he helps arrange a tour for her and playing engagements in England. So for this to happen, Kathleen's mum, she's, she's I'm getting stage mum vibes. Yes.  Because she's still very, still very young. Oh, yeah. I mean, I can't believe she wasn't playing with dolls.  And this would have been a conversation between Minnie, Kathleen's mum, and the teacher. It probably wouldn't have been a conversation with her as a child. No, probably not.  You don't really choose much when you're six, seven. No, that's true. So the problem they have is that they have no money. So, so what do you do, Eric? You have no money, you have a prodigy. You exploit the prodigy by having them play and make an income for you, which is something that happens unfortunately to many, many talented musicians coming from, you might say, less well-off families. They end up becoming the breadwinner. All their focus gets put upon these, these kids. And so not only do they have the added burden of playing and making sure they keep up They're playing well, but they also have the burden of making sure that they play well enough to make an income so that their families can survive. I mean, that's a very familiar story, and it's a story that has more failures than winners, I'm afraid, because you do hear about the winners. You do hear about the Misha Elmans or the Yasha. Well, Heifetz is a little different because he had a more middle-class family, but you do hear of Oskar Shumsky, for example, who I know I knew personally, he says, don't believe that these violence that you hear about having normal childhood behind every great violence, there's always a mama or a papa. And I think he himself endured that kind of pressure, the pressure to somehow become. The breadwinner, or let's say the some, the pressure to become a great violinist, primarily because he would serve as the breadwinner for the family. Well, if you think about it, you could say that.  Violin playing in the early 20th century was very dominated by Russians, particularly Russian Jews. And one of the reasons for that was that in Russia, all the Jews were confined to an area known as the Pale of Settlement.  In other words, a designated area that they could live in, but they could not leave that particular area. And basically, some very gifted young students could get into university or could go into a conservatory, and one of the big examples was Misha Elman, and Misha Elman, you might say left the Pale of Settlement to go study with Leopold Auer in St Petersburg. And they had to get all sorts of permission to do that. Well, the success of Misha Elman, the global success, the international success, I think resonated so well. with the people in the ghetto that they sort of saw, wow, this is one of our boys and look what he's done. He's now playing for the crowned heads of Europe. So I think for them, they felt this was a way out. And if you think about it, the film, Fiddler on the Roof,  which is a famous musical and it was adapted as a famous film. And basically, that film, just the very title, talks about the Fiddler on the Roof. And the setting is in the Pale of Settlement, the Jewish ghetto in Russia. They're often subjected to random attacks by the Cossacks and all sorts of difficulties. But here, despite all that, you know they manage to survive. And of course the image of the Fiddler on the Roof. The violinist is exemplified, you might say, by Misha Elman, who literally grew up in the Russian ghetto. Yeah, and Misha Elman, he'll, he'll become, he He'll become important in our story, yeah. The money. This is not a problem. There is a wealthy admirer called Harriet Pullman, Carolan, in San Francisco. And she pays for Kathleen and her mother to take the trip to England. And in 1904, at the age of 14, Kathleen plays for King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace. And then in the next year in 1905, she and her mother, they come back to England. This tour marks the beginning of a life that she would lead for years to come of performing and playing. And so by the time she was 15, she was touring and playing with the London Symphony. And it was in a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London that she really shoots to fame.  So is the Wigmore Hall, is that, is that still today an important place to play? Oh, extremely so. It's funny because the Wigmore Hall was originally called the Bechstein Hall, and obviously during the wars, it became a much more the name was more neutralized to become less dramatic, and it became named after the street it's on, which is Wigmore Street. It was always a very important venue, but around the sort of 60s In the 70s it had declined a bit in its status because the South Bank had been built and so the Wigmore Hall was a little bit relegated to a sort of a little second class status. But in the past 20 years or so the Wigmore Hall has catapulted to  fame again and it's today one of the most distinguished halls. In London. All right. Okay. And this is, this is pre war. So it's, it would have been called? Bechstein. Okay. So it would have been called the Bechstein Hall when she played? Probably. Oh yeah, definitely. So the Bechstein Hall was, I think first opened in 1901 and it was built by the piano manufacturers, the German manufacturers Bechstein, hence the name. And after the First World War, I believe it was changed to a more neutral sounding, less Germanic name, and it adopted the name of the street that it's currently on, which is Wigmore Street. Incidentally, the first concert at Wigmore Hall was actually performed, was a violin and piano recital, performed by Eugene Ysaye and Federico Busoni.  And then one night in London, Kathleen and her mother went to another concert of another child prodigy called Mischa Elman. And he was, so he's the fiddler on the roof guy, and he was almost exactly the same age as Kathleen. He was just a few months there's just a few months difference between them. And she, she hears him playing this concert and she's, she's just blown away. Blown away, and after the concert, she and her mother decide that Kathleen, she just has to go and have lessons from the same teacher as this, as this, as Mischa. So the only thing, only little thing about Mischa Elman's teacher is that he is in Russia. And as far as anyone knows, no foreigners study in the St. Petersburg Conservatorium, but that is about to change. Definitely no ladies. So, Kathleen and her mother had arrived in England with 300 raised by their church in San Francisco and this was, it just wasn't enough to get them to Russia and to the conservatorium where the famed Leopold Auer was a professor, but get there they would because Kathleen's mum, Minnie, still had a few tricks up her sleeve. She went and petitioned the Canadian High Commissioner.  So she must have been, I feel like Minnie, she must have been very persuasive. Like there was nothing was getting in between, you know, her daughter and this career. Forceful, a task to be reckoned with, certainly. Yeah. She's like we'll get to England, we have no money. Not a problem. We're gonna, we're gonna get this teacher. He's in Russia. Not a problem. No foreigners. It, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't seem to be a problem for her, no girls. Not a problem. No foreigner has ever studied in this St. Petersburg conservatorium. Not daunted. They're off. They go. So to pay the cost travel, Minnie managed to get a loan from Lord Strathconia, the Canadian high commissioner.  And from there, mother and daughter travelled to Russia. And in October of 1906, Kathleen becomes the first foreigner to attend the St. Petersburg Conservatorium. And in her class are 45 Students and she's the only girl. And we have to remember this is pre-revolutionary Russia. So there's still the Tsar Nicholas the second at this point. Yeah. She's mixing in, in that set. So it's an interesting place to be as a musician. Cause you're frequenting the sort of the upper classes but you can come from, from nothing and arrive there. Her professor was the famed teacher, Leopold Auer, who had a knack of discovering talent. Leopold Auer was actually a Hungarian violinist, and he was trained in Vienna, and he also studied with Joachim.  And what happened was Russia has always had a sort of love for the violin, and they employed many people to teach at the conservatory, because they really embraced Western culture. They had A number of important French violinists come, but their big, you might say, catch was to get Vieuxtemps, Henri Vieuxtemps,  to teach for a number of years at, in St. Petersburg. And after Henry Vieuxtemps, they actually got Henry Wieniawski to teach at the conservatory. And when Wieniawski decided to go back to Europe, they employed Leopold Auer to take his place at St Petersburg. Right. So he's up there with the big names. Well, they were a little bit let down. I mean, that's what they were, I think, a little bit disappointed to replace Wieniawski with Leopold Auer because Wieniawski was such a major violinist. So he had initially a little rough time, but he was adored by Tchaikovsky and Tchaikovsky loved Auer's playing, dedicated a number of works for him, including the famous serenade melancholic, and wrote a lot number of ballet scores, which Leopold Auer played the solos for. But of course, they had a big rift when Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto for Auer, because Auer said it was unplayable.  And that really hurt Tchaikovsky's feelings. And it laid dormant for several years before another Russian violinist. Brodsky took it up, learned it, and. Premiered it in Europe first, and only after its success in Europe did he bring it back to Russia, where it became a big success, and Auer felt very bad about that, and in fact, just before Tchaikovsky died, a few months before Tchaikovsky died, story has it that Auer went to Tchaikovsky and apologized to Tchaikovsky for his initial mistrust of the concerto. In fact, by that time, Auer himself had actually performed the concerto, championed it, and taught it to many of his students.  Yeah, and we'll see in this story how sensitive composers are, and how easy it is to hurt their feelings and really create. Like a lot of emotional turmoil. That's coming up. So Auer, like he might not have been their first choice for replacing, but he did have a knack of finding star pupils. That is something that we see, that I see in the conservatorium. Every now and then you have a teacher who's very talented at finding talent. Absolutely. And I know in Australia you have one very distinguished teacher who I think now has been poached by the Menuhin School in, in England. Yes. And we're not going to talk about that. Yes, we won't.  Because it's Must be a sore point.  But we do see, we do see him every now and then when he comes back. So along with Elman and Efren Zimbalist, Parlow becomes one of Auer's star pupils and Auer was so taken with her playing that he often called her Elman in a skirt, which I think is supposed to be a compliment. And in Auer's biography, he writes, he says, “It was during this year that my first London pupil came to me, Kathleen Parlow, who has since become one of the first, if not the first, of women violinists”.  And that, he says that in his biography, My Long Life in Music.  So, Every year, Auer had a summer school in Kristiana, which is Oslo today. And Parlow spent her summers there and became a great favourite in Norway, which leads us to the next and perhaps one of the most marking events in her career and life. At 17, having spent a year at the conservatory in Russia, Kathleen begins to put on public performances she gives solo performances in both St. Petersburg and Helsinki. So these are two places she knows quite well by now. And these concerts were, they were very important as Kathleen's mother really had no money to support them. And so, with but you know, Minnie doesn't bother her, she just ploughs on. And so with the money from these concerts this would have to tide her over.  From letters that I've read, they were living in like this small apartment and then another friend writes, you know this other person, they've been saying you live in a tiny little place, but I'm not going to spread that rumor. And, and so it was a, it was a thing on the radar that they didn't have much money and they were scraping by and they were like frequenting people of much more wealthier than they were, so they were sort of on the fringes of society, but with her talent that was sort of pushing, people wanted to know her. So she makes her professional debut in Berlin and then began, she begins a tour of Germany and the Netherlands and Norway. And in Norway, she performs for the King Hakon and Queen Maud. Of whom she'll become a favorite. And, and her touring schedule was phenomenal. It was just like nonstop. So, yeah. For a 17-year-old that's, you know, she's going all over the world. And you were saying that Auer knew . Do Tchaikovsky do you think Auer, was he was giving her these pieces that did, that influenced him? Yes.  I mean, Tchaikovsky  wrote a number of violin, solo violin works before the concerto, the most famous of which is, of course, the Waltz Scherzo and the Serenade  Melancholique. One is a fast, virtuoso piece, the other is a slow, soulful piece. And I know that Auer was the dedicatee of certainly the Serenade Melancholique, which she did play. So, so Auer's giving her stuff from, you know, his friend Tchaikovsky to play. Now she's 17 and she's touring to support herself and her mother and she has an amazing teacher who probably understands her circumstances all too well because Auer growing up also found himself in her position, supporting his father in his youth with his playing. So she's studying in St. Petersburg, which is an incredible feat in itself. So she must have had quite a strong character and her mother, Minnie, also appears to be very ambitious for her daughter. We're talking about her mother being ambitious, but for Kathleen to, you know, she's her daughter, she, she must've had quite a strong wheel as well. Yes. Well, she certainly did.  I wish we knew more about her because maybe she was very subservient, you know, we have no idea. Maybe she didn't have, I mean, it's a speculation, of course. Yeah. We do have like hundreds of letters from Kathleen and there's a lot between her and Auer, and there's a real sort of paternal, he really sort of  cared for her like a daughter almost and she looked up to him like a father and he was always very correct about it, you know, he would always write the letter to her. To Minnie, her mother the correspondents, it was, and it was always very, everything was very above board, but a very, they were very close. Kathleen later says that after expenses, her Berlin debut netted her exactly 10 pounds.  She didn't know it at the time, but this was an indication of what her future would be like, and she would be sort of financially in a precarious state most of her life, and she would so her routine was she studies with Auer every summer in order to prepare, like they were preparing her repertoire for the next season of touring. So now she has a tour  in 1908, so she's still 17, almost 18. It's in Norway, and to understand just a little bit of the political climate in the country, We can see that Norway, only three years earlier, had become independent of Sweden and had basically become its own country. So there's this this great sense of nationalism and pride in being Norwegian. And they have a newly minted king, King Hakon, who she's played for, and his queen, who was, He was in fact a Danish prince. And then when Norway, the Norwegian parliament asked him if he would like to become the king of Norway when they had their independence. And he said, why not? As part of this great sense of nationalism Norwegian musicians, composers, writers, and poets, they were celebrated and became superstars. And, oh gosh, yes, We can sort of understand. Poets have sort of dropped off the list, but back then poets, they were a big deal.  So you add to this a young, fresh faced, talented Canadian girl who knows and understands their country. She arrives in Oslo to play in the National Theatre, where Norway's very own Johan Halvorsen who's conductor and composer and violinist, he's conducting the country's largest professional orchestra. And that night for Kathleen's concert, she plays Brahms and some of  Halvorsen's compositions and the two, Kathleen Parloe and Halvorsen, they would go on to become quite good friends and Halvorsen regarded her very highly in saying, he said that her playing was superior almost to all the other famous soloists who made guest appearances in the city. So, I mean, a lot of people went through Oslo, so that was, you know, high praise.  And Kathleen quickly Becomes a admirer of his and she would become a driving factor in him finishing his violin concerto that he'd been dithering over for a very long time.  And this is Kathleen playing one of Halvorsen's compositions. It's not his concerto, it's Mosaic No. 4. So back to the theatre. And it was a magical night with the romantic music of Brahms to make you fall in love. And everyone did, just some more than others. And to finish off, there's music from their very own Johan Halvorsen to celebrate you know, a Norwegian talent. So Kathleen plays her heart out and when the concert ended, the crowd goes wild and the 17 year old soaks up the thunderous applause. She's holding on tight to her violin as she bows to adoring fans. Tonight she is the darling of Oslo.  In the uproarious crowd stands a man unable to take his eyes off this young woman. Her playing has moved him and her talent is unbelievable.  This man makes a decision that will change both their lives forever. So, Einar Bjornsson had fallen head over heels for the 17 year old Canadian there and then. She would turn 18 in a few months. And in that moment, he decided to give her the most beautiful gift she would ever receive.  So, who is Einar Bjornsson?  So what we were saying, poets, poets are less of a, you know, a hot shot today, but Einar was the son of a very, very famous poet. A Norwegian businessman and son of one of the most prominent public figures of the day, Bjørnstan Bjørnsson. He was a poet, a dramatist, a novelist, a journalist, an editor, a public speaker, and a theatre director. Five years earlier, in 1903, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and one of his poems, called ‘Yes, We Love This Land', was put to music and is the Norwegian national anthem up to this day. So, you could say he was kind of famous in these parts, and his personality alone would have easily filled. A concert hall, that one in Oslo.  Einar's father here, we're talking about Einar's father, he's the poet. Einar himself doesn't appear to have written any poetry. And this, so this situation could have been just fine the whole infatuation, love at first sight thing, except for a few things that put a spanner in the works. To begin with, Einar Björnsson is somewhat older than the youthful Kathleen he's 26 years older.  Then her, in fact, and for a 17 year old, that is a big age gap. So he's 45, but that aside, there is a problem that he's also married and has two children. His daughter is actually almost the same age as Kathleen she's 16, but he doesn't really seem to  see that. All he can see is this violinist and her talent. And he's been just, he's besotted and he's going to make a grand gesture. So obviously, one way to support the arts is to, what patrons do is they will buy, a lovely instrument and lend it to someone. So that's your normal affair. Obviously, one way to show his devotion to her is to find her a better violin. Hers is absolutely not good enough for someone of her talent. And he has to find her something amazing because she is amazing. He's determined to give her the most wonderful gift she has ever received.  So he goes out and he's a businessman. And so he goes to his businessman contacts. And Kathleen would have spoken to her entourage. I imagine, and I now finally finds a violin worthy of Kathleen's virtuosity, and it happens to be one of the most expensive violins on the market in 1908, and it's a 1735 Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu violin. It had previously belonged to great violinists  such as Giovanni Battista Viotti and Pierre Baillot. So just to clarify in the violin making world Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù are the two top makers. If you're comparing two instruments, if one was owned by no one not anyone that you know. And then another one was owned by Viotti and Pierre Baillot . The one that's owned by Viotti and Pierre Baillot is probably going to be worth more. Yeah. So Viotti, he was just huge. He had a lot of instruments. I think he did a little bit of teaching and dealing on the side, Viotti. Like with the number of instruments named after him, or he just went through a lot of instruments. So she buys this violin, and it's not all smooth sailing to get the violin. Because she, there's this, there's a big correspondence between her and Auer, and we see that actually there's this letter where it says from Auer saying, I saw Hamming very cross.  He says that the violin is compromised if he takes it back. So at one point, I think she may have changed her mind about this violin, but Hamming the dealer was not okay with this. All the I'm just trying to read his writing, it's not that easy. All the papers brought the news That Kathleen bought it so the newspapers have already, so the, you've got Hamming, that's annoyed, the papers have already said they've bought this violin and he could not, it says he could not sell it soon and repeat the sale, waiting till he finds something equal to the Guarneri. He showed me a Strad, indeed wonderful, asking 60, 000 livres, which must be pounds, right?  A nice fellow, isn't he?  And now, goodbye, write to me.  Love, Auer.  They do end up getting the violin. They, they don't get the 60, 000 Strad that Hamming Gets all upset about and offers, which I think he might have been exaggerating the price just to make him calm down about and to keep the del Gesu. Then Einar gives this to Kathleen. So this is a very kind of strange situation because normally you don't, you don't actually give, the patrons don't actually give their instrument to the No, absolutely. That's a remarkable gift. Just in terms of, I mean, the gesture is very magnanimous, but in terms of financial, there's just a financial cost or value of the gift is quite enormous. And  so really after only knowing her for a month, Einar transfers this money into her account and she travels, Kathleen travels to Germany to the Hamming workshop and purchases her del Gesu violin for two thousand pounds  and in today's money  according to an inflation calculator, that is three hundred thousand pounds. Almost four hundred thousand US dollars. More than half a million Australian dollars, which at the time was a lot for a violin as well. So we're not I mean, I, today you'd be kind of happy to buy a Del Gesu for half a million, but then it was, it'd be a bargain. So, it's interesting this, like, he buys this, this young violinist this very expensive present and it's a, and it's a grey area and it's fraught with debate ethically, really. And I feel like today musicians find themselves sometimes in this position where they're sort of indebted to the, to a benefactor. It's almost feudal. I I feel cause at the same time you're very happy that they're lending it to you, but got to keep an eye on if it's a healthy relationship to. To get the money he had to get, you know, half a million pounds pretty quickly. If you remember, Ina's father was a very famous poet who'd won a Nobel Prize in literature and part of the prize is that you win a large sum of money. And so, what does Einar do? He goes and asks Dad. So he asks, he borrows, he borrows most of the money actually. Goodness knows how he convinced him, but you know, he's a businessman. And also for the remaining, he's married, remember, and he's married to, actually, to an heiress, and he takes a bunch of her, her dowry money and transfers this to essentially a teenager he met a month ago. The purchase of this incredibly expensive violin attracted, it attracted the attention of the press internationally, but journalists It's never really questioned the fact that this, this gift was given to a young woman by a, by an established family man. So everyone was just like, Oh, isn't it amazing? Because normally in this circumstance, people don't often give the instrument. You buy it as an investment and you'll lend it to someone. I think I've heard of like very few, very few cases of things being gifted, but actually normally your standard practice is to, to lend it to people. And most people playing on strads, that's, that's what it is, someone's lent it to them. How would you feel about someone giving a 300, 000 instrument to your daughter, who's a teenager? Well, I'd be, I mean, I'd just hate the sort of obligation that would involve, because On one hand, it is a very wonderful gift if it is a gift, but you almost expect that  there is some expectation in return, don't you? Yeah. It's like he's bought her almost.  Kind of.  So, Einar, as, as I mentioned, he's, he's from a well known Norwegian family. They're very patriotic. His father's writings really established a sense of pride and meaning to what it was to be Norwegian. And he was. Like his father was this beloved figure in the country and he was quite frankly a hard act to follow. But his children gave it a good shot.  You have Einar was one of five children. His father Bjornstein Bjornsson was the poet and public figure. He worked in a theatre. His mother was an actress when he'd met her. Which is a little bit risque also for the time. So they're a bit more of sort of an acting bohemian theatre family. His older brother Bjorn Bjornsson, just to be complicated here, his brother's called Bjorn Bjornsson.  And not to be confused with Bjornstein Bjornsson, his father. So he was a stage actor and a theatre director.  Like his dad. He was a playwright and he was the first theatre director of the National Theatre. And that was the big theatre in Oslo where Kathleen played. He was also quite busy in his personal life, because his first wife was Jenny Bjornsson. I mean, another Bjornsson. Boarding house owner. So he married her for four years. So this is Einars older brother. He married her for four years, then he divorced her, then he married an opera singer. Called Gina Oselio for 16 years, but then he, they, they got divorced, and then he married in 1909 Aileen Bendix, who was actually Jewish, and that's an important point, that she was Jewish, because at this time, things are kind of soon things will start heating up in Europe. And then he was, then there was Einar's younger brother called Erling Bjørnson, and he was a farmer and a politician for the Norwegian Far Right Party. So he was extreme right. Bit of a fascist. The other brother. So he was elected to the parliament of Norway and he was very active during World War II. So his two brothers have very, like, polarized opinions. Einar himself, he was a passive member of the far right party, but during the war years at that time that was the only party that people were allowed to be part of, so you can't, it's hard to tell his political leanings from that. Then he has a younger sister.  Bergliot Bjornson, and she was a singer and a mezzo soprano, and she was married to a left wing politician Sigurd Ibsen, who was, he was the son of a playwright, and he becomes the Norwegian Prime Minister, so he plays a central role in Norway getting its independence. He met Einar's sister because he's a big patriot. Einar's father is a big patriot and that's how they were kind of family friends. It's not bad, you know, having your husband as the prime minister. Then he has another little sister called Dagny Bjornson and she was 19 when she marries a German publisher called Albert Langdon and so they're sort of like leftish as well. So Einar, he marries the sister of Albert Langdon. So they have this joint brother sister wedding. On the same day, the Bjornson brothers sisters marry the Langdon brothers sisters. But, the important thing to know is that the Langdons are very, very wealthy. They're orphans and they, they've inherited a lot of money. And so, but then Dagny, she ends up leaving her husband. Goes to Paris and works at another newspaper. And this is all in the, you know, the early 1900s.  So she had this amazing life and then and then she marries another man, a French literate called Georges Sartreau well he comes also from a very wealthy family. Then you have Einar, who's a businessman, and he marries Elizabeth and they have two children, and his life is like not that remarkable. I think the most exciting thing he does is fall in love with Kathleen, I suppose, and sort of runs after her and her violin. From Kathleen's diaries, we can see the day after this concert in Oslo on the 10th of January, it's written 10th January, Mr Bjornson, 11;30am She meets with him the day after skiing and tobogganing with the Bjornsons. She has a concert the next day, but the day after that it's dinner with the Bjornsons, then another concert. And then she plays for the King. Then she goes to dinner with the Bjornsons. So this is just an excerpt from her diary for those weeks. And the next day, it's just Mr. Bjornson. That's just her meeting him not with the family. And maybe this is where he says, you know, I'll get you a violin. Maybe that was that meeting. And then on the 28th of February, she's in Germany and, and he's there. Einar is there. He goes to see her. Then on the 6th of March, she's in Amsterdam and in her diaries, you know, Mr Bjornson, he's there. He's kind of like, I don't know if this is creepy. He's following her around and then, and it's around about this time that he buys the violin for her. So she finishes her tour and she goes back to England and a month later in her diary, who rocks up?  I know, he's there.  In England, and she's still only 17 there. It's like he's kind of shadowing her a bit. Yes, it's that next level patronage.  And then there's the, the aesthetic at the time, the, the pre-Raphaelite willowy type woman, which she fits perfectly into. And Kathleen, if you, if you see Kathleen, it's kind of like. John William Waterhouse, his paintings. There's women in these long flowy robes with flowers in their hair and long willowy postures and, they're often like, you know, they're flopping about on something like a chair or there's this one holding this pot of basil. And there's that famous painting, The Lady of Shalott, where you've got this woman float, is she, is she dead? She's floating in the water with her hair and, and all this fabric and flowers and.  In a promotional article, there was this quote from a review in the Evening Sun. “Kathleen Parlow, tall, straight, slim, and swaying as the white birch sapling of her native Canada, but a spring vision, but a spring vision all in pink from her French heels to her fiddle chin rest and crowned with parted chestnut hair of a deeper auburn than any Stradivarius violin made an astonishing impression of masterful ease”. I don't know if men were described like this, but they loved her. She's like a white birch.  Well she's very slender, she had beautiful long hair she was very thin, very fragile, and I think she sort of exemplified this pre Raphaelite beauty basically and that was so enchanting to have someone who  was almost from another world playing the violin divinely. I think she must have cut an incredibly attractive image  for the day. Absolutely. Yeah. And then she would have been like playing these like incredible romantic pieces. It would be juxtaposed with her playing. Yeah. And yeah. Yes. So she was this real William Waterhouse figure with her violin.  So she's lithe and willowy, and she has her touring schedule, which was phenomenal. She, so she tours England, Finland, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Just to name a few. It just kind of stopped after that. It was just never ending. And you have to remember it's the beginning of the 20th century,  and traveling, it's not like it is today. It was much more. Uncomfortable. I mean, it's incredible. You see one day she's in one country, the next day in another country. So this must have been quite fatiguing. And she's just playing night after night. Her mother, Minnie, she's her, she's, they're quite close. She's, and often like with these, with prodigies, often their parents. They're best friends, like they're the only constant in their life. So in the summers, she returns to Oslo every year for the summer school hour that's helping her for the next concerts. She spends quite a lot of time with Halverson, going to lunches and teas and rehearsals with him. You can see this in her diaries.  But is this, is this kind of the life of a musician as well? Like you have to, you have to go to a lot of teas and lunches with people to please patrons and so on. Yes, I think you do because musicians don't normally have much money and so to ingratiate themselves to patrons and sponsors they really had to coax them into help Yeah, because she's living this life sort of beyond her means, going to the theater, going to concerts and things, and sort of a balancing act. Back in Norway, and a week after she turns 18, there's an entry in her diary, play for Mr. Bjornson, and the next month her entries, they change slightly, and she'll now just call him E. B. For Einar Bjornson and the entries will say things like E. B. arriving and then often like a week later It's E. B. leaving and in her diaries, it's intermittently always though he'll be there for a week wherever she is often in England or and every few months He'll just pop up, you know in London in Germany in the Netherlands And he just always happens to be happens to be there and what's interesting is she has these hundreds of letters archived Of her writing to friends, to family, to her pianist. And it's really interesting that there's zero letters to Einar. There's no correspondence between them, which I think is maybe on purpose, they may be, they have to have been removed because she just writes letters to everyone, but we don't have these, any letters from them, so it just leaves things up to speculation. This brings us to the end of part one in the story of Kathleen Parlow. I would encourage you to keep listening to the music of Kathleen. To do this, Biddulph Recordings have released two CDs that you can listen to on Apple Music, Spotify, or any other major streaming service. You can also buy the double CD of her recordings if you prefer the uncompressed version. I hope you have enjoyed her story so far, but stick around for part two to find out what will happen with her career, the violin, the man who gave it to her, and the mystery behind a missing concerto that Kathleen would, in part, help solve after her death.  Goodbye for now.   ​ 

