Thomas Nast

[wikipedia]

Thomas Nast (September 27, 1840 – December 7, 1902) was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist who is considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon".^[1] He was the scourge of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine. Among his notable works were the creation of the modern version of Santa Claus, and Uncle Sam (the male personification of the American people), as well as the political symbols of both major United States political parties: the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey.
He was born in the barracks of Landau, Germany (now in Rhine Palatinate), the son of a trombonist in the 9th regiment Bavarian band and had a half sister named Andie. The elder Nast's socialist political convictions put him at odds with the Bavarian government, and in 1846 he left Landau, enlisting first on a French man-of-war and subsequently on an American ship.^[2] He sent his wife and children to New York City, and at the end of his enlistment in 1849 he joined them there. Thomas Nast's passion for drawing was apparent from an early age, and he was enrolled for about a year of study with Alfred Fredericks and Theodore Kaufmann and at the school of the National Academy of Design. Nast attended school in New York City from the age of six to fifteen, when he was forced to drop out due to financial problems. Thomas had problems adjusting to life in America and never took well to school. He spent his entire school career on the verge of flunking out and consequently was not an especially good speller. After school he started working in 1855 as a draftsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper; three years afterward, for Harper's Weekly.

Notable works

Nast's Santa Claus on the cover of the January 3, 1863, issue of Harper's Weekly.

Nast's depiction of iconic characters, such as Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, are widely credited with giving us the recognized versions we see today.

• A classic version of Santa Claus, drawn in 1863 for Harper's Weekly. Before then, most depictions of Santa Claus showed a tall, thin man. Nast drew him as the bearded, plump man known today.
• Republican Party elephant^[13]
• Democratic Party donkey
• Tammany Hall tiger, a symbol of Boss Tweed's political machine
• Columbia, a graceful image of the Americas as a woman, usually in flowing gown and tiara, carrying a sword to defend the downtrodden.
• Uncle Sam, a lanky image of the United States (first drawn in the 1830s; Nast and John Tenniel added the goatee).
• John Confucius, a variation of John Chinaman, a traditional caricature of a Chinese Immigrant.
• The Fight at Dame Europa's School, 1871

Thanks Tom!

SPIRIT MEDICINE HEALING SONG - LAKOTA - (HQ HD)

Be Yourself

Little Saint Nick - Beach Boys

The Dells - Run for cover

M.A.R.S. - Pump Up The Volume - http://retrovidz.blogspot.com/

Madness 'The Prince'

Walk Beside Me

Don't walk in front of me,
       I may not follow.

Don't walk behind me,
       I may not lead.

Just walk beside me and be my friend.

      A real friend is someone who walks in
when the rest of the world walks out.

Forgiveness is the glue,
         that repairs broken relationships.

Nature has given to men one tongue,
       but two ears, that we may hear

from others twice as much
as we speak.

True friends are like diamonds,
        precious and rare.

A friend is someone
       who knows the song in your heart,

and can sing it back to you
       when you have forgotten the words.

A friend is one who believes in you
        when you have ceased to believe

                     in yourself.

It takes a long time
to grow an old friend.

~~ Author Unknown ~~

---

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and is tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. 

Doo Doo Wop....

Winter

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening,
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
We're happy tonight.
Walking in a winter wonderland.

Gone away is the bluebird,
Here to stay is a new bird
He sings a love song,
As we go along,
Walking in a winter wonderland.

In My Life

"In My Life"

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

In my life I love you more

London, J, From, 'The Call Of the Wild'

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, But for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half-hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by graveled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miler's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.

And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. It was true, there were other dogs. There could not but be other dogs on so vast a place, but they did not count. They came and went, resided in the populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless, strange creatures that rarely put nose out of doors or set foot to ground. On the other hand, there were the fox terriers, a score of them at least, who yelped fearful promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.

But Buck was neither house dog nor kennel dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge's sons;I he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge's daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge's feet before the roaring library fire; he carried the Judge's grandsons on his back, or rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for he was king--king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller's place, humans included.

