Tuesday, December 30, 2014

 
 


The Farewell Waltz (Auld Lang Syne), Waterloo Bridge

A scene from one of my absolute favorite films, Waterloo Bridge, starring one of my absolute favorite actresses, Vivien Leigh.


Auld Lang Syne, The Film When Harry Met Sally


Auld Lang Syne, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra


A Long December, Counting Crows


Seasons of Love, The Play, Rent


Let's Start the New Year Right, Bing Crosby

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Merry Christmas! Enjoy some of the world's most beautiful Christkindlmarkts (Christmas markets)



A Christmas market, also known as Christkindlmarkt, Marché de Noël, Christkindlesmarkt, Christkindlmarket, and Weihnachtsmarkt, is a street market associated with the celebration of Christmas during the four weeks of Advent. These markets originated in Germany, Austria, South Tyrol in Northern Italy and the eastern French regions of Alsace, Lorraine and Savoy.

The history of Christmas markets goes back to the Late Middle Ages in the German-speaking part of Europe and in many parts of the former Holy Roman Empire that includes many eastern regions of France and Switzerland. Dresden's Strietzelmart was first held in 1434. The Christmas markets of Bautzen (first held in 1384), Frankfurt (first mentioned in 1393) and Munich (1310) Augsburg (1498) were even older. The Vienna "December market" was a kind of forerunner of the Christmas market and dates back to 1294.

In many towns in Germany and Austria, Advent is usually ushered in with the opening of the Christmas market or "Weihnachtsmarkt". In southern Germany and Austria it is sometimes called a "Christkind(e)l(s)markt" (German language, literally meaning "Christ child market"). Generally held in the town square and adjacent pedestrian zones, the market sells food, drink, and seasonal items from open-air stalls, accompanied by traditional singing and dancing. On opening nights (and in some towns more often) onlookers welcome the "Christkind" (originally boy Jesus, but more often depicted as an angel-like girl), acted out by a local child.


Chicago, Illinois, United States

Strasbourg, France
The oldest Christmas market of Europe (1570)


 
Dresden, Germany
11 completely different Christmas markets in one city!
 
Verona, Italy
Buon Natale!
 
 
 
Basel, Switzerland
One of the prettiest and largest Christmas markets of Switzerland
 
Vienna, Austria
 
 
 
Birmingham, England
The largest outdoor Christmas Market in the United Kingdom
 
Christmas, Scandinavian Style
 
 
 
Barcelona, Spain
 
Toronto, Canada
Santa Lane, home of Rudolph the Reindeer Zoo, and a fairytale forest maze complete this Christmas market

 
 


Do They Know It's Christmas, Band Aid


Need a Little Christmas, Johnny Mathis


Little Drummer Boy, Vienna Boys Choir


All I Want for Christmas Is You, Mariah Carey


Silent Night, Stevie Nicks

Sunday, December 14, 2014





 
"Love is alive, and He's by me..."
 



Love Is Alive, The Judds


Friday, December 12, 2014

Transforming lion killers into 'Lion Guardians' By Meghan Dunn, CNN




Kenya (CNN) -- As a child, Leela Hazzah would spend her summer nights lying on the rooftop of her family's home in Egypt. Her father and uncle had told her stories of their childhood, when they would sleep on the same rooftop and hear lions roaring. "I used to lay there, listening for those same sounds. But I didn't hear anything," Hazzah said.

Leela Hazzah

Hazzah's father finally got the courage to tell his young daughter that she would not hear lions roaring because they had long since gone extinct in Egypt. "Sixty years ago, there were probably half a million lions in Africa," Hazzah said. "Today, there are less than 30,000 lions in all of Africa."

Hazzah spent a year living among the Maasai to understand their relationship with lions and why they were killing them. "Livestock are the core of their culture. It's their main source of livelihood," Hazzah said. "When they lose their cows, they don't have anything left. So they retaliate, and they kill lions."

She then realized that Maasai warriors, the leaders and protectors in their community, would be the best ambassadors for lions. She began teaching them the benefits of protecting lions, with an emphasis on preserving their culture. In turn, the lessons began rippling through the entire tribe.

Many Maasai warriors come to Lion Guardians illiterate, having never attended school. Hazzah and her team teach each one how to read and write. The guardians also learn about "their" lions. They keep data on the lions' movements and population changes as part of their job. If a guardian hears about a lion hunt, he intervenes. He helps the individuals understand the importance of keeping lions alive, including that lions draw tourists to the area, which provides jobs.