I'm against nose jobs for ordinary noses (like mine), but this journalist, who's covered cosmetic surgery for decades, is less judgmental: “I believe everybody is free to do what they want with their body.” Incidentally, she's just turned 96 and looks fabulous.

A friend recently shared me a remarkable passage from the Torah commentary of Rav Eliezer of Worms (Germany, 1176-1238), known as the "Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah," who was a disciple of Rabbenu Yehuda Ha'ahasid (author of Sefer Ha'hasidim, 1150-1217), and a teacher of the Ramban (Rav Moshe Nahmanides, Spain, 1194-1270). (The Hida, in Shem Ha'gedolim, tells that the teachings transmitted by Rabbenu Yehuda Ha'hasid to Rav Eliezer of Worms originate from Shimon Ha'pakuli, one of the Tanna'im.) Commenting on the verse in Parashat Vayehi, "Va'yebarech Otam" ("He blessed them" – Bereshit 49:28), which refers to the blessings which Yaakob Abinu granted his sons before his death, the Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah observed that the word "Otam" is written with the letter "Vav." It could have just as well been written without this letter, and thus the Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah finds great significance to this letter in the context of Yaakob's blessing. He explained that all blessings in the Torah are given on condition. Whenever we find in the Torah a promise of great success or prosperity, the promise is made on condition that we faithfully obey Hashem's commands. However, the Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah writes, the extra letter "Vav" in the phrase "Va'yebarech Otam" alludes to six blessings (as the letter "Vav" has the numerical value of 6) which mark an exception to this rule – namely, the six blessings of Birkat Kohanim. When the Kohanim bless the congregation, they pronounce six blessings – "Yebarechecha," "Ve'yishmarecha," "Ya'er," "Vi'yhuneka," "Yisa," and "Yasem." These six blessings, the Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah teaches, are unconditional. We don't have to earn them. No matter how deserving or undeserving we are, we are granted these blessings. This teaching of one of our Rishonim (Medieval sages) should bring our appreciation of Birkat Kohanim to an entirely new level. When we stand in front of the Kohanim as they pronounce their blessing, we receive them irrespective of our "record," regardless of any sins we might have committed. This is a very special blessing which we receive each day directly and unconditionally from Hashem, and we should celebrate this great privilege, and take full advantage of it. This is particularly meaningful for our community, which follows the custom of having the Kohanim bless the congregation each and every day (and not only on festivals, as is done in Ashkenazic communities). We are so fortunate to be able to receive this special blessing, which does not depend on our merits. Incidentally, this passage also gives us a glimpse into the remarkable "Ru'ah Ha'kodesh" of our great sages. From just a single letter – the letter "Vav" – the Ba'al Ha'Roke'ah was able to deduce this profound insight into the unique nature of Birkat Kohanim, undoubtedly testifying to his exalted level of understanding and insight.

Personally, I think that one's most cherished tunes come from ... oneself. By which I mean that the music you love may say more about you than about the music itself. You hear a Pretenders single and it calls you instantaneously back to the person you were when you first heard it. "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds has the power to instantly recreate the mood you were in when you first saw The Breakfast Club in the theater. Or maybe it brings to mind and heart the person you were with when you saw it! I seriously ask you, Why do you like the music, and especially the rock 'n roll music, that you still like? Why does a particular song have the power to evoke tears -- like in two seconds? Why? Tell me, please -- I'm deeply interested. And why interested? Because I care about you. I care about your heart. I care about the assimilation of both your negativity -- which often has its origin in long ago experience of pain -- and your positivity -- which can boost you up when other things pull you down. How would you begin this podcast? I mean, with what music would you open it? And conclude it? Incidentally, the Spirit of God spoke to me during the recording of it. You'll notice a change which takes place near the end. So I left it in -- the unexpected change -- because, well, it witnesses. LUV U!

The Union Finance Ministry has come out with a ‘White Paper' on the changes in the Indian economy in the past 20 years. In the 58-page document, which it presented in Parliament, the government compares the 10 years of UPA-rule from 2004 to 2014 with 10 years of NDA rule from 2014 to 2024. It claims that the NDA government in 2014 inherited a “deeply damaged economy” marked by “governance, economic and fiscal crises”. It further claims that the in the past 10 years, the NDA government has “turned around” the economy and “rebuilt” it from the foundations for long-term growth. Incidentally, this is the second such major paper from the government making significant claims in the economic domain. Earlier, the Niti Aayog had released a paper claiming that multidimensional poverty declined in India during the NDA years. We did a podcast on that paper as well, and you can check it out here (hyper link here). What are the various claims made in the White Paper, and how do they stand up to scrutiny? Guest: economist Professor Arun Kumar. Host: G. Sampath, Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu. Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian. Listen to the episode on the Niti Aayog report here.