JOYCE,J,-from, A Portrait Of The Artist, As, A,Young Man.

Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it
stopped before the nothing place began?

It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all
round everything. It was very big to think about everything and
everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big
thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's
name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that
was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then
God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But,
though there were different names for God in all the different
languages in the world and God understood what all the people who
prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the
same God and God's real name was God.

It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head
very big. He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green
round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was
right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped
the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with
her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered
if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics.
There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr
Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on
no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he
did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When
would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big
voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.

From, George Orwell, 'Animal Farm'.

[Ch v]

In January there came bitterly hard weather. The earth was like iron, and 
nothing could be done in the fields. Many meetings were held in the big 
barn, and the pigs occupied themselves with planning out the work of the 
coming season. It had come to be accepted that the pigs, who were 
manifestly cleverer than the other animals, should decide all questions of 
farm policy, though their decisions had to be ratified by a majority vote. 
This arrangement would have worked well enough if it had not been for the 
disputes between Snowball and Napoleon. These two disagreed at every point 
where disagreement was possible. If one of them suggested sowing a bigger 
acreage with barley, the other was certain to demand a bigger acreage of 
oats, and if one of them said that such and such a field was just right 
for cabbages, the other would declare that it was useless for anything 
except roots. Each had his own following, and there were some violent 
debates. At the Meetings Snowball often won over the majority by his 
brilliant speeches, but Napoleon was better at canvassing support for 
himself in between times. He was especially successful with the sheep. Of 
late the sheep had taken to bleating "Four legs good, two legs bad" both 
in and out of season, and they often interrupted the Meeting with this. It 
was noticed that they were especially liable to break into "Four legs 
good, two legs bad" at crucial moments in Snowball's speeches. Snowball 
had made a close study of some back numbers of the 'Farmer and 
Stockbreeder' which he had found in the farmhouse, and was full of plans 
for innovations and improvements. He talked learnedly about field drains, 
silage, and basic slag, and had worked out a complicated scheme for all 
the animals to drop their dung directly in the fields, at a different spot 
every day, to save the labour of cartage. Napoleon produced no schemes of 
his own, but said quietly that Snowball's would come to nothing, and 
seemed to be biding his time. But of all their controversies, none was so 
bitter as the one that took place over the windmill. 

In the long pasture, not far from the farm buildings, there was a small 
knoll which was the highest point on the farm. After surveying the ground, 
Snowball declared that this was just the place for a windmill, which could 
be made to operate a dynamo and supply the farm with electrical power. 
This would light the stalls and warm them in winter, and would also run a 
circular saw, a chaff-cutter, a mangel-slicer, and an electric milking 
machine. The animals had never heard of anything of this kind before 
(for the farm was an old-fashioned one and had only the most primitive 
machinery), and they listened in astonishment while Snowball conjured up 
pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while 
they grazed at their ease in the fields or improved their minds with 
reading and conversation. 

Within a few weeks Snowball's plans for the windmill were fully worked 
out. The mechanical details came mostly from three books which had 
belonged to Mr. Jones--'One Thousand Useful Things to Do About the House', 
'Every Man His Own Bricklayer', and 'Electricity for Beginners'. Snowball 
used as his study a shed which had once been used for incubators and had a 
smooth wooden floor, suitable for drawing on. He was closeted there for 
hours at a time. With his books held open by a stone, and with a piece of 
chalk gripped between the knuckles of his trotter, he would move rapidly 
to and fro, drawing in line after line and uttering little whimpers of 
excitement. Gradually the plans grew into a complicated mass of cranks and 
cog-wheels, covering more than half the floor, which the other animals 
found completely unintelligible but very impressive. All of them came to 
look at Snowball's drawings at least once a day. Even the hens and ducks 
came, and were at pains not to tread on the chalk marks. Only Napoleon 
held aloof. He had declared himself against the windmill from the start. 
One day, however, he arrived unexpectedly to examine the plans. He walked 
heavily round the shed, looked closely at every detail of the plans and 
snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating 
them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly he lifted his leg, 
urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word.


[all transcripts in