Leela and a Lion Guardian
 
For Hazzah, watching the transformation of young Maasai warriors has been one of the most rewarding parts of her efforts. "I know we're making a difference," Hazzah said. "When I first moved here, I never heard lions roaring. But now I hear lions roaring all the time."

"That was the moment when I decided I knew what I wanted to do," Hazzah said. "I wanted to hear lions roaring." 

Now 35, she has since devoted her life to lion conservation. While earning her master's in conservation biology, Hazzah's research led her to Kenya. She lived in a tree house and began seeing firsthand the rapid decline of African lions due to habitat loss and human-lion conflict.

"Sixty years ago, there were probably half a million lions in Africa. Today, there are less than 30,000 lions in all of Africa," she said.

Now armed with a doctorate in environmental studies, Hazzah has found one solution to help the lion population grow. Her nonprofit turns Maasai warriors -- who have a tradition of killing lions -- into lion protectors.

The organization employs 65 Lion Guardians throughout East Africa. Their ultimate goal: reduce lion killings. "The lion is iconic," said Hazzah, who started Lion Guardians in 2007. "If there are no lions left in Africa, it will have a significant effect. We could lose a lot more than just the lion."

Changing a culture

Hazzah spent a year living among the Maasai to understand their relationship with lions and why they were killing them. For one, young warriors receive their lion name when they first kill a lion, a sort of rite of passage. "It brings a huge amount of prestige to the warrior who kills a lion," Hazzah said. The lion is iconic. The Maasai also live a mostly pastoral life and depend on their livestock. They use it to feed their families; they use it for currency. Livestock is also a status symbol. "Livestock are the core of their culture. ... It's their main source of livelihood," Hazzah said. "When they lose their cows, they don't have anything left. So they retaliate, and they kill lions."

Hazzah's idea for Lion Guardians came together while living in the community and spending time with the warriors. "They started opening up and telling me stories," she said. "That's when it clicked." Hazzah realized that Maasai warriors, the leaders and protectors in their community, would be the best ambassadors for lions. She began teaching them the benefits of protecting lions, with an emphasis on preserving their culture. In turn, the lessons began rippling through the entire tribe. "Maasai have a very close-knit relationship with lions. It's very much a love-and-hate relationship," Hazzah said. "They dislike them because they eat their livestock, but they also admire them tremendously because they are just beautiful animals."

From hunter to guardian

Today, protecting lions is a full-time job for a guardian, who earns around $100 a month. The group teaches the guardians a number of methods to reduce human-lion conflict in their communities. If a guardian hears about a lion hunt, he intervenes. He helps the individuals understand the importance of keeping lions alive, including that lions draw tourists to the area, which provides jobs.

Guardians also help farmers strengthen corrals where they keep their livestock. They also help find and safely return lost livestock. These measures have prevented livestock deaths and, more importantly, retaliatory lion killings. "Becoming a Lion Guardian is a rebirth for (the Massai). They gain even more prestige than they would have from killing a lion," Hazzah said.

Most Maasai warriors come to Lion Guardians illiterate, having never attended school. Hazzah and her team teach each one how to read and write. The guardians also learn about "their" lions; they keep data on the lions' movements and population changes as part of their job. Director of Science and co-founder Stephanie Dolrenry works with the guardians to study and name their lions and provides the technical field training and equipment the guardians need to monitor the lions.

For Hazzah, watching the transformation of young Maasai warriors has been one of the most rewarding parts of her efforts. "We never imagined when we first started Lion Guardians that we could transform these killers to the point where they would risk their own lives to stop other people from killing lions," she said. Hazzah said the Lion Guardian program has had great success in the Amboseli region of Kenya. When used alone or with other conservation programs, the program was 99% effective in stopping lion killings.

"I know we're making a difference," Hazzah said. "When I first moved here, I never heard lions roaring. But now I hear lions roaring all the time."

Want to get involved? Check out the Lion Guardians website at www.lionguardians.org and see how to help.


The Lion Sleeps Tonight, The Tokens


Sunday, December 7, 2014

Sunday is for Poetry: WITH TRUE LOVE



 
Comes tears,

Cups of joy fills,
 
Ameliorates earth's ills,
 
Releases diseases' grip,
 
Veils fallen soldiers,
 
Embraces the homeless,
 
With the sick, cry,
 
Accepts a lover's good-bye,
 
 Broken hearts heal,
 
Through the pain of true love.
 