Two witty stories of Piety & ProfanityListen to the Podcast at Steamy StoriesHeaven or HellBy Many Feathers .What’s it like when we die?Let’s face it. No one really knows what its like to die, I certainly didn’t. The last thing I remember was someone saying, “He’s gone.” In the next instant I was somewhere else. I can’t even explain it really, because the somewhere else was without substance, without definition really. Until images came to mind, places I had once known, been to, or had wondered about. Then suddenly… there I was!It felt warm, comforting. I was standing on a hill, there was a breeze against my face, though again, there hadn’t been until I’d considered it, then there it was! It was quiet, peaceful, just as I imagined it might be, would be. I looked down at myself, I was old.“Damn! Aren’t we supposed to change back to the best way we ever looked, or should look?” I wondered. And suddenly, I did. At least I wasn’t just a thought floating around without substance. Then I grimaced, worried that I would be, but that didn’t happen.“Ok, that’s better. Much, much better!" I said feeling a hell of a lot better admittedly. But it was still strange.I mean, we all have our own ideas of what Heaven is supposed to be like I suppose. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever even heard of or imagined before either. No pearly gates, though they’d have looked really out of place from where I was standing. No white haired guy in a white flowing robe with a great big book with a bright green bookmarker holding the place open where my name would have been listed. None of that. Hell, there wasn’t even a bird singing or a butterfly flying. And then…there was."Ok, maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this after all,” I thought to myself.But I was still surprised no one had come to greet me, no one had come to tell me where I was supposed to go, or what I was supposed to do. I even thought about my parents who had died years ago. Nothing. Unlike the sudden appearance of birds, butterflies and bee’s (which I quickly decided I didn’t want or need and made them go away) there was nothing else. At least no mom, no dad. No uncles, no aunts, no friends (only one or two of which I could actually remember as having died before I did). Bottom line was, no people.“Well, this sucks!” I said aloud wondering if anyone could actually hear me.I decided to go for a walk, and then wondered if I could fly. Sure enough, I was floating in the air and moving forward at an incredible speed. Problem was, the ground below me whizzed by faster than I could imagine it until I was standing in the middle of darkness.“Lets try that one again,” I thought. I was back on the hill again, oh yeah; the breeze thing, and the birds and the butterflies were kinda cool too. Except, I really am going to walk this time, at least until such a time as I get the flying/moving thing down a whole lot better.So I walked. And I walked, and I walked. The only cool thing here was, when I got tired of walking and seeing the same scenery (cause I knew it usually would take several hours if I was to walk out of this valley and actually get anywhere else), all I had to do was think of another place, and I was there. One moment in the mountains, in the next walking through Canyon lands in Moab. At least I thought it was Moab, sure looked like it anyway, though once again there was no people. And that was the other interesting part. I tried thinking about the valley where I’d lived, my home, once again my friends and family. I think…though don’t take my word on this, but I think I was in the valley where my home should be, once was, or would be. I mean who knows, when your dead, maybe when we’re there, we’re just borrowing the here, which is real, when that reality isn’t. Anyway, no houses, no cars, no planes, no people. Nada…nothing.I kept thinking that maybe I was on hold or something. Or that I’d failed to see the sign that had said “Out to lunch”. I certainly didn’t want to stand around in the dark, and I was sort of missing the birds at this point, as I’d forgotten to bring them along with me. So I went back. Back to the mountain, sat down and waited.Who knows how long I sat there waiting. A year? A day? A century or two? Who the hell knows. I certainly didn’t have a watch, couldn’t even produce one. And who was around to tell or give me the correct time, or even what the hell day it was anyway?So I just sat there and waited. And wondered. And began to think about my life and some of the people I knew, or once knew anyway. And then the last thing in the world I had ever expected to happen happened. I looked up the hill and saw a young woman walking towards me. She looked familiar, and even at this distance I could envision her face, see her smile, and she even waved.“Thank God!” I said aloud, half expecting to hear a booming “You’re Welcome!” but that didn’t happen either. I really hate it when you can’t remember a name. I mean I knew I knew her, I just couldn’t remember from where, or when. Then it came to me. And was that because I suddenly decided I did know her name? That I’d actually thought about her in passing when I began thinking about my life and what I’d accomplished or failed to accomplish for one reason or another? Or because I just decided what her name was. Once again, I didn’t know for sure, not really. But as Darlene approached getting ever closer, which is when I suddenly decided to do the half-fly, half hop thing, I was standing next to her.“Darlene? Is that really you?” She smiled and nodded her head yes.“Please tell me you can speak,” I asked worriedly. “Or are we supposed to be talking with our minds and not our mouths or something like that?” I asked.She laughed then, which was like music to my ears (and briefly, I swear I could hear the Sound of Music playing in the background).“I’ve been looking for you,” She said simply.“You have?”“Yes, ever since I got here.”“How long has that been?”“Oh, I don’t know, forever maybe? Who knows?”At the moment, I couldn’t very well argue with that. “Well, it’s sure as hell nice to finally see someone else, and actually talk to them!” Then I hunched my shoulders worriedly, wondering if the word “Hell” was appropriate, or inappropriate under the circumstances.“So, you seen anyone else?” I had to ask.“Nope, just you. But then again, like I said, you’re the only one I’ve been looking for anyway.”I still wondered why. Why was she here with me and not with her friends, her family. What was she doing here looking for me for? And why her anyway? I mean after all, Darlene had been the first girl I had ever kissed, first girl who two years later actually let me touch her boobs, and then the first girl I had ever gone down on in her parents bedroom when they were out for the evening. But what that had to do with us still escaped me. Or any of this for that matter.“So, now what?" I had to ask."I don’t know, you tell me,” she responded.Like that helped anything. I guess we could continue to sit here and wait. But I’d done that already. And it was Darlene that said she’d been wandering around for just about ever looking for me, so there had to be something about that that made some sort of sense, which for the moment at least, didn’t.And then I thought about something else.“Was there a reason why you’ve been looking for me?” I asked.“Yeah,” she said finally grinning. “Why don’t you lie down on the grass and I’ll show you.”Now we were getting somewhere. Unless she suddenly turned into some sort of Vampire or something at the last minute.“You’re not a Vampire are you?” I had to ask. Once again she laughed.“No, and I’m not here to suck your blood either. But I wouldn’t mind sucking something else.”“Ok, this HAD to be heaven!” I decided. “No way in, well…you know, no way in that place could this be that.”She had a lot bigger, a lot nicer tits than I remembered too. But of course that probably made sense. I mean back then…anyways, at least now she had them and they were pretty nice looking too. She undressed and got down on her knees and oh yeah, that felt nice, really nice. And once again I was reminded how good this felt, how pleasurable this was, and that if she kept this up I’d soon be climaxing. And then the fear, “What if? What if I can’t? What if she sucks and sucks me for ever and I can’t?” But then I was, and I did…and all was right with the world again. Well, this world anyway. And besides, I sorta always figured that if a person went to hell, they probably couldn’t have an orgasm, so that was at least a point on the Heaven side of the ledger I suppose. And the fact I’d just had one, and a damn good one in fact, tended to support that theory.“Now what do you want to do?” I asked a while later.“How about we fuck now?” she asked demurely. Once again I looked around. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk like that here,” I told her. “Mess around, or do it might be a little more appropriate, something like that.”“Ok, so lets mess around then,” she stated.So we did.The only thing I remember about Darlene that I didn’t like was that she was so clingy as they say. Seemed she was always touching me one-way or the other. A hand on my leg if we were simply sitting there, or if we walked anyplace, she had to hold my hand, or if we laid down in the grass, or on a hill, or sometimes when we just floated around off the ground (especially then) so I quit floating after that), she had to be holding onto something. I mean sometimes when she held onto things, or when even I did, I liked it. But not all the time. But if I said anything to her about it, hurt her feelings, then she’d sit there and cry until I told her I was sorry, to which there would come the hand into my lap again.Oh yeah, and you don’t sleep either. You don’t go to bed and wake up the next morning feeling either tired, sleepy or refreshed. The sun’s just sort of there, all the time, though you don’t see the sun, or anything else like it for that matter. It’s just sun-shinny with light all day long (all night long for that matter) but like I said. You don’t sleep. I sorta miss that.Then a while later. (I like to think in terms of days, but for all I know, a day is a year here, or a millennium, who cares?) Anyway, so like about maybe a week later we’re hanging out, (oh yeah and I gave up wearing clothes, I mean whets the point? We’re usually naked most of the time anyway, and it makes it a whole lot easier when we’re in the mood to mess around). So we’ve just finished doing it…again, when I look up the road. (Made that one myself out of dirt, seemed appropriate anyway, somewhere to look down, or walk down when we weren’t busy messing around). And low and behold, I see this other girl approaching us. And just like Darlene, I think I know her, and then I do know her. Brenda?Brenda’s the first girl I ever did it with. She smiles and waves, and I wave back and notice Darlene’s not smiling. But she remains by my side as we sort of do the float walk thing towards where Brenda’s standing.Next thing you know, it’s the same story. Brenda’s been looking for me for quite a while too now, and finally knows where to find me, so she has, and here she is, and here we are all now.And then we’re all messing around, having a hell…I mean having a lot of fun, and its all good, and they’re both beautiful and all that, even though Brenda and Darlene sort of fight over who’s going first and that sort of thing, which is kind of cool in a way as I really never did have another girl fight over me, except for maybe Theresa, and then low and behold, I see her approaching, smiling and waving at us too.Damn, now isn’t this interesting? I think to myself. Then I begin to picture all the girls I’ve ever known, ever been with throughout my entire life. And the next thing I know, there’s this entire flock of women walking down the road towards us, towards me rather as neither Darlene, Brenda, or especially Theresa are looking very anxious to meet any of them.And better still, every damn, ah every darn one of them is as naked as the day they were born, or died…whatever.And have you ever heard the term, “Too much of a good thing?” Well in a way I guess, this was the perfect example of that. Though admittedly when I saw my first wife, and my third I began to wonder. And though my second wife hadn’t shown up as yet, I was sort of grateful for that, as I’d really considered her to be quite a bitch, and so she either hadn’t died yet (and I couldn’t honestly remember if she had, or if she hadn’t…and who knows what time it is, or how long we’ve all been here anyway) the fact she hadn’t shown up was a good sign, sorta. Because she really had been the meanest most vindictive woman I’d ever known. And seeing her here, really would convince me this was Hell, and not just some sort of holding area that I was now sorta hoping this really was.But it was all still pretty much confusing. On the one hand, I could “do it” with any one of them any time I liked. And did so, but I had to admit, it took a lot out of me, and most of them afterwards got all pissy about it if I hadn’t chosen one of them. (Especially Theresa). And have you ever tried doing it with someone else hanging over your shoulder yelling “Me next? Me next?" I tell ya, it’s not exactly conducive to keeping it up even while your doing it, or even how attractive or how beautiful the woman are with that going on all the time.Eventually, I did learn that if I thought about moving very fast when I flew, entered that black void, I would find myself alone. The only problem with that was, the moment I came out, wherever it was I thought I would be, they’d find me. Then it was fucking, sucking until I was totally exhausted once again, not to mention all the God damn bickering (yeah you heard me) it’s starting to get on my nerves in case you didn’t know it.Point is, I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on, why I’m here, or what this really is.Mostly now I just sit alone here in the dark.I miss my birds.By Many Feathers for LiteroticaVictorian SistersThe secret correspondence of two naughty sisters, in the gilded age of London's well-bred society.By Sally hollister. Listen to the podcast at Steamy StoriesDear Tess,I have been led to believe, in a recent social visit to your home, that you allowed my Bernard to be beastly with you to such a degree as is shameful for ladies to put to pen & ink. As you know I have always regarded you as a sister and I am loathe to believe that this can be true. Pray tell me what occurred.Your dearest friend,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am afraid to inform you that the rumours you have heard are true, but do be assured that the event was not of my instigation. It happened thus; I was bending over to pick something up when Bernard assaulted me from behind and was, as you say, beastly with me. He came upon me so sudden I feared for my sanity as I am not used to being assaulted in such a fashion in my own drawing room on a Wednesday afternoon. But, as you can infer, I was not to blame.Your devoted friend,TessPS: I am your sisterDear Tess,Sorry about the sister thing. Quite forgot. Anyway, I cannot believe that my Bernard would behave in such a brutal fashion. Are you sure he did not trip and thus fall upon you?Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I truly cannot say if Bernard tripped, for as I informed you, I was bent down at the time and my gaze was upon the trinket I was retrieving.Your devoted sister,TessDear Tess,It is beyond belief that my sweet Bernard would take advantage of a girl in the way you imply. Are you sure you did not wiggle your bottom at him in a provocative fashion, thus causing a rush of blood to his head and his attack upon your nether parts.Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am outraged that you could think I could behave in such a fashion. I have only wiggled my bottom once in my life. It was during my honeymoon, in front of my husband, Victor, and it gave him a nosebleed. You must seek elsewhere to find a motive behind Bernard’s caddish behaviour.Your dearest sister,TessDear Tess,I have now spoken to Bernard about the matter and he confirms that he did indeed trip over a rug which caused him to fall upon you. What I still cannot ascertain is how he managed to achieve his end through your bustle.Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,Ah, I failed to inform you that I have taken up nude modelling recently and was in that mode when the event occurred. I have had to resort to this as our financial situation is perilous. Victor has been thrown out of the army since leading his regiment on an attack upon our allies, the French, during an exercise. He has always had difficulties with his sense of direction, the silly sausage. In any case I think it was an absolute over-reaction by the military big-wigs as there were only 43 of the Froggies killed and none of them above the rank of sergeant.As we have no income Victor suggested I take up modelling in the nude for artists and it is quite lucrative at 10 guineas per hour. It doesn’t quite cover Victor’s gambling debts so I came up with the idea of offering minor beastliness to young gentlemen for a small remuneration. You will understand then that your Bernard owes me 20 guineas. We cannot take cheques else the amount would be taxed so would you slip the amount into an envelope and have your butler drop it off at our residence?Your loving sister,TessDear Tess,I understand entirely your need to pursue a career of nude figure modelling and offering beastliness to strange men as times are hard. What I fail to understand is this, though you were naked, how it came to be that Bernard managed to be beastly with you if he was fully dressed? He, as far as I know, has not taken up a career of nude modelling. I have spoken to Bernard about the 20 guineas and he says he accepts his debt but says he must pay by cheque and make a record of the transaction, otherwise he will not be able to claim any tax relief on the transaction.CharlotteDear Charlotte,How Bernard achieved his end while fully clothed I do not know, but the fact is that beastliness did occur. As my new enterprise requires discreetness to all my gentlemen; you must question him further on the event. I am shocked that he wishes to declare the transaction to the tax authorities. Has he no concern for the reputation of his sister-in-law in her hour of need?TessDear Tess,My apologies, dear sister, but I have the truth from Bernard at last. It seems that when he saw you bending over, in all your nakedness, he became extremely aroused and took his manly parts out; and handled them vigorously, as he does. I suggested that his trip over the rug then, was caused by him approaching you with the intent of being beastly, but he denied this, saying that he was reaching for a box of cigars. I can vouch for this as he likes a smoke while committing the sin of Onan. Nevertheless, the fact is that he had his manly parts exposed and so, it was not only your nakedness which caused the incident. Consequently and by way of reparation I have insisted that he pay you in cash, with no record kept; to protect your reputation.Incidentally, now that he has been beastly with you, I wonder if I may venture that I would not object to your Victor being beastly with me, as a sort of quid pro quo. It would seem only fair and I make this offer with Bernard’s full approval. I am available for beastliness on the 14th thru 18th, while Bernard is off to Scotland for the shooting.CharlotteDear Charlotte,You are such a sweet sister! I received the 20 guineas yesterday and have tucked them secretly away. Victor is amazingly excited about being beastly with you and says he has had a notion for it ever since he first met you. He was so aroused that he was beastly with me last eve, several times and in various positions. I do hope he provides as much satisfaction as your Bernard did for me. He was beastly with me for over half an hour, which is what made me suspicious about the story of tripping on the rug.On the former matter, Victor asks if being beastly with you is on the same commercial basis that I am pursuing and, if that is the case, what kind of fee you would be looking for? I personally would only ask that you set a sufficiently high quid for your bountiful quo. So as not to raise the presumptions of my future complimentary ministrations, such as suffice to satisfy his urges..TessDear Tess,No, I am not selling beastliness as you are, for we are not in the same financial straits which you are suffering, so you can inform Victor he may keep his cash in his pocket. I am only offering him beastliness so that we can all be on an equal footing in being beastly with each other. I have no particular desire for Victor and look upon the upcoming event as merely a matter of etiquette. The sooner you two can get yourself back on a sound financial footing, so that you can forego selling beastliness, the happier I shall be. It does my reputation no good, let me tell you, to have my sister behaving like a trollop. Whatever my debauched actions extend to shall be my best effort to further share in your sufferings, as a good sister ought to do.Your devoted sibling,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am saddened that you think me a trollop for I had aspirations to be a strumpet. I acknowledge that these positions hold little in the way of social distinction, but the beastliness is jolly good and one does meet such interesting people. A bishop of the church visited me yesterday but he only wanted me to sit on his lap and call him uncle while he fiddled about beneath my skirts. It was the easiest and quickest 10 guineas I’ve ever earned. He even said, ‘Bless you, child,’ when he left.Your loving sister,TessDearest Tess,Sitting on bishop’s knees while they fiddle about with your under-carriage is hardly becoming of a well-brought-up young lady. If word of this gets out your reputation will be totally ruined. Have a care, beastliness with young men to earn a coin is understandable, but this goes beyond the pale.Your concerned sister,Charlotte.Dear, sweet, Charlotte,I fear you have misunderstood me. The gentleman in question was Roman Catholic, and not Church of EnglandTessDear Tess,Thank the Lord for that. I had believed that these Romish sorts were only interested in young men’s bottoms so, of course, I assumed that the clerical gentleman in question was one of ours. This puts the entire matter in a totally different light; though I do warn you to steer clear of the clergy in general. They are there to look after our spiritual needs and should not be tempted by beastliness. Tell Victor, I shall expect him at 11am, the 14th; as arranged. And please Insist that he fasts all carnal relief along the trip. And that he's had a sound night's rest. His return shall commence following sufficient rest for the carriage ride home.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Have no fears, I have no intent to allow full beastliness with a member of the clergy. If I were so minded our local vicar is quite a dish. The poor chap has the misfortune to be married to a wife with a face so sour that one could hardly imagine that she’d ever seen a gentleman’s sausage, never mind handled it, so he’s be bound to be up for a bit of extra-marital naughtiness. But he has nothing to fear from me as there are enough of the laity to satisfy my financial needs.I hope you are enjoying your bout of beastliness with Victor. He left here quite the ardent lover at the thought of beastliness with you, and with my consent too. No man could have been more pleased at the consequences of his brother in law tripping over a carpet rug.Your loving sister,TessDear Tess,Your letter is to hand, but your husband is not. I know you said he had a bad sense of direction but he was to be picked up at the railway station by our driver, so I can’t see how he could possibly have lost his way. Oh wait, I think I hear the door.CharlotteDearest Charlotte,I write on behalf of Victor who wants me to thank you for a wonderful weekend. He says the beastliness was absolutely superb and possibly the best he’d ever had, which made me a little jealous, I confess. Nevertheless, he has returned to me re-invigorated and never stops from singing your praises. All day he has been telling me how good you are at this, and how wonderfully you did that. If you are such an artiste where beastliness is concerned perhaps you should reconsider offering it on a commercial basis.Your sister,TessDear Tess,I fear Victor’s recollections of our encounter differ somewhat from mine. For me, the beastliness was not 'superb’ and as a matter of fact I thought it quite inadequate. I had hardly got him into my bed-chamber and started handling his sausage when he was effusive all over my hand. I allowed him a half hour to recover and then attempted again, when he reacted in precisely the same fashion. I will say this for him, he is copious. However the entire weekend proceeded in this fashion and in matter of fact no complete beastliness ever took place. Is this what he is like when he is beastly with you? You must have a very unhappy marital life if this is the case and the chances of you starting a family are slim.With my deepest regrets.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Victor admits that he became over-excited at thought of being beastly with you and humbly begs your pardon for his woeful performance. He is not, he himself allows, one of nature’s long-distance runners, but neither is he a sprinter. He is what you might call a 'middle-distance’ man and I have always found him entirely satisfactory in that department. You are, as I freely admit, much more beautiful than I, and I can quite understand how the thought of beastliness with you, brought my poor pet to such a state of arousal. So, please forgive us both for our lack.Your humble sister,TessDear Tess,I do not see how you can say that I am more beautiful than you, for as you well know I am your sister. Not only that, I am your twin sister. Even more so, I am your identical twin sister. I am older than you by a matter of ten minutes which might suggest that it is this fact which has worked the trick and your Victor is actually aroused by older women. I would be glad to hear your views on this.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Ah, but that explains so much. Why we always had our birthdays on the same day and were always the same age. I do wish Mama had told me but, as you know, she was always busy entertaining uncle Samuel and far too distracted for we young sprites. As to Victor being attracted to older women, he denies this vigorously and says he only has eyes for pretty young doxies such as we are. He also says that the incident with old Mrs Puffer, the family cook, was an utter misunderstanding and the rumour that he was caught in her room about to be beastly with her was a falsehood. He was, in fact, rummaging through her clothes looking for a school-book which she had secreted about her person. I have my doubts about this version of events however, as I am aware of how much Victor loathes learning of any sort.It may therefore be true that he is aroused by old crones, such as you are. Just think, when you reach the grand old age of 30, for a full 10 minutes I shall be only 29. Oh, the joy of being young!Victor has offered to visit you again and attempt to make a better list of being beastly if this is acceptable to both Bernard and yourself. For myself, I should think that he has had his chance and should be happy for the limited amount of beastliness he did get. If you think differently, please let me know.  If further correspondence becomes too difficult for your butler to attend to deliveries, You might consider sending your letters with Bernard, at his weekly… art tutoring.Your younger sister,TessBy Sally hollister for Literotica

Look around! Everything has some kind of design and order. Calendars, language, nature, science, and medicine. Then consider fabrics, computers, business, and farming. Design includes appearance, function, and natural / man-made capacity. The world - in fact, the entire universe - overflows with amazing design. Incidentally, you are no exception. Life is more meaningful, pleasant, and manageable when you embrace your incredible design. Let's explore how to do that. Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

Two witty stories of Piety & ProfanityListen to the Podcast at Steamy StoriesHeaven or HellBy Many Feathers .What’s it like when we die?Let’s face it. No one really knows what its like to die, I certainly didn’t. The last thing I remember was someone saying, “He’s gone.” In the next instant I was somewhere else. I can’t even explain it really, because the somewhere else was without substance, without definition really. Until images came to mind, places I had once known, been to, or had wondered about. Then suddenly… there I was!It felt warm, comforting. I was standing on a hill, there was a breeze against my face, though again, there hadn’t been until I’d considered it, then there it was! It was quiet, peaceful, just as I imagined it might be, would be. I looked down at myself, I was old.“Damn! Aren’t we supposed to change back to the best way we ever looked, or should look?” I wondered. And suddenly, I did. At least I wasn’t just a thought floating around without substance. Then I grimaced, worried that I would be, but that didn’t happen.“Ok, that’s better. Much, much better!" I said feeling a hell of a lot better admittedly. But it was still strange.I mean, we all have our own ideas of what Heaven is supposed to be like I suppose. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever even heard of or imagined before either. No pearly gates, though they’d have looked really out of place from where I was standing. No white haired guy in a white flowing robe with a great big book with a bright green bookmarker holding the place open where my name would have been listed. None of that. Hell, there wasn’t even a bird singing or a butterfly flying. And then…there was."Ok, maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this after all,” I thought to myself.But I was still surprised no one had come to greet me, no one had come to tell me where I was supposed to go, or what I was supposed to do. I even thought about my parents who had died years ago. Nothing. Unlike the sudden appearance of birds, butterflies and bee’s (which I quickly decided I didn’t want or need and made them go away) there was nothing else. At least no mom, no dad. No uncles, no aunts, no friends (only one or two of which I could actually remember as having died before I did). Bottom line was, no people.“Well, this sucks!” I said aloud wondering if anyone could actually hear me.I decided to go for a walk, and then wondered if I could fly. Sure enough, I was floating in the air and moving forward at an incredible speed. Problem was, the ground below me whizzed by faster than I could imagine it until I was standing in the middle of darkness.“Lets try that one again,” I thought. I was back on the hill again, oh yeah; the breeze thing, and the birds and the butterflies were kinda cool too. Except, I really am going to walk this time, at least until such a time as I get the flying/moving thing down a whole lot better.So I walked. And I walked, and I walked. The only cool thing here was, when I got tired of walking and seeing the same scenery (cause I knew it usually would take several hours if I was to walk out of this valley and actually get anywhere else), all I had to do was think of another place, and I was there. One moment in the mountains, in the next walking through Canyon lands in Moab. At least I thought it was Moab, sure looked like it anyway, though once again there was no people. And that was the other interesting part. I tried thinking about the valley where I’d lived, my home, once again my friends and family. I think…though don’t take my word on this, but I think I was in the valley where my home should be, once was, or would be. I mean who knows, when your dead, maybe when we’re there, we’re just borrowing the here, which is real, when that reality isn’t. Anyway, no houses, no cars, no planes, no people. Nada…nothing.I kept thinking that maybe I was on hold or something. Or that I’d failed to see the sign that had said “Out to lunch”. I certainly didn’t want to stand around in the dark, and I was sort of missing the birds at this point, as I’d forgotten to bring them along with me. So I went back. Back to the mountain, sat down and waited.Who knows how long I sat there waiting. A year? A day? A century or two? Who the hell knows. I certainly didn’t have a watch, couldn’t even produce one. And who was around to tell or give me the correct time, or even what the hell day it was anyway?So I just sat there and waited. And wondered. And began to think about my life and some of the people I knew, or once knew anyway. And then the last thing in the world I had ever expected to happen happened. I looked up the hill and saw a young woman walking towards me. She looked familiar, and even at this distance I could envision her face, see her smile, and she even waved.“Thank God!” I said aloud, half expecting to hear a booming “You’re Welcome!” but that didn’t happen either. I really hate it when you can’t remember a name. I mean I knew I knew her, I just couldn’t remember from where, or when. Then it came to me. And was that because I suddenly decided I did know her name? That I’d actually thought about her in passing when I began thinking about my life and what I’d accomplished or failed to accomplish for one reason or another? Or because I just decided what her name was. Once again, I didn’t know for sure, not really. But as Darlene approached getting ever closer, which is when I suddenly decided to do the half-fly, half hop thing, I was standing next to her.“Darlene? Is that really you?” She smiled and nodded her head yes.“Please tell me you can speak,” I asked worriedly. “Or are we supposed to be talking with our minds and not our mouths or something like that?” I asked.She laughed then, which was like music to my ears (and briefly, I swear I could hear the Sound of Music playing in the background).“I’ve been looking for you,” She said simply.“You have?”“Yes, ever since I got here.”“How long has that been?”“Oh, I don’t know, forever maybe? Who knows?”At the moment, I couldn’t very well argue with that. “Well, it’s sure as hell nice to finally see someone else, and actually talk to them!” Then I hunched my shoulders worriedly, wondering if the word “Hell” was appropriate, or inappropriate under the circumstances.“So, you seen anyone else?” I had to ask.“Nope, just you. But then again, like I said, you’re the only one I’ve been looking for anyway.”I still wondered why. Why was she here with me and not with her friends, her family. What was she doing here looking for me for? And why her anyway? I mean after all, Darlene had been the first girl I had ever kissed, first girl who two years later actually let me touch her boobs, and then the first girl I had ever gone down on in her parents bedroom when they were out for the evening. But what that had to do with us still escaped me. Or any of this for that matter.“So, now what?" I had to ask."I don’t know, you tell me,” she responded.Like that helped anything. I guess we could continue to sit here and wait. But I’d done that already. And it was Darlene that said she’d been wandering around for just about ever looking for me, so there had to be something about that that made some sort of sense, which for the moment at least, didn’t.And then I thought about something else.“Was there a reason why you’ve been looking for me?” I asked.“Yeah,” she said finally grinning. “Why don’t you lie down on the grass and I’ll show you.”Now we were getting somewhere. Unless she suddenly turned into some sort of Vampire or something at the last minute.“You’re not a Vampire are you?” I had to ask. Once again she laughed.“No, and I’m not here to suck your blood either. But I wouldn’t mind sucking something else.”“Ok, this HAD to be heaven!” I decided. “No way in, well…you know, no way in that place could this be that.”She had a lot bigger, a lot nicer tits than I remembered too. But of course that probably made sense. I mean back then…anyways, at least now she had them and they were pretty nice looking too. She undressed and got down on her knees and oh yeah, that felt nice, really nice. And once again I was reminded how good this felt, how pleasurable this was, and that if she kept this up I’d soon be climaxing. And then the fear, “What if? What if I can’t? What if she sucks and sucks me for ever and I can’t?” But then I was, and I did…and all was right with the world again. Well, this world anyway. And besides, I sorta always figured that if a person went to hell, they probably couldn’t have an orgasm, so that was at least a point on the Heaven side of the ledger I suppose. And the fact I’d just had one, and a damn good one in fact, tended to support that theory.“Now what do you want to do?” I asked a while later.“How about we fuck now?” she asked demurely. Once again I looked around. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk like that here,” I told her. “Mess around, or do it might be a little more appropriate, something like that.”“Ok, so lets mess around then,” she stated.So we did.The only thing I remember about Darlene that I didn’t like was that she was so clingy as they say. Seemed she was always touching me one-way or the other. A hand on my leg if we were simply sitting there, or if we walked anyplace, she had to hold my hand, or if we laid down in the grass, or on a hill, or sometimes when we just floated around off the ground (especially then) so I quit floating after that), she had to be holding onto something. I mean sometimes when she held onto things, or when even I did, I liked it. But not all the time. But if I said anything to her about it, hurt her feelings, then she’d sit there and cry until I told her I was sorry, to which there would come the hand into my lap again.Oh yeah, and you don’t sleep either. You don’t go to bed and wake up the next morning feeling either tired, sleepy or refreshed. The sun’s just sort of there, all the time, though you don’t see the sun, or anything else like it for that matter. It’s just sun-shinny with light all day long (all night long for that matter) but like I said. You don’t sleep. I sorta miss that.Then a while later. (I like to think in terms of days, but for all I know, a day is a year here, or a millennium, who cares?) Anyway, so like about maybe a week later we’re hanging out, (oh yeah and I gave up wearing clothes, I mean whets the point? We’re usually naked most of the time anyway, and it makes it a whole lot easier when we’re in the mood to mess around). So we’ve just finished doing it…again, when I look up the road. (Made that one myself out of dirt, seemed appropriate anyway, somewhere to look down, or walk down when we weren’t busy messing around). And low and behold, I see this other girl approaching us. And just like Darlene, I think I know her, and then I do know her. Brenda?Brenda’s the first girl I ever did it with. She smiles and waves, and I wave back and notice Darlene’s not smiling. But she remains by my side as we sort of do the float walk thing towards where Brenda’s standing.Next thing you know, it’s the same story. Brenda’s been looking for me for quite a while too now, and finally knows where to find me, so she has, and here she is, and here we are all now.And then we’re all messing around, having a hell…I mean having a lot of fun, and its all good, and they’re both beautiful and all that, even though Brenda and Darlene sort of fight over who’s going first and that sort of thing, which is kind of cool in a way as I really never did have another girl fight over me, except for maybe Theresa, and then low and behold, I see her approaching, smiling and waving at us too.Damn, now isn’t this interesting? I think to myself. Then I begin to picture all the girls I’ve ever known, ever been with throughout my entire life. And the next thing I know, there’s this entire flock of women walking down the road towards us, towards me rather as neither Darlene, Brenda, or especially Theresa are looking very anxious to meet any of them.And better still, every damn, ah every darn one of them is as naked as the day they were born, or died…whatever.And have you ever heard the term, “Too much of a good thing?” Well in a way I guess, this was the perfect example of that. Though admittedly when I saw my first wife, and my third I began to wonder. And though my second wife hadn’t shown up as yet, I was sort of grateful for that, as I’d really considered her to be quite a bitch, and so she either hadn’t died yet (and I couldn’t honestly remember if she had, or if she hadn’t…and who knows what time it is, or how long we’ve all been here anyway) the fact she hadn’t shown up was a good sign, sorta. Because she really had been the meanest most vindictive woman I’d ever known. And seeing her here, really would convince me this was Hell, and not just some sort of holding area that I was now sorta hoping this really was.But it was all still pretty much confusing. On the one hand, I could “do it” with any one of them any time I liked. And did so, but I had to admit, it took a lot out of me, and most of them afterwards got all pissy about it if I hadn’t chosen one of them. (Especially Theresa). And have you ever tried doing it with someone else hanging over your shoulder yelling “Me next? Me next?" I tell ya, it’s not exactly conducive to keeping it up even while your doing it, or even how attractive or how beautiful the woman are with that going on all the time.Eventually, I did learn that if I thought about moving very fast when I flew, entered that black void, I would find myself alone. The only problem with that was, the moment I came out, wherever it was I thought I would be, they’d find me. Then it was fucking, sucking until I was totally exhausted once again, not to mention all the God damn bickering (yeah you heard me) it’s starting to get on my nerves in case you didn’t know it.Point is, I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on, why I’m here, or what this really is.Mostly now I just sit alone here in the dark.I miss my birds.By Many Feathers for LiteroticaVictorian SistersThe secret correspondence of two naughty sisters, in the gilded age of London's well-bred society.By Sally hollister. Listen to the podcast at Steamy StoriesDear Tess,I have been led to believe, in a recent social visit to your home, that you allowed my Bernard to be beastly with you to such a degree as is shameful for ladies to put to pen & ink. As you know I have always regarded you as a sister and I am loathe to believe that this can be true. Pray tell me what occurred.Your dearest friend,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am afraid to inform you that the rumours you have heard are true, but do be assured that the event was not of my instigation. It happened thus; I was bending over to pick something up when Bernard assaulted me from behind and was, as you say, beastly with me. He came upon me so sudden I feared for my sanity as I am not used to being assaulted in such a fashion in my own drawing room on a Wednesday afternoon. But, as you can infer, I was not to blame.Your devoted friend,TessPS: I am your sisterDear Tess,Sorry about the sister thing. Quite forgot. Anyway, I cannot believe that my Bernard would behave in such a brutal fashion. Are you sure he did not trip and thus fall upon you?Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I truly cannot say if Bernard tripped, for as I informed you, I was bent down at the time and my gaze was upon the trinket I was retrieving.Your devoted sister,TessDear Tess,It is beyond belief that my sweet Bernard would take advantage of a girl in the way you imply. Are you sure you did not wiggle your bottom at him in a provocative fashion, thus causing a rush of blood to his head and his attack upon your nether parts.Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am outraged that you could think I could behave in such a fashion. I have only wiggled my bottom once in my life. It was during my honeymoon, in front of my husband, Victor, and it gave him a nosebleed. You must seek elsewhere to find a motive behind Bernard’s caddish behaviour.Your dearest sister,TessDear Tess,I have now spoken to Bernard about the matter and he confirms that he did indeed trip over a rug which caused him to fall upon you. What I still cannot ascertain is how he managed to achieve his end through your bustle.Your dearest sister,CharlotteDear Charlotte,Ah, I failed to inform you that I have taken up nude modelling recently and was in that mode when the event occurred. I have had to resort to this as our financial situation is perilous. Victor has been thrown out of the army since leading his regiment on an attack upon our allies, the French, during an exercise. He has always had difficulties with his sense of direction, the silly sausage. In any case I think it was an absolute over-reaction by the military big-wigs as there were only 43 of the Froggies killed and none of them above the rank of sergeant.As we have no income Victor suggested I take up modelling in the nude for artists and it is quite lucrative at 10 guineas per hour. It doesn’t quite cover Victor’s gambling debts so I came up with the idea of offering minor beastliness to young gentlemen for a small remuneration. You will understand then that your Bernard owes me 20 guineas. We cannot take cheques else the amount would be taxed so would you slip the amount into an envelope and have your butler drop it off at our residence?Your loving sister,TessDear Tess,I understand entirely your need to pursue a career of nude figure modelling and offering beastliness to strange men as times are hard. What I fail to understand is this, though you were naked, how it came to be that Bernard managed to be beastly with you if he was fully dressed? He, as far as I know, has not taken up a career of nude modelling. I have spoken to Bernard about the 20 guineas and he says he accepts his debt but says he must pay by cheque and make a record of the transaction, otherwise he will not be able to claim any tax relief on the transaction.CharlotteDear Charlotte,How Bernard achieved his end while fully clothed I do not know, but the fact is that beastliness did occur. As my new enterprise requires discreetness to all my gentlemen; you must question him further on the event. I am shocked that he wishes to declare the transaction to the tax authorities. Has he no concern for the reputation of his sister-in-law in her hour of need?TessDear Tess,My apologies, dear sister, but I have the truth from Bernard at last. It seems that when he saw you bending over, in all your nakedness, he became extremely aroused and took his manly parts out; and handled them vigorously, as he does. I suggested that his trip over the rug then, was caused by him approaching you with the intent of being beastly, but he denied this, saying that he was reaching for a box of cigars. I can vouch for this as he likes a smoke while committing the sin of Onan. Nevertheless, the fact is that he had his manly parts exposed and so, it was not only your nakedness which caused the incident. Consequently and by way of reparation I have insisted that he pay you in cash, with no record kept; to protect your reputation.Incidentally, now that he has been beastly with you, I wonder if I may venture that I would not object to your Victor being beastly with me, as a sort of quid pro quo. It would seem only fair and I make this offer with Bernard’s full approval. I am available for beastliness on the 14th thru 18th, while Bernard is off to Scotland for the shooting.CharlotteDear Charlotte,You are such a sweet sister! I received the 20 guineas yesterday and have tucked them secretly away. Victor is amazingly excited about being beastly with you and says he has had a notion for it ever since he first met you. He was so aroused that he was beastly with me last eve, several times and in various positions. I do hope he provides as much satisfaction as your Bernard did for me. He was beastly with me for over half an hour, which is what made me suspicious about the story of tripping on the rug.On the former matter, Victor asks if being beastly with you is on the same commercial basis that I am pursuing and, if that is the case, what kind of fee you would be looking for? I personally would only ask that you set a sufficiently high quid for your bountiful quo. So as not to raise the presumptions of my future complimentary ministrations, such as suffice to satisfy his urges..TessDear Tess,No, I am not selling beastliness as you are, for we are not in the same financial straits which you are suffering, so you can inform Victor he may keep his cash in his pocket. I am only offering him beastliness so that we can all be on an equal footing in being beastly with each other. I have no particular desire for Victor and look upon the upcoming event as merely a matter of etiquette. The sooner you two can get yourself back on a sound financial footing, so that you can forego selling beastliness, the happier I shall be. It does my reputation no good, let me tell you, to have my sister behaving like a trollop. Whatever my debauched actions extend to shall be my best effort to further share in your sufferings, as a good sister ought to do.Your devoted sibling,CharlotteDear Charlotte,I am saddened that you think me a trollop for I had aspirations to be a strumpet. I acknowledge that these positions hold little in the way of social distinction, but the beastliness is jolly good and one does meet such interesting people. A bishop of the church visited me yesterday but he only wanted me to sit on his lap and call him uncle while he fiddled about beneath my skirts. It was the easiest and quickest 10 guineas I’ve ever earned. He even said, ‘Bless you, child,’ when he left.Your loving sister,TessDearest Tess,Sitting on bishop’s knees while they fiddle about with your under-carriage is hardly becoming of a well-brought-up young lady. If word of this gets out your reputation will be totally ruined. Have a care, beastliness with young men to earn a coin is understandable, but this goes beyond the pale.Your concerned sister,Charlotte.Dear, sweet, Charlotte,I fear you have misunderstood me. The gentleman in question was Roman Catholic, and not Church of EnglandTessDear Tess,Thank the Lord for that. I had believed that these Romish sorts were only interested in young men’s bottoms so, of course, I assumed that the clerical gentleman in question was one of ours. This puts the entire matter in a totally different light; though I do warn you to steer clear of the clergy in general. They are there to look after our spiritual needs and should not be tempted by beastliness. Tell Victor, I shall expect him at 11am, the 14th; as arranged. And please Insist that he fasts all carnal relief along the trip. And that he's had a sound night's rest. His return shall commence following sufficient rest for the carriage ride home.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Have no fears, I have no intent to allow full beastliness with a member of the clergy. If I were so minded our local vicar is quite a dish. The poor chap has the misfortune to be married to a wife with a face so sour that one could hardly imagine that she’d ever seen a gentleman’s sausage, never mind handled it, so he’s be bound to be up for a bit of extra-marital naughtiness. But he has nothing to fear from me as there are enough of the laity to satisfy my financial needs.I hope you are enjoying your bout of beastliness with Victor. He left here quite the ardent lover at the thought of beastliness with you, and with my consent too. No man could have been more pleased at the consequences of his brother in law tripping over a carpet rug.Your loving sister,TessDear Tess,Your letter is to hand, but your husband is not. I know you said he had a bad sense of direction but he was to be picked up at the railway station by our driver, so I can’t see how he could possibly have lost his way. Oh wait, I think I hear the door.CharlotteDearest Charlotte,I write on behalf of Victor who wants me to thank you for a wonderful weekend. He says the beastliness was absolutely superb and possibly the best he’d ever had, which made me a little jealous, I confess. Nevertheless, he has returned to me re-invigorated and never stops from singing your praises. All day he has been telling me how good you are at this, and how wonderfully you did that. If you are such an artiste where beastliness is concerned perhaps you should reconsider offering it on a commercial basis.Your sister,TessDear Tess,I fear Victor’s recollections of our encounter differ somewhat from mine. For me, the beastliness was not 'superb’ and as a matter of fact I thought it quite inadequate. I had hardly got him into my bed-chamber and started handling his sausage when he was effusive all over my hand. I allowed him a half hour to recover and then attempted again, when he reacted in precisely the same fashion. I will say this for him, he is copious. However the entire weekend proceeded in this fashion and in matter of fact no complete beastliness ever took place. Is this what he is like when he is beastly with you? You must have a very unhappy marital life if this is the case and the chances of you starting a family are slim.With my deepest regrets.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Victor admits that he became over-excited at thought of being beastly with you and humbly begs your pardon for his woeful performance. He is not, he himself allows, one of nature’s long-distance runners, but neither is he a sprinter. He is what you might call a 'middle-distance’ man and I have always found him entirely satisfactory in that department. You are, as I freely admit, much more beautiful than I, and I can quite understand how the thought of beastliness with you, brought my poor pet to such a state of arousal. So, please forgive us both for our lack.Your humble sister,TessDear Tess,I do not see how you can say that I am more beautiful than you, for as you well know I am your sister. Not only that, I am your twin sister. Even more so, I am your identical twin sister. I am older than you by a matter of ten minutes which might suggest that it is this fact which has worked the trick and your Victor is actually aroused by older women. I would be glad to hear your views on this.CharlotteDear Charlotte,Ah, but that explains so much. Why we always had our birthdays on the same day and were always the same age. I do wish Mama had told me but, as you know, she was always busy entertaining uncle Samuel and far too distracted for we young sprites. As to Victor being attracted to older women, he denies this vigorously and says he only has eyes for pretty young doxies such as we are. He also says that the incident with old Mrs Puffer, the family cook, was an utter misunderstanding and the rumour that he was caught in her room about to be beastly with her was a falsehood. He was, in fact, rummaging through her clothes looking for a school-book which she had secreted about her person. I have my doubts about this version of events however, as I am aware of how much Victor loathes learning of any sort.It may therefore be true that he is aroused by old crones, such as you are. Just think, when you reach the grand old age of 30, for a full 10 minutes I shall be only 29. Oh, the joy of being young!Victor has offered to visit you again and attempt to make a better list of being beastly if this is acceptable to both Bernard and yourself. For myself, I should think that he has had his chance and should be happy for the limited amount of beastliness he did get. If you think differently, please let me know.  If further correspondence becomes too difficult for your butler to attend to deliveries, You might consider sending your letters with Bernard, at his weekly… art tutoring.Your younger sister,TessBy Sally hollister for Literotica

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Soft Prompts for Evaluation: Measuring Conditional Distance of Capabilities, published by porby on February 3, 2024 on LessWrong. (The link above is likely going to expire in favor of arxiv once I get it submitted. Incidentally, if anyone wants to endorse me for cs.LG on arxiv, please DM me, and thanks!) Abstract: To help evaluate and understand the latent capabilities of language models, this paper introduces an approach using optimized input embeddings, or 'soft prompts,' as a metric of conditional distance between a model and a target behavior. The technique aims to facilitate latent capability discovery as a part of automated red teaming/evaluation suites and to provide quantitative feedback about the accessibility of potentially concerning behaviors in a way that may scale to powerful future models, including those which may otherwise be capable of deceptive alignment. An evaluation framework using soft prompts is demonstrated in natural language, chess, and pathfinding, and the technique is extended with generalized conditional soft prompts to aid in constructing task evaluations. What is this? This paper applies soft prompts to evaluations. They're prompts composed of optimized token embeddings; they aren't restricted to the usual dictionary of discrete tokens. To the limit of the optimizer's ability, they compress conditions into the tokens composing the soft prompt. Different target behaviors or capabilities will tend to require different numbers of soft prompt tokens. Capabilities that are natural to the model, like repeating a single token over and over again, can be achieved with a single soft prompt token even in small models. Repeating a longer string may require more tokens, and even partially eliciting more complex behavior like pathfinding or chess could require many more. Why is this useful? Soft prompts offer a simple way to quantify the conditional distance between a model and a target behavior. If many tokens are required, then lots of information-as-conditions is needed to define the behavior and it's unlikely that it will happen by chance. If no number of tokens suffices, the behavior is likely inaccessible by inputs alone.[1] It can be used as a part of evaluation suites to monitor the change in distance to concerning behaviors across models and scales and the degree to which those behaviors can be achieved in the first place. It is also difficult for the model to hide a capability that is otherwise accessible to some input. If the original model is an end-to-end differentiable product of gradient descent, it has already been shown to be transparent to the same type of optimizer that will be tasked with adversarially optimizing the input soft prompts against the machinery of the model.[2] Compared to manual attempts at elicitation or automated techniques restricted to discrete tokens or black box optimization, it dramatically improves the chances that an evaluation's attempt to elicit concerning behavior will succeed. It's also dumb simple. Are there any cute short results for me to look at? Yes! One of the tests was reverting fine-tuning on TinyLlama's chat variant by simply optimizing a soft prompt for standard autoregressive prediction. The training set was RedPajama v2, a broad training set. No effort was put into providing directly 'detuning' samples (like starting with a dialogue and then having the trained continuation deliberately subvert the original fine tuning), so some dialogue-esque behaviors persisted, but the character of the assistant was a little... different. Note that, despite a malicious system message, the original chat model simply doesn't respond, then turns around and generates a user question about how great General Electric is. The soft-prompted assistant has other ideas. Notably, the loss on RedPajama v2 for the orig...

If a person had already fulfilled his obligation of Kiddush on Shabbat, may he recite Kiddush again for those who have not yet heard Kiddush? This often happens on Shabbat morning, when a man attends synagogue and then participates in the Sebet after the services, where he hears Kiddush and then eats. May he repeat Kiddush for his wife and children when he returns home, or is he ineligible to recite Kiddush on their behalf, since he has already fulfilled his Kiddush obligation? A similar situation arises when a Rabbi or other distinguished figure attends several affairs on Shabbat morning. He might recite Kiddush at the Sebet after services, and then attend a luncheon where he is given the honor of reciting Kiddush. Can he repeat Kiddush and fulfill the obligation for those in attendance, who have yet to hear or recite Kiddush? A fundamental rule in Halacha establishes that "Af Al Pi She'yasa Mosi" – even if a person has already fulfilled his obligation, he may repeat the recitation to fulfill the requirement for others. Hence, a person who has already recited Kiddush may repeat Kiddush for his family or for anybody else, and the others fulfill their obligation by listening to his recitation. This Halacha applies without restriction; a person can recite Kiddush many times on Shabbat morning in order for others to fulfill their obligation by listening to his recitation. Thus, if a Rabbi attends even four or five Sebets on Shabbat morning, he may be given the honor of reciting Kiddush at each function. In such a case, if the one who makes Kiddush does not wish to drink the wine, he may recite Kiddush and give the cup to somebody else (an adult) to drink. Normally, one cannot recite a Beracha over food on behalf of somebody else. If, for example, somebody wishes to drink some wine, he cannot ask his friend – who is not drinking wine – to recite the Beracha on his behalf. When it comes to Berachot over food, only the person who eats or drinks may recite the Beracha. Seemingly, then, a person who recites Kiddush – which consists of the Beracha of "Boreh Peri Hagefen" over wine – should be required to drink the wine, rather than allow somebody else to drink the wine. However, the Beracha of "Boreh Peri Hagefen" in Kiddush has the status of a "Birkat Ha'misva" – the Beracha recited over a Misva, rather than simply a Beracha recited over food. When it comes to Birkat Ha'misva, one may, indeed, recite the Beracha on behalf of somebody else. Therefore, one who recites Kiddush is not required to personally drink the wine, and may instead give the wine to another adult to drink. This Halacha is explicitly codified in the Shulhan Aruch (Orah Haim 273:4; listen to audio recording for precise citation). I indeed recall that Hacham Baruch Ben Haim, Zecher Sadik Libracha, would recite Habdala on Mosa'eh Shabbat in the terrace room of Shaare Zion, and, preferring not to drink the wine, would give the cup of wine to somebody else to drink. Incidentally, we should note that the Kiddush recited on Shabbat morning differs from the Friday night Kiddush in that it essentially consists of only the Beracha over the wine. Although we customarily recite some Pesukim (verses) relevant to Shabbat as part of the Shabbat morning Kiddush, these verses are not actually part of the Kiddush. Therefore, if somebody does not have a Siddur available on Shabbat morning when he recites Kiddush, and he does not remember the verses customarily recited, he may simply recite the Beracha of "Boreh Peri Hagefen," and this suffices for the Shabbat morning Kiddush. Similarly, if a woman wishes to recite Kiddush so she can eat before her husband returns home from the synagogue on Shabbat morning, but she is not familiar with the customary text, she may simply recite the Beracha of "Boreh Peri Hagefen." Summary: A person may recite Kiddush on behalf of others on Shabbat even if he had already recited or heard Kiddush. When a person recites Kiddush (or Habdala) on behalf of others, he does not have to drink the wine himself; he can give the wine to another adult to drink.

Girls Gone Hallmark is your go-to Hallmark movie review podcast. This week, co-hosts, Megan and Wendy answer the call to review "The Perfect Catch" starring Nikki DeLoach and Andrew Walker. This 2017 movie tells the story of a baseball player who returns to his hometown and reconnects with a former flame while learning important life lessons about love, family, and following your dreams. Will this be a home run? Listen and find out. Buy "The Perfect Catch" on DVD ($14) Feeling Generous? We Need Your 5-STAR Ratings and Reviews Spotify Podcast listeners: Spotify allows listeners to rate podcast episodes. Once you listen to a podcast for at least 30 seconds, you get the option to rate it between one and five stars. Return to the podcast's main page and tap the star icon. Then, tap submit. "The Perfect Catch" Trailer About "The Perfect Catch" "The Perfect Catch" was filmed in British Columbia in March of 2017. Steven R. Monroe directed "The Perfect Catch." He has 56 directing credits including one of Girls Gone Hallmark favorites "Love to the Rescue." Monroe also directed "Pumpkin Pie Wars," "Caribbean Summer," and "A Winter Getaway." Hanz Wasserburger gets both story and teleplay credit. He has 16 writing credits and additional Hallmark Channel projects include "I'm Not Ready for Christmas" and "A Novel Romance." Writing partners Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer also get teleplay credit for this film. Together they have 39 writing credits including "3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost," "The Professional Bridesmaid," "The Santa Stakeout" and a number of Crossword Puzzle Mystery movies. Related Podcast Review: "Love to the Rescue" starring Nikki DeLoach Nikki DeLoach plays Jessica. We most recently saw Nikki as Professor Ambrose in "True Justice" Family Ties," a movie she also co-wrote. She has a staggering 71 acting credits, which includes 19 Hallmark Channel movies. She and Andrew Walker can be seen in the "Curious Caterer" series. Andrew Walker plays baseball guy Chase Taylor. Andrew has over 80 acting credits including appearances early in his career on "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." Lately, Walker appears to work almost exclusively with Hallmark. His first appearance on the network was in Debbie Macomber's "Dashing Through the Snow" in 2015 with Meghan Ory. Chance Hurstfield plays Wesley. Chance is now a 17 year old actor with 26 acting credits. He is most well known for his role as Danny Dixon on "A Million Little Things" where he appeared in 79 episodes. He has also appeared in two other Hallmark movies: "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" and "Christmas List." Related: What did Girls Gone Hallmark think of the original "Curious Caterer" - Listen Here! Vincent Dangerfield play Brett Thompson. Vincent has no relation to Rodney Dangerfield, but does have 19 acting credits including "A Tale of Two Christmases," "Darrow and Darrow," and "A Gift for Christmas" for Hallmark. Lisa Durupt plays Nina. We recently saw Nina in "The Irresistible Blueberry Farm." Among her other 70 acting credits, she's been in "Murder She Baked" and the "Hannah Swensen" mystery movies, "Time for Them to Come Home for Christmas" and Netflix's "To All the Boy: Always and Forever." P. Lynn Johnson plays Lindy. P. Lynn has been a working actress for 36 years and has racked up 120 acting credits with three projects currently in the works. She was in the first "Final Destination" movie, and a number of Hallmark projects like "Finding Father Christmas," Engaging Father Christmas," and "Marrying Father Christmas." Most recently she was in "Magic in Mistletoe" from the 2023 Countdown to Christmas season. Eric Keenleyside plays Mason. Much like his on-screen wife, Eric has been working for nearly 40 years and has nearly 200 acting credits. Incidentally, he was in "Final Destination 2" and appears in many of the Martha's Vineyard Mysteries for Hallmark.

The cryptosphere is, well, cryptic. Even the best of the best find it hard to explain the whole thing without fumbling. Zeke Faux has managed to put it all together in his fascinating book, "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall". Zeke planted himself within the crypto-mad community to learn more about the trade. He has interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, among others, to understand what the biggies were up to. Incidentally, "Number Go Up" was referenced a few times during the former crypto king's recent trial where he was charged with multiple counts of fraud. To research the wider consequences, Zeke visited Cambodia to uncover the underbelly of the industry where people are being held captive or trafficked. We are yet to see a solid application of the technology that powers cryto. When that will be is anybody's guess. Until then, if there is one book that you should read to understand where we stand so far, read this one.

A bit of rare good news for Wellingtonians, they've escaped having the water restrictions ratcheted up on them this week. That decision was taken today, it's taken every week at the moment, and at the moment they're staying in level 2- for now. But the case against Wellington City Council as the bad guys is building fast. I would argue it's becoming more and more obvious that they have neglected to fix the pipes when they knew they should've. Remember how I told you the guys who fix the pipes asked for $10 million but only got $2.3 million from the council? Turns out the reason Wellington City Council said no to giving all the money was because they told Wellington Water they didn't think they could use all the money to do the job and fix the pipes. Except they could. Because the budget for fixing the pipes the previous year was $10 million, and they used it all. So Wellington City Council reduced the maintenance budget by 75 percent when they knew the pipes would leak- and there were water restrictions in the city every summer. On top of that, there's a guy on the Wellington Regional Council called Daran Ponter who's just thrown them to the wolves as well. Daran is a Labour man, so you would expect him to be friendly to a left leaning council. Nope, he's called them out for spending the money they should be spending on pipes on other things- “new town halls, or refurbished town halls, or bike lanes". Now, I reckon the case that's building here is that this council needs Government intervention. It needs a Crown Observer called in. Because if you don't know that you should spend money on making sure people get water to their houses before you spend money on cycleways, you shouldn't be running a council. Incidentally, the Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has gently threatened that in a letter to Wellington City Council- and I think he should follow through. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last week, we studied Ezekiel 1, the prophet's first inaugural vision, which provided an intense peak at God's heavenly throne chariot. The experience overwhelmed Ezekiel so much that he collapsed prostrate on the ground, which is where we find him in today's episode when God verbally commissioned Ezekiel (2:1–3:11). Although Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all included the narratives of their divine call, Ezekiel's story is by far the longest account. Incidentally, it is the only call narrative where God did all the talking. Moses and Jeremiah pushed back on God's request with their own counter-speech. Moses felt inadequate for the task because he was “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Ex. 4:10). Jeremiah was insecure about his youth (Ex. 4:10; Jer. 4:6). Isaiah and Ezekiel both experienced such powerful theophanies that they were quick to comply with no reservation (Isa. 6:1-13). The major difference between Isaiah and Ezekiel's inaugural visions is that God transported Isaiah to the heavenly throne, but for Ezekiel, he brought the divine throne to him in exile. 

Part 2 of our Timber Rattlesnake episode. If you haven't listened to part 1, go and do that. We'll wait right here for you. The episode was recorded on December 7, 2023 at Hunters Creek County Park in East Aurora, NY.Episode NotesWhen the guys discussed the different types of snake teeth, Steve wondered if the word solenoglyphous, which refers to snakes with two large, hinged fangs (like the Timber Rattlesnake), has any relation to nightshades, which are plants in the genus Solanum. Bill could have cleared it up right away if he had been sharp enough to notice the difference in spelling. Upon getting home and doing some research, he found that the root soleno is Greek, and it means a tube or pipe. This makes sense given that solenoglyphous snakes have large, hollow fangs. The second part of the word - glyphos – means to cut or carve, so solenoglyphous could be taken to mean “hollow fangs that cut or carve”. Incidentally, Bill also tried to look up what Solanum means. He found many circular references – sites that said Solanum means nightshade, and that nightshade means Solanum. The most promising reference he found said that Solanum possibly stems from the Latin word sol, meaning "sun", referring to the nightshades love of sun, maybe? Steve asked if proteroglyphous fangs (the smaller, unhinged fangs in species like the Coral Snake) are hollow. Bill thought they might be, and he was right. A little internet digging led to this blog post that had a handy-dandy cross-section of the different types of snake teeth. Can owls identify venomous snakes? While we couldn't find any studies, or even any general articles, that covered this specific question, we did find an interesting study that looked at venom resistance in a variety of animals. The research “analyzed the molecular resistance against cobra venom and found considerable differences in resistance between animas groups.” It showed that several mammal species, such as the Honey Badger and the Asian Mongoose, independently evolved resistance to cobra venom, but the snake-eating bird species looked at showed no resistance. The study's authors hypothesized that "…the resistance is redundant: There is no selection pressure for it. Birds have feathers, scaly legs, excellent vision, are very intelligent, and are very agile. The snakes don't stand a chance against all these adaptations, so birds just don't need to be resistant." So, while we don't know if owls can ID venomous snakes, at least one team of researchers feels that snake-eating birds are such bad-ass hunters, with so many tools in their evolutionary toolbox, that they wouldn't even need to tell the difference between venomous and nonvenomous snakes. And that answers another question the guys asked: Do Honey Badgers eat venomous critters? They do! And the story of how is shared in this great article from Slate. Our favorite quote: “Evolving to withstand snake venom [and so be able to eat a venomous snake] is like being the only person at a party who can eat the extra-hot salsa: You get it all to yourself. Plus…this means the honey badger gets to hunt fairly slow-moving prey with only one pointy end, rather than fast prey with one pointy end plus four sets of claws.”Steve was correct in calling our Bill for referring to the England as United Kingdom during the USA's colonial period. The UK did not form until 1801, when the Kingdom of Ireland joined with Scotland, England, and Wales. Please comment below if you notice any mistakes or unanswered questions in the episode.Episode LinksAs the guys mentioned in the episode, you should check out Snoop Dogg's delightful series of nature videos: Plizzanet EarthHere's more info on The Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas.Wild Snake Education and Discussion Group's article about Timber Rattlesnakes. And here's a link to their Facebook group, too.Visit the North American Snakebite Registry The paper describing the wiener dog bitten by a rattlesnake. If you can look without your heart breaking, you can scroll down to see the pictures and videos. Check out the National Park Service's handy-dandy breakdown of snake dentition. And this blog post, mentioned above, presents some of the same info and more.Timber Rattlesnakes are intertwined with US history. Look into the Timber Rattlesnake and it's connections to Ben Franklin and the American RevolutionSponsors and Ways to Support UsThank you to Always Wandering Art (Website and Etsy Shop) for providing the artwork for this episode. Gumleaf Boots, USA (free shipping for patrons)Support us on Patreon!Check out the Field Guides merch at our Teespring store. It's really a great deal: you get to pay us to turn your body into a billboard for the podcast!References / Works CitedAdamski, Jonathan (2020) Viperid Spotlight: Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). Available at: https://wsed.org/viperid-spotlight-timber-rattlesnake-crotalus-horridus/ (Accessed: 10-20-23).Clark, R.W., 2002. Diet of the timber rattlesnake, Crotalus horridus. Journal of Herpetology, 36(3), pp.494-499.Glenn, J.L., Straight, R.C. and Wolt, T.B., 1994. Regional variation in the presence of canebrake toxin in Crotalus horridus venom. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part C: Pharmacology, Toxicology and Endocrinology, 107(3), pp.337-346.New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (2013) Species Assessment for Timber rattlesnake. Available at: https://extapps.dec.ny.gov/docs/wildlife_pdf/sgcntimberrattlesnak.pdf. (Accessed 11-20-2023). Rokyta, D.R., Wray, K.P. and Margres, M.J., 2013. The genesis of an exceptionally lethal venom in the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) revealed through comparative venom-gland transcriptomics. BMC Genomics, 14, pp.1-21.

What a world it is that people will stand up and shout you down for having the audacity to suggest that a fluid emanating from a woman's urethra is urine. Perhaps we are the Galileos of a new enlightenment, called to the world to bring knowledge to the huddled masses. Incidentally, and perhaps appropriately, if you want to see Galileo's middle finger, it's on display in the Museo di Storia del Scienza in Italy. We recommend that listeners view it before submitting uninformed one-star reviews of the podcast. We discussed the techniques used by potentially scorned women to search through their boyfriends' phones to see what he's been up to. Clever searches include looking at his screen time and battery usage, reddit history and the like. What differentiates touching aimed at intimacy from initiation of sex? Is it the same for men and women? And, how does differentiating between these kinds of interactions apply in "dead bedroom" situations? Along similar lines, what's going on when a woman wants to "ignore" her partner during sex? Is it a fetish, or is she just not all that interested in the act? For those interested in seeing the TikToker discussed early in the episode, her is her profile: https://ymmv.me/152/trinity We get a lot of our questions from Reddit, so for our listeners' enjoyment, here are links to some of the questions we discussed this week: https://ymmv.me/152/rubbing https://ymmv.me/152/ignored https://ymmv.me/152/cumkiss Twitter: @ymmvpod Facebook: ymmvpod Email: ymmvpod@gmail.com

After looking over the data from the most recent storm center that came through. Scott Sabol and I discovered something remarkable about it. Join us as we talk about it. Incidentally, I decided NOT to post the video as I discovered that I had a distractingly huge piece of blueberry skin stuck to my front tooth after eating oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast, LOLOL. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/andrebernier/support

On Episode 146 of the RETROZEST podcast, Curtis engages on a celebration of the 45th Anniversary of the premiere of SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE! This is a 1978 superhero film based on the DC Comics superhero Superman, played by Christopher Reeve. It is the first of four installments in the Superman film series starring Reeve as Superman. It was directed by Richard Donner based on a screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton. In addition to Reeve, the film features an ensemble cast including Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Jeff East, Margot Kidder, Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter, Jackie Cooper, Trevor Howard, Marc McClure, Terence Stamp, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Jack O'Halloran, Maria Schell, and Sarah Douglas. Assisting Curtis in this endeavor with an exclusive interview is DIANE SHERRY CASE, the actress who portrayed Smallville cheerleader and Clark Kent's teen crush Lana Lang in the film. In addition to her role in Superman, Diane is known for her work on the films Hawaii (1966) and Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971). She also played Bing Crosby's daughter in the TV. series The Bing Crosby Show, and appeared in numerous other series, as well as two Superbowl commercials. More recently, Diane has published numerous short stories and authored two novels. With a grant from the American Film Institute, she wrote and directed two short films, Spa-tel and Valentine's Day. Her digital series House Poor, which she also wrote and directed, is a available on Amazon Prime. Be sure and check out Diane's Facebook , Twitter (X) and Instagram pages! Incidentally, you may help the RetroZest podcast by purchasing a unique RETRO-THEMED T-Shirt or two (many different designs and colors!) from our store at store.retrozest.com/home. You may also help the RetroZest Podcast by purchasing a Celebrity Video Message gift for a friend/family member from CelebVM! Choose from celebrities like Barry Williams, Gary Busey, Ernie Hudson, Robert Fripp, Right Said Fred, etc.! Simply enter their website through our portal store.retrozest.com/celebvm, and shop as you normally would; it's no extra cost to you at all! Contact Curtis at podcast@retrozest.com, or via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Also, check us out on TikTok!

Try this on for size... It's Episode 81 with another 3-timer guest, Michael (or Gambit, or Dills) Dillon! In this episode we say where we are all at (1:40) before we dive into our main topic about humility (8:40). We discuss what we think humility means (10:00), can we be proud and humble (12:00), and whether awe and humility overlap (15:15). Incidentally, we also name some of our top 3 “humbling” moments of 2023, including but not limited to, building a long-lasting relationships (17:30), running marathons (21:55), having messy clothes (27:00), encountering differing views on the earth (29:15), being stung by bees (35:00), our capacity for caretaking others (40:25), and feeling lost at Home Depot (50:00). We then close with a full Dressing Room of trying things on for size that have humbled us as well (52:00).

I THOUGHT I had gone too far, but they went and did it . . . they hired an apparent Satanist. THE THESIS: The Democrat Party is mainstreaming Satanism. Incidentally, that is NOT a thesis, that is now a fact. Original Episode LinksTHE SCRIPTURE & SCRIPTURAL RESOURCES: 1 John 5:18-2018 We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them. 19 We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. 20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.Ephesians 6:12For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.The Rank and File Of Satan's KingdomIn Ephesians 6:12, the apostle Paul presents a divine revelation he received that describes how Satan's kingdom has been militarily aligned. He writes, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”Notice that at the top of this list, Paul mentions a group of evil spirits he calls “principalities.” This word is taken from the Greek word archai, an old word that is used symbolically to denote ancient times. It is also used to depict individuals who hold the highest and loftiest position of rank and authority. By using the word archai, Paul emphatically tells us that at the very top of Satan's kingdom are powerful evil beings that have held their lofty positions of power and authority since ancient times — probably ever since the fall of Lucifer.Paul goes on to tell us that below principalities is a second group of evil beings he refers to as “powers.” This word “powers” is taken from the Greek word exousia, and it denotes delegated authority. This describes a lower, second-level group of evil beings — demon spirits — who have received delegated authority from Satan to carry out all manner of evil in whatever way they desire to do it. These evil forces are second in command in Satan's dark kingdom.Continuing in his description of Satan's rank and file in descending order, Paul mentions “the rulers of the darkness of this world.” This amazing phrase is taken from the word kosmokrateros and is a compound of the words kosmos and kratos. The word kosmos denotes order or arrangement, whereas the word kratos has to do with raw power. Thus, the compounded word kosmokrateros depicts raw power that has been harnessed and put into some kind of order.This word kosmokrateros was at times used to picture military training camps where young men were assembled, trained, and turned into a mighty army. These young men were like raw power when they first arrived in the training camp. However, as the military training progressed and the new recruits were taught discipline and order, all that raw manpower was converted into an organized, disciplined army. This is the word Paul now uses in his description of Satan's kingdom. What does it mean? Don Stewart :: How Does Satan Keep Unbelievers in Spiritual Darkness?The Figurehead was told to appoint an apparent Satanist as the Monkey Pox coordinator. And, at this point, given his social media profiles and interviews, he will need to come and and PROVE he's not a Satanist.Benny Johnson was first out with the pictures of this guy. They are disturbing beyond belief. If you are not a Satanist why do you do everything Satanists do? Benny Johnson: “Meet Demetre Daskalakis. Demetre was just appointed by Joe Biden to be the official White House National Monkeypox Response Deputy Coordinator. Demetre proudly wears the official symbol of the Church of Satan: The Pentagram. Joe Biden appointed a Satanist to the White House.”Some more pictures of this guyOf course, playing to the Illusion of Respectability, he put on the coat and tie to lie to people about Monkey Pox[AUDIO] - Suddenly wearing a jacket and tie, Demetre explains this about Monkey PoxThe people who run Joe Biden, and The Party as a whole, are obsessed with promoting all things that go against the Word of God. Adultery, theft, muder, coveting are all sins, but CNN is obsessed with promoting the sin of being active in same sex intercourse. [AUDIO] - Watch Christiane Amanpour insistently push the gay agenda on the newly-elected president of Kenya. She seems very disappointed when he doesn't seem to be on board. Where is her respect for the traditions of African society?The rot comes from the top. This so-called pediatrician is teaching kids how to make their own sex lube . . . (more on her in a bit).[AUDIO] - A so-called pediatrician teaches kids how to make their own sex lube for anal sexThe evil spirits that push adults to use the bodies of kids for their sexual desires have not gone away. In fact, they are celebrated as legitimate academics! WARNING: very disturbing content. Dr. John Money, Father Of Gender Theory, Was A Pedophilia Apologist[AUDIO] - To get an idea of what Queer Theory prescribes, watch this short clip by author Derrick Jensen. Notice how at the end he points out how not a single queer theorist has gone on record against pedophilia.The rot starts at the top. The goddesses permeates The Party all the way to the bottom[AUDIO] - Arizona State Superintendent @kathyhoffman_az is now being sued after it was discovered the Dept of Education website directed kids to hyper-sexualized secret chat rooms.Sex Education Book Instructs Parents To Let Their Young Children Watch Them Have SexBack to the so-called pediatrician: [AUDIO] - Pediatrician--the same one grooming kids with how to make their own lube fo anals sex--promotes puberty blockers to kids on tiktok claiming they just “pause” puberty so you have more time to “explore your gender identity”You must understand that their fake god is neither male nor female -- this is terrible to consider and vital to know We were told this would happen, the Bible describes these times. [AUDIO] - To put it in pop culture terms, the movie “Taken” is helpful . . . Liam Neeson knew the trafficked would take his daughter, he told her so and told her what to do. He never stopped looking for her and he destroyed the men who abducted her. The Lord, Jesus will not stop pursuing us until the Final Battle. He has given instructions on what to do to avoid being taken and what do do if our loved ones are taken. People are prayerfully fighting back. This is the second time a godless event like this was canceled in Idaho after people prayed and put public pressure on businesses sponsoring this so they can virtue signalBoise Pride Fest cancels children's drag showZions Bank canceled their sponsorship -- but, WHY is an LDS-owned back sponsoring a festival based upon human pride and defiance of the Word of God?Alan's Soaps https://alanssoaps.com/TODD Use coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price. Bonefrog https://bonefrogcoffee.com/todd Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions. 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Apparently there was enough time left in 2023 to squeeze in one last superhero movie – Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom! The first Aquaman movie was kind of fun, how bad can the second one be? Incidentally, the element she … Continue reading →

Yesterday was the winter solstice. Brings back memories... ----- Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Said another way, there is more darkness on December 21st than any other day. It's also the day I got engaged many years ago. The story I like to tell is that my wife, who was then a collegiate volleyball coach, was watching VHS videos of players she was hoping to recruit. I asked her to stop the video and pay attention to me for a moment or two. She reluctantly did with a “this better be good” expression. I asked her to marry me. She considered the proposition. She looked me up and down a few times. She remained quiet for a terribly uncomfortable amount of time and finally said “Ok” and then hit play on the VCR and returned to her work. She'll deny much of this story, by the way. It's usually the darkest day of the year that I begin my annual Christmas panic purchases. I fear that I've underperformed with the gift giving; that my gifts won't amount to enough. I blow through my preset budgets and start tossing stuff under the Christmas tree in a panic. My kids never mind this. My wife says you've done too much, you've gone too far. She's never returned any of the gifts I get her, by the way. She says “You've gone overboard” as she takes her bounty with her to the back of the house. And I get the same complaints from kids every year. “Dad,” they say, “you're too hard to buy for.” They're right. Like most fathers I tend to get myself what I want. Every year I struggle to get my father something and this year he flat our said “I don't want anything. Nothing. Really. Nothing. I'm trying to get rid of all the stuff I have.” However, I'll get him something. It'll may be a new phone charger. The one he has is quite dated. It's powered by a gerbil on a wheel and takes all night to charge his phone. However, I struggle with the question “Is a phone charger the right gift to give your father?” Seems very impersonable. My grandmother used to give the gifts she received back. She'd say, “I've enjoyed it for many months. Thank you very much. Now I'm giving it back to you.” We started buying her gifts with that in mind – what will I want in the spring that I can give her for Christmas? Incidentally, my wife and I married on the summer solstice. We got engaged on the winter solstice and married on the summer solstice. We realized this years later. So my wedding day was absolutely the longest day of the year. That cannot be denied. It's all in how you say it. As 2023 winds to a close, I wish you a happy holiday season and a Merry Christmas. Try to slow down. Find a warm fire and stare into it for a while. Fires make good company. There is stress all over during the holidays, but for a short time, try to sluff it off and sit quietly. I'll do the same. I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep it Real.

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

On Episode 145 of the RETROZEST podcast, Curtis engages in a discussion about the history of the band Y&T with special returning guest, Tim Durling of the Tim's Vinyl Confessions YouTube Channel! Tim is the author of the recently published book, Down For the Count: The Y&T Album Review, which he discusses at length in this episode. He is also the author of Unspooled: An Adventure in 8-Tracks, which he discussed back on RetroZest #78. Be sure and check out Tim's Facebook , Twitter (X) and Instagram pages! Incidentally, you may help the RetroZest podcast by purchasing a unique RETRO-THEMED T-Shirt or two (many different designs and colors!) from our store at store.retrozest.com/home. You may also help the RetroZest Podcast by purchasing a Celebrity Video Message gift for a friend/family member from CelebVM! Choose from celebrities like Barry Williams, Gary Busey, Ernie Hudson, Robert Fripp, Right Said Fred, etc.! Simply enter their website through our portal store.retrozest.com/celebvm, and shop as you normally would; it's no extra cost to you at all! Contact Curtis at podcast@retrozest.com, or via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Also, check us out on TikTok!

Even if one is studying Torah when the time for the Hanukah candle lighting comes, he should stop learning and go light candles, rather than appoint somebody to do it in his stead. The entire purpose of Torah study is to prepare us to serve G-d, and thus when the time comes to light the Hanukah candles, which is how we are to serve Hashem at that moment, we must do so. Although it is told that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai used all his time for Torah learning without ever stopping, except for Biblical obligations such as Keri'at Shema, this practice is reserved for those on his unique level of diligence. Nobody can claim such a stature, and in fact even serious students of Torah routinely interrupt their studies for mundane purposes such as to get a cup of coffee, answer a phone call, and so on. Clearly, then, it would be wholly inappropriate for somebody to suddenly claim that he is too diligent a student to interrupt his studies for an important Misva such as Hanukah candle lighting. One should light the Hanukah candles with genuine emotion and excitement, and not out of rote. We must remind ourselves when we light that the miracle was performed for us, as we would likely not be observant Jews today if the Hanukah miracle had not occurred. We might draw a comparison to the Halacha requiring one to recite a Beracha when arriving at a place where a miracle happened to his father, his grandfather or his Rabbi – "Baruch She'asa Nes Le'abi Ba'makom Ha'zeh" (or "Le'zkeni" or "Le'rabbi"). Since he would not have been born if his father or grandfather had not been saved – and one would not have been taught if his Rabbi had not been saved – he must recognize how the miracle directly affected him. Similarly, our existence as Torah-observant Jews is a direct result of the Hanukah miracle, and thus when we light the candles we must feel that we give praise and thanks for a miracle that was performed for us. One should gather his entire family for the lighting of the Hanukah candles. It is not proper for one person to light while the rest of the family members are going about their ordinary business. The candle lighting must be a family event. It is preferable to use olive oil for the Hanukah candle lighting, and fortunately, olive oil today is readily available, and one can even purchase a readymade set of cups of oil with wicks for the Hanukah candle lighting. It must be noted, however, that the act of lighting should be done with a wax candle. This is mentioned by Rabbi Haim Hakohen of Halab (Aleppo), who was a student of the Arizal (Rav Yishak Luria of Safed, 1534-1572). The Arizal explained that when we light the Hanukah candles, we bring 370 lights from the upper worlds down into our world. This is symbolized by the Hebrew word "Sha'ava" (wax), as the first two letters ("Shin" and "Ayin") have a combined numerical value of 370, and the final two letters – "Vav" and "Heh" – which are the final two letters of the Name of "Havaya," represent our world. By using a wax candle to perform the act of lighting, we express the fact that we are bringing 370 lights down into our world. (Listen to audio recording for precise citation from the work Torah Lishmah, 476.) Incidentally, for the same reason the Arizal taught that if somebody is ill, Heaven forbid, or faces some other personal problem, he should light two wax candles next to the Hechal in the synagogue, in order to bring the heavenly blessings upon him. Summary: One should light the Hanukah candles when the time arrives even if he is at that moment engaged in Torah study. The lighting should be done with the entire family together, and with genuine joy borne out of the recognition that we directly benefit from the Hanukah miracle. It is preferable to fuel the Hanukah lights with olive oil, but the act of lighting should preferably be performed with a wax candle.

Happy Friday! Just slipping into your feed to let you know that the week is nearly over, and there's only one more week to go before we have to get through the next week. Oh God. This week we talk about party season. Are you dreading it? Do you have the energy for it? If so, how? Incidentally we recorded this podcast lying on the floor…nearly there…

Updated April 15, 2021: This topic of the "firmament" is also of great interest to atheists. A popular anti-creationist made a 40-minute YouTube video critical of this article. We may have hit a nerve. A favorite claim of many atheists is that the Bible teaches that the earth is surrounded by a solid domed sky. Instead, the Bible actually teaches that the firmament of Day Two is the crust of the earth, which divided water below the crust from the waters on the surface. Documenting this thereby rebuts that widespread false allegation. When we first published this article, that extra bonus was unexpected. So we've embedded and responded to Brett Palmer's video including by pointing out that the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, below, corroborates this understanding of the "firmament" as first referring to the earth's crust (i.e., biblically, to paradise, to heaven on earth). And we show that the Bible's Hebrew word for firmament, raqia, from the verb raqa, refers not only to the heavens above, but explicitly, to the crust of the earth. And we present the meaning of the Syrian geographical place name, Raqqa, and extend to antiquity the etymology of the English word, rock. At Real Science Radio (which airs on America's most-powerful radio station), we teach Dr. Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory as the best understanding of the global flood, geology and the relevant scriptures. If the following is correct, all flood models based on the "canopy theory" and "plate tectonics" are false.On Day Two God Made the Crust of the Earth: Dr. Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory helps to understand the global flood, geology and the relevant scriptures. On Day Two of creation, God formed the crust of the earth, called the firmament (Hebrew: raqia), which extended for miles above a worldwide subterranean ocean, and the crust of course also held waters upon its surface. If this is true, we would expect to read in the Bible that initially, the surface of the earth was covered only with water, and that then God made the earth's crust above the water. And consistent with the Hydroplate Theory (which describes a layer of water at least one-mile thick that was perhaps dozens of miles below the earth's surface), in fact the Bible teaches that God: - "In the beginning God created... the earth. ...and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:1-2). Then God, - "laid out (raqa) the earth above the waters" (Psalm 136:6). And, - "by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth [was] standing out of water and in the water" (2 Peter 3:5). - "Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament" (Gen. 1:7). So, "The earth is the Lord's... For He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the waters" (Ps.24:1-2). Where the Water Came From: The global flood then began when those "fountains of the great deep were broken up" (Gen. 7:11) for the pre-flood earth had been "standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water" (2 Peter 3:5-6). Those waters had been stored up for global judgment if needed. For when "the heavens were made," the Bible says of much of the Earth's water back then that God "lays up the deep in storehouses" (Ps. 33:6-7; see also Prov. 8:27-28). For God created not only the surface waters, for He "made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters" (Rev. 14:7 KJV [as with many versions; some like the NKJV say "springs of water"). Dr. Brown's book, In the Beginning, demonstrates powerfully that the world's major geologic features flow logically from these initial conditions. But some creationists who disagree point out that, "God called the firmament Heaven" (Gen. 1:8), claiming that this firmament must be either the atmosphere (e.g., Henry Morris) or outer space (e.g., Russell Humphreys). Heaven on Earth, Hell Beneath: However at RSR we show that, whether figurative or literal, the crust of the earth is the boundary between heaven and hell. It is consistent with Biblical history that God would originally call the crust of the earth "heaven." For at creation, "He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble (Job 26:10-11). And then, "He divideth (not raqa but raga) the sea with his power" (Job 26:12 KJV, Jubilee, Websters, etc.). God designated the region below the crust as the initial abode of those who may pass away. Hell is the holding prison for the unrepentant dead. "Hell from beneath is excited about you, to meet you at your coming" (Isa. 14:9; etc.). For the newly-made earth, the Lord logically referred to everything from the crust and above as heaven. Hence dozens of verses indicate that heaven also refers to the earth's atmosphere as in "rain from heaven," the "dew of heaven," "birds of heaven," "dust from the heaven," city walls "fortified up to heaven," smoke rises "to the midst of heaven," "the heavens are shut" in drought, "frost of heaven," "clouds of heaven," "snow from heaven," "hail from heaven," and the east winds "blow in the heavens." Thus even after the Fall, from Genesis and Job, through the Gospels, Acts and Revelation, the Bible continued to refer to the atmosphere, one molecule above the ground, as heaven. Apart from this understanding, a Bible student might think that while the surface of the Moon is in "heaven", that the paradise God made on the surface of the Earth is not. Also, the Bible's thirty-two occurrences of the phrase "kingdom of heaven" appear only in the royal Gospel of Matthew, and some of these (Mat. 11:12; 13:24 with Mat. 13:38; 16:19; Mat. 18:1 with Luke 9:46; etc.) locate this kingdom of "heaven" at least partially on earth. Lucifer Fell from Heaven on Earth: "God called the firmament Heaven," because the earth's crust formed the boundary between heaven and the future hell. The firmament also divided the waters of the earth (Gen. 1:2, 6) which even reserved the floodwaters of judgment below ground. For God "lays up the deep in storehouses" so "let all the earth fear the Lord," (Ps. 33:7-8), because He "shut in the sea with doors" until in the flood "it burst forth and issued from the womb," (Job. 38:8). But after the Fall, which likely occurred within a week of Creation, earth lost its heavenly designation, for apparently God will never fully replicate the first earth. Only two detailed Bible stories involve happenings that occured prior to the Fall, the creation account and the record of Lucifer's fall. And both of these events refer to earth as heaven. Isaiah 14:12 describes "Lucifer" as "fallen from heaven," yet Scripture places him on earth at the moment of his fall. "You were in Eden, the garden of God," (Ezek. 28:13). And "you have said in your heart: "I will ascend into heaven... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds," (Isa. 14:13-14). "Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit," (Isa. 14:15). Even though he was on earth, Lucifer fell "from heaven," because prior to the Fall, the surface of the earth was part of heaven's realm. * Bible Students Understand the Firmament, But Get Confused at 1:8: See this explained in this five-minute segment, in our 2-hour flood video, that begins at 48:30. Just click and the video will start at the correct point... Consider the flesh. Notice that just as gravity pulls our physical flesh down toward the center of the earth, the Fall created the world system which relentlessly pulls our spiritual flesh, drawing us down toward the lowest depths until death, and then the believer's released spirit soars upward to heaven, whereas the unbeliever's unfettered spirit falls downward, the firmament no longer keeping him out of Hades, thus his soul plummets into hell. C.S. Lewis wrote the preface to D.E. Harding's esoteric The Hierarchy of Heaven & Earth in which Harding wrote that "Hierarchy is... something like the ancient circles of heaven and earth and hell" (1952, p. 27), and that the "narrowest Hell would be widest Heaven if the Devil could only bring himself to turn round and look out from the Centre instead of in at himself" (p. 187). In the modern classic, Soul of Science, (1994, p. 38), Pearcey and Thaxton describe the view of Christian "medieval cosmology" that "at the very center of the universe was Hell, then the earth, then (moving outward from the center) the progressively nobler spheres of the heavens." Christians continue to affirm this hierarchy quoting Paul who was "caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor 12:2), the first being the sky, the second is space, and the third God's habitation. King David even refers to the deep, as the "channels of the sea", where in the flood "the foundations of the world were uncovered", which were "the foundations of heaven" (2 Sam. 22:8, 16). Incidentally, the never-before-seen consequences of the flood caused the troubles David lists here. The lightnings, thunder, dark waters, thick clouds, darkness, volcanic eruptions, smoke, coal and fire, the earth shaking, and when the "channels of the sea appeared" only then the "foundations of the world were uncovered..." Moses Qualified His Last Four Uses of Firmament: Moses used the word firmament nine times in the creation account. He intentionally distinguished the last four occurrences from the first four, which all pivot around the central instance where God called the earth's firmament Heaven. Each of the four in the second grouping (Genesis 1:14, 15, 17, 20) is qualified separately by an exceptional repetition. The prepositional phrase "of the heavens" makes a distinction between the first firmament of the earth, and the second "firmament of the heavens." And if firmament means the "heavens," the very term "firmament of the heavens" would seem unnecessarily redundant, especially when repeated four times. However, the qualifier "of the heavens" is added so that the reader will not confuse this firmament of sky and space with the previous firmament of earth. Thus, readers alien to the notion of "heaven" on earth should nonetheless be able to separate the two firmaments, and understand God's meaning. Now, millennia after the Fall, God's own record of creation notwithstanding, sin has almost completely obscured the original perspective of the earth's surface as "heaven." The Things God Called Day and Earth: "God called the light Day." Yet like with the word firmament, Genesis has two very different meanings for light. Day 4 would be unintelligible without recognizing its initial meaning. "Then God made two great Days to rule the heavens"? No. The same is true for the dry land that "God called... Earth". If it had only one meaning, then the Earth would have been created on Day Two when the "Earth" appeared. Our Full Firmament Video: Above we pointed to a five-minute excerpt. Here's the full 30-minute segment out of our Global Flood video on raqia titled, Is the Day 2 firmament of Genesis the Earth's crust?: Kingdom of Heaven Lost on Earth: When man rebelled, earth became more like hell than heaven. Thus man's habitation on the surface of the earth lost its heavenly designation. The Bible describes Hell as below, bounded by the firmament. However in the beginning "God called the firmament Heaven" because that's where He placed Adam and Eve, above ground on the surface, in the heavens, in fellowship with Him, not in any other realm but in His kingdom, in heaven on earth. 2011 UPDATE - Atheists and the Solid Dome: YouTube anti-creationist Brett Palmer created a 40-minute rebuttal video (embedded here) of this little article on the firmament. Seems like we hit a nerve. Aside from Brett casting aspersions from the recently invented flat-earth myth, consider that as with many other atheists, he claims that the word firmament (Hebrew raqia) discredits the creation account by showing that Genesis cannot be God's Word because it merely echoes the ancient world's false belief in a solid domed sky above the earth. So, if raqia (firmament) refers not only to the heavens, but also to the crust of the earth, standing above a subterranean chamber of water, then atheists would lose a favorite argument. Raqia is the noun from the verb raqa meaning being hammered or spread out, as in working metal into a thin sheet or plate. "They beat (raqa) the gold into thin sheets" (Exodus 39:3). "The goldsmith overspreads (raqa) it with gold" (Isaiah 40:19; i.e., gold-plated). Similarly, God overspread the waters of the earth with the plates of the earth's crust, i.e., the firmament, what Walt Brown calls hydroplates. For "God made the firmament (raqia), and divided the waters which were under the firmament (raqia, the crustal plates) from the waters which were above the firmament" (Genesis 1:7). Please review again the verses listed below. For not only did God create "the sea and the fountains" (Rev. 14:7), if this understanding of raqia is is the Bible's actual meaning, then we would expect also to read that initially the surface of the earth was covered only with water, and that then God made the earth's crust above the water: - "In the beginning God created... the earth. ...darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." Gen. 1:1-2 - God "laid out the earth above the waters" Ps. 136:6- "by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water" 2 Pet. 3:5 - "Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." Gen. 1:7 "The earth is the Lord's... For He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the waters." Ps. 24:1-2 When the Bible specifically links raqa to the earth (as in the passages below), and because words typically have multiple meanings, it is extreme to insist that raqia cannot refer to anything but the heavens. Genesis was written back when pagans wondered what held up the earth. Perhaps it rested on the back of a tortoise, or on a pillar, or was held up by Atlas. Yet the most ancient Scripture teaches that God, "hangs the earth on nothing" (Job 26:7), which is visually consistent with modern astronomical observation. For just as the firmament of the earth holds up the mountains, so too, the firmament "of the heavens" is strong enough to hold the earth.God Raqa the EARTH! Firmament (raqia) is used "of the heavens" commonly and eleven times the Bible speaks of God stretching out the heavens. Then there is something not included in the above video. Another three times the Bible says that God raqa the earth itself. This shows, unlike as stressed on YouTube, that raqia very naturally also refers to the earth. Dr. Walt Brown's book lists these verses but I'll repeat them here for Mr. Palmer's consideration: To Him who laid out (raqa) the earth above the waters… Ps. 136:6 Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth (raqa) the earth and that which comes from it… Isa. 42:5 “I am the Lord, who makes all things, who stretches out the heavens all alone, who spreads abroad (raqa) the earth by Myself;" Isa. 44:24 The firmament (raqia) of the creation account was iconic in ancient Israel, as the Tyndale Bible Dictionary says, "the firmament is always related to Creation." So the repetition and by two authors shows that the wording is deliberate. Thus these verses show an ancient awareness in Scripture that God raqa the Earth, that is, that His stretching out of the raqia of Genesis 1:8 readily refers to terra firma, or as the King James translators coined the word from the Latin, the firmament. Raqia and Heaven Both Refer Also to the Earth Raqa the Earth Heaven on Earth To Him who laid out (raqa) the earth above the waters...  Ps. 136:6 "He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble... He stirs up the sea with His power..." Job 26:10-12 Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth (raqa) the earth...  Isa. 42:5 "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force." Mat. 11:12; "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field;" and "the field is the world..." Mat. 13:24, 38 I am the Lord... who stretches out the heavens all alone, who spreads abroad (raqa) the earth by Myself  Isa. 44:24 "And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" Mat. 16:19 [and 18:18] Etymology of Raqia: The word raqia relates to raqa as sharia (law) relates to shara'a (to ordain or decree). Further, the ancient Middle East commonly ended names in "ia," and in this particular example of early Hebrew usage, raqia, though not a proper name, is the name for something created by raqa. (Atheist Brett Palmer, though not especially reliable, does specifically agree with this explanation in his follow-up video.) Pillars of Heaven: Regarding the crust of the Earth being referred to as heaven, consider the "pillars" which formed beneath the crust, as Dr. Brown describes it, at many "locations, the [subterranean] chamber's sagging ceiling pressed against the chamber's floor. These solid contacts will be called pillars." Thus since they supported the Earth's surface, they could be referred to as "pillars of heaven", just beneath the surface, which would "tremble" when they were crushed in God's judgment of the great flood of Noah's day, When God, "stirs up the sea with His power", as Job put it. "He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble... He stirs up the sea with His power..." (Job 26:10-12). Earth's Foundation with Pillars Sunk into their Bases: This doesn't have to confuse Bible students. This five-minute segment at 1:04:22 depicts the pillars. Just click and the video will start at the correct point... * No One Before Or Since? Palmer says, virtually alleging omniscience for himself, that "no one before or since Enyart has ever asserted that two firmaments were created in the creation story." However, the nearly contemporaneous Babylonian creation epic states directly that heaven above and the "firm ground below" were called by the same name, that is, "heaven." First though consider Google. The claim then is that the term firmament refers to sky and space, and also to the sphere of the world. So, as the originator of this concept :) that firmament has two meanings, I am gratified that it's catching on. The Google results for "define:firmament" gives two meanings: The heavens or the sky, esp. when regarded as a tangible thing A sphere or world viewed as a collection of people * Not Half Bad and Not Half Right: Hey, for Google, that's not half bad, for the firmament (the Earth's surface) was called heaven so that Adam and Eve could be fruitful and multiply and fill the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Then regarding Palmer's claim that, "no one before or since Enyart has ever asserted that two firmaments were created," Dr. Brown's book credits "two pastors" with showing him this simple heaven-on-earth understanding of Genesis 1:8. The pastor before me later publishing a book on the topic: Paradise: Past, Present, and Future, and of course since then, Walt Brown too has adopted this understanding. >* Babylonian Creation Epic: The ancient pagan world had a corrupted memory of biblical accounts. Compare for example Egypt's sun god arising out of the waters of creation with, "God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light.'" Likewise the flood of Noah's day is remembered in Babylon's Epic of Gilgamesh. Also, the seven tablets of Enuma Elish similarities to the seven days of the creation week include man's creation on the sixth day which is presented on the sixth tablet. The first creation tablet describes the "waters commingling as a single body" when "no marsh land had [yet] appeared", reminiscent of the firmament dividing the waters (Gen. 1:6-7) and the dry land appearing (Gen. 1:9). The truth reported by Moses in Genesis 1:8a, that God called the firmament heaven (referring to the crust of the Earth, i.e., God's kingdom of heaven, on Earth) is emphasized in the first lines of the first Babylonian creation tablet which state, "When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by that name." That is, before the term "heaven" even applied to sky and space, before that not even the firmament below had yet been called that same name, i.e., heaven. (This translation, "firm ground below had not [yet] been called by that name", appears in old-earth Oxford Prof. John Lennox' book Seven Days that Divide the World. Importantly, after discussing this matter personally with Dr. Lennox, RSR can report that he does not agree with our Genesis 1:8 interpretation, so in no way would he publish a biased translation to make our point.) For as Moses wrote, "God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament... And God called the firmament Heaven... Then God said, '...let the dry land appear.'" So whereas atheist video maker Palmer (see above) says that "no one before or since Enyart has ever asserted that two firmaments were created in the creation story", Brett can now consider that this Babylonian Enuma Elish creation epic parallels the Hydroplate Theory's understanding of the firmament as referring also, and originally, to the "firm ground below" the heavens. And thus, because God raqa the Earth, by creating the raqia, that is, the solid rock crust of the Earth, therefore, the etymology of the English word rock can now be traced back much further than the medieval Latin rocca. Not surprisingly then, studying geography we find that root word in the names of various ancient places in the region. For example, in 2015 Raqqa hit the headlines as the capital city of the Islamic terrorist group ISIS. An accurate understanding of Genesis is essential for understanding early history. Thus we can now trace the etymology of our English word rock to that very Epic of Gilgamesh flood account, with Gilgamesh being the king of Uruk, located in the south of the modern nation with a name that means "deeply rooted, well-watered", for God placed the water deep under the raqia which explains the name of the ancient place, Iraq. (See also Bob's draft comments on the Enuma text.) * Countries, Regions, and Peoples Ending in A and IA: Why do so many place names end in ia? God raqa the raqia to give mankind a place to live on the face of the Earth. In the web's most complete list of place names that end in ia, see about 120 significant geographical regions that end with -a or -ia, and others that sound like they end in ia, like Kenya and Libya. (RSR maintains this list.) Consider also, not unlike the city of Raqqa and the country of Iraq, the continent of Africa may have a related etymology, and consider also that in Arabic afar means dust, earth. And the names of many lands that do not end in -ia, as Egypt, still give a nod to the suffix when referencing their people, as with Egyptian, Akkadian, Persian, and the more modern Caucasian, with -ian equating also to the -yan as discussed at rsr.org/yan such as Aryan (meaning from the Sun land).* Seven-Day Week: The worldwide use of a seven-day week results from the creation account. And those seven days are named for the heavenly bodies (Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc.) as God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." (On a related topic we interviewed Scientific American editor and atheist Michael Shermer for Real Science Radio. That full show is so much fun to listen to.) "Dr. Shermer, while much of the ancient world was worshiping heavenly bodies, could you at least agree that the Bible is correct on page one, where it states that the Sun is a light?" [Moses was correct also when he taught in Deuteronomy that the planets and stars are not gods and should not be worshiped.] "So can you agree that the Bible is correct in Genesis chapter one, that the Sun is not a god, but a light?" To which Shermer infamously replied, which you can hear in this 73-second excerpt (and transcript) that the sun is not a light. Wow. It's often difficult to have a reasonable discussion with atheists. Also, the worldwide use of blood sacrifices resulted from God commanding Adam and Noah to sacrifice animals prefiguring the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. * A Solid Dome Sky Belief Widespread Yet Not Intuitive: As Wikipedia reports, "The notion of the sky as a solid object (rather than just an atmospheric expanse) was widespread among both ancient civilizations and primitive cultures, including ancient Greece, Egypt, China, India, native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and also early Christians. It is probably a universal human trait to perceive the sky as a solid dome." Retrieved 8-27-11. However, with the many varied movements in the heavens of the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, comets, and meteorites, it's not intuitive that so much of the whole world would end up believing that the Earth had a solid-domed sky. Except, of course, if the ancients who populated the world after the global flood were misunderstanding the raqia of Day Two as referring to the heavens instead of to the crust of the earth. Conclusion: So, the Bible speaks of Earth using the same term, raqia, as for the firmament "of the heavens" (clarified that way in Genesis 1). Yet when the paradise of Eden and God's Kingdom of Heaven on Earth became "filled with violence," mankind began to forget that God made earth as part of His Kingdom of heaven. Thus, what changed was the common use of the term heaven for the Earth. © 2007 - 2017 Bob Enyart, RSR.org.com * RSR's Global Flood and Hydroplate Theory: Here's our best-selling flood video which is available also on DVD, Blu-ray, and download. We hope you enjoy this: Email: From Walt Brown to Bob Enyart on March 22, 2005: "Dear Bob, I like your proposal concerning Genesis 1:8a, and after much thought, have decided to include it [in the 8th edition of In the Beginning]. I have credited Pastor Diego Rodriguez and you as the originators of this very attractive explanation. ... Thank you for sending me your explanation. -Walt" Biologos: Note that Francis Collins' theistic-evolution group BioLogos uses their misunderstanding of the firmament in their effort to diminish the authority of Genesis. For example, "Genesis... says things that are at odds with what modern people know to be true of the world... The other cosmologies from the ancient world depict some solid structure in the sky. The most natural explanation of the raqia is that it also reflects this understanding. There is no indication that Genesis is a novel description of the sky." In other words, Collins claims that Genesis' presentation of the firmament [in contrast to the biblical and historical insights above] equates to that of pagan myths. As old-earth Christians, they therefore reject the global flood and many other biblical teachings. See this explained in our Trading Genesis video: Bio: Bob Enyart co-hosts Real Science Radio and pastors Denver Bible Church. Bob first had a technical career working: - at McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Company on the Army's Apache helicopter - as a systems analyst for "Baby Bell" U S West - as a program manager for Microsoft, and - as a senior analyst for PC Week Bob became a believer in 1973, entered full-time Christian work in 1989, and in 1991 began hosting a daily show on America's most powerful Christian radio station, the 50,000-watt AM 670 KLTT. In 1999, the elders and pastor of Denver's Derby Bible Church ordained Bob into the ministry. In 2000, Derby planted Denver Bible Church with Bob as pastor and in 2015 as a host of Real Science Radio Bob was inducted into the Creation Science Hall of Fame. You can see Bob Enyart's materials online or call 1-800-8Enyart. If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read Why Canaan was Cursed?, Polygamy in the Bible, and Slavery in the Bible. And you can hear Bob at RealScienceRadio.com!

A few weeks ago a paper was published in the journal Archaeological Prospection that the Gunung Padang site in Indonesia is not, as is generally believed, around 2 thousand years old. And that it is actually closer to 20,000 years old. For $5 a month, you can help support the show and listen to our full premium episodes. You'll also get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes, which is pretty cool. https://www.patreon.com/wetwired This claim was first floated back in 2014 but was largely disregarded for a few reasons. This 2023 paper seems like it's mostly trying to vindicate the earlier one and rehabilitate those claims. Incidentally, this is also a site that Graham Hancock has leaned on heavily to support his worldwide, high-tech, lost civilization idea. Gunung Panang shows up in the very first episode of his 2022 Netflix series. Obviously, it's a pretty grabby claim, so unsurprisingly more than a few popular websites absolutely lapped it up. To help us sort all this out, we're joined by Archaeologists Dr Bill Farley and Steph Halmhofer. Follow Steph Halmhofer: https://bonesstonesandbooks.com https://twitter.com/Cult_Archaeo https://bsky.app/profile/cultarchaeo.bsky.social Follow Bill Farley: https://linktr.ee/archaeologytube https://twitter.com/ArchaeologyGame https://bsky.app/profile/archaeologytube.bsky.social Some reading: Natawidjaja et al. 2023 Geo-archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia in Archaeological Prospection https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/arp.1912 Since recording this episode, some completely warranted heat has been directed at the publishers and authors of the 2023 Natawidjaja article. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03546-w The paper we mentioned a few times in this episode that Steph Halmhofer co-authored with William T. D. Wadsworth and Kisha Supernant. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/arp.1915 Indonesia's Own ‘Pyramid': The Imagined Past and Nationalism of Gunung Padang by Dian Sulistyowati https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348911628_INDONESIA%27S_OWN_%27PYRAMID%27_THE_IMAGINED_PAST_AND_NATIONALISM_OF_GUNUNG_PADANG Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en For $5 a month, you can help support the show and listen to our full premium episodes. You'll also get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes, which is pretty cool. https://www.patreon.com/wetwired Catch up with us on the Wetwired Discord. https://discord.gg/fr62mpUy5c Follow us: Twitter at https://twitter.com/wetwiredpod Instagram at https://instagram.com/wetwiredpod Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/wetwired.bsky.social https://patreon.com/wetwired

Alasdair takes James to Canterbury, in Kent*, a city positively brimming with ghosts. The boys skip from the Roman streets to a tea house, which boasts its own unique ghost room. But! What begins as a grisly interior design show ends up as a hard hitting exposé. Foklore or FAKElore? You decide.   We also come up with some Chaucer-themed business ideas. If you open a Canterbury grocers that sells only parsnips called "The Parsonips Tale" you have to pay us royalties. There's a lot to get your teeth into here. And a lot of panels to hide your teeth behind, if that's what you're into. Incidentally**, why not pop into Tiny Tim's Tea Rooms and book yourself on a Canterbury a ghost tour? * Actual Kent, this time. ** Tooth pun!

There aren't a whole lot of things that make Max and Matt lose their cool faster than a hard, "NO" from one of their offspring. Incidentally, those two letters aren't the kids' favorite ones to hear either. So, how do you set necessary limits without ending up in unnecessary power struggles? How do you give your kids a voice in decision making without living your life in a state of constant negotiation? And how do you parse out which parts of the conflict are inevitable, and which parts are about the unresolved baggage we're bringing to the table as adults? You WILL listen to this episode, and you're going to LIKE IT... because mandating other people's feelings works every time. Let's NO!

God has seen fit that Mike Johnson will be the Speaker of the House. Will Johnson be the man who restores regular order to the House? Incidentally, those in the Mockingbird media have already resorted to name-calling in an attempt to discredit him. Remember Rep. Jamaal Bowman who pulled the fire alarm? There is video evidence proving that he lied to the police and intentionally pulled the fire alarm in the House. His actions constitute felony behavior, but he will not face any such charges. Will Mike Johnson demand just treatment for those involved in January 6? Will he ensure there is no double standard in the law, where Rep. Bowman faces no consequences, while others have been held for two years for their involvement in January 6 without trial?What does God's Word say? John 15:4-94 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. 5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. 9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.Episode 1,185 Links:The 19-year-old darker-skinned, Indian (but somehow “white supremacist”) neo-Nazi who admitted to the FBI that his plan was to “get to the White House, seize power, and be put in charge of the nation and kill the President…” despite his admission all charges were dropped save one count of damaging property in excess of $1K. Why? Mark Hemmingway: “Dude rams a White House barrier and "his federal charges have since been downgraded to a single count of depredation of property of the United States"? I don't want to sound paranoid, but that seems like they're trying to hush this up…”Iowa's Grassley says 40 people gave FBI criminal information about Biden family; Senator sends letter to Justice, FBI seeking recordsIRS Leaker Who Stole Trump's Tax Returns Gets ‘Slap On The Wrist' From Biden DOJFLASHBACK: @RepMikeJohnson: “Listen to the language carefully it's expressly written in the Constitution… the president shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.. I just listed a small sampling, just the tip of the iceberg of the credible allegations and the mounting evidence that shows that Joseph Biden has engaged in bribery schemes…”Owen Shroyer's Prison Sentence Begins As He Is Put in Solitary ConfinementDemocrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman says he struck a deal with fellow Democrat D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb to have the fire alarm charges expunged from his record once he pays a fineDemocrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who was caught on tape pulling a fire alarm just before a big House vote: "That's crazy, immediately likening me to an insurrectionist!"DHS Secretary Mayorkas has twice refused to grant Secret Service protection for [Robert Kennedy's] campaign. For full transparency, here are all the details, including the 3rd formal submission letter to Sec. MayorkasCuomo Admits ABC Had BANNED Them Wearing American Flag Pins After 9/11Isabel Vaughan-Spruce has been given a fixed penalty notice by the Thought Police.Clearly not protesting.Clearly not harassing anyone.Clearly causing no harmArrested for silently praying in her head, again!Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf openly despises white people. 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