 
 
 
**petra michelle: 2010"






Mysteries, Beth Gibbons


The Healing Has Begun, Matthew West


Monday, December 1, 2014

The "Wallace cut" -- Wallace Chan, the million dollar jeweler

I personally wouldn't spend millions on a piece of jewelry, but I do appreciate a work of art --  such are Wallace Chan's creations.

(CNN) -- Locked inside the gemstone there appears to be a human face.


As the jewel is turned into fragments, it appears to be looking in several different directions at once.
How the disembodied head, which seems to have a life of its own, was spirited into the gem seems to be something of a mystery.
 
"It is a sacred thing to create a face," says Wallace Chan, 58, the Chinese artisan jeweler that produced the piece. "It's like a ghost appearing in the gem as you work. The dialogue of gemstone, color and light gives it life. There is a Buddhist saying that every person has many selves, and that inspired me spiritually as I created this work."
 
The work, Now and Always, is a depiction of Horae, the Greek goddess of the seasons. Her dancing was said to move the year from through winter to fall, spring and summer. Such a multifaceted figure from mythology seemed the perfect inspiration for the jeweler.
 
Chan's exceptional artistry has caught the eye of a number of high-profile buyers, including Francois Curiel, chairman of Christie's in Asia, and Prince Henrik of Denmark. "Each piece can take me thousands of hours."
Carving out his own identity
 
It's not the first time that Chan has "created" a human face in a jewel. But Now and Always is certainly the finest demonstration of the "Wallace cut", a technique that Chan invented and perfected over decades.
Rather than cutting into the surface of the jewel, shaping it into a geometric form, Chan cuts into it  from the back, carving out complex images from inside the gem. "Every stroke and cut has to consider movement of the light," he says. "It took a lot of practice because I had to learn how to carve in reverse. When you work from the back of the jewel, right is left, top is bottom and deep becomes shallow. It is like having to drive a car backwards and forwards at the same time."
 
 
Chan uses a dentist's drill with a specially adapted blade, which rotates 36,000 times a minute.
When he started using the tool, he quickly realized that the heat generated would damage the gemstone -- a major problem with material that is this expensive. So he developed a technique of working under cold water.
 
"It means I can't see clearly when I'm cutting," he says. "It becomes a very repetitive process. I make one cut, take it out of the water to check it, dry the stone, check it again, and if it's fine I put it back in the water and make another cut."
 
This is a painstaking process, but for Chan it is also a meditative one. He puts his "soul and consciousness into the creation", he says, and becomes so absorbed that he "forgets [his] own existence. My mind is one with the work, and my physical self is removed from the gemstone," he explains. "It's quite emotional, because I'm within in the inner world of gemstone, focused on how the light enters and interacts with the colors."
 
 
From rags to riches
 
Chan's technique is the culmination of many years of development. He was born in a poor part of Fuzhou in 1958, and left school at the age of 13. In order to support his family, he became an apprentice to a sculptor making Chinese religious iconography.
 
He went on to study Western sculpture, and in 1974 set up his own workshop. After being commissioned by a Taiwanese art collector to make a jeweled "stupa", or Buddhist reliquary, Chan's focus shifted from sculpture to jewelry and he began to explore innovative techniques.
He began setting jewels in titanium instead of gold, which allowed him to create "jewelry sculptures" that were still light enough to wear. He also experimented with using gems to fix each other in place, rather than metal settings, as well as new methods of cutting jade.
 
 
But his dream was to find an entirely new way of working with gemstones. Gradually, he refined his ideas until he arrived at the concept of reverse cutting.
In the Eighties he began to practice, using cheap crystals. But after a year-and-a-half, he realized that the tools he had been using were not equal to the task.
So he visited factories that produced medical instruments, and after six months of research, came up with the idea of modifying a dentist's drill.
The rest is history. "It was the only way to satisfy the standard I wanted to achieve," he says.
 
The height of exclusivity
 
Chan was the first Asian artist to exhibit his work at the prestigious Bienalle des Antiquaires in Paris. In 2012, he showed "Great Wall", a necklace made of diamond maple leaves with a central jade stone. It sold for $73.5 million.
This year, he showed "Vividity", a brooch featuring a deep pink, 64-carat Elbaite tourmaline surrounded by rubies and colored diamonds.
These pieces of jewelry carry such an aura of exclusivity that it is rare to find a Chan piece on the open market. Most of his work is sold directly to collectors, who are loath to sell them on.
When they are put up for sale, they carry hefty price tags. Two years ago, a small pair of Chan earrings sold in Hong Kong for $555,000.
 
"Each piece can take me thousands of hours," he says. "It is like going on a journey each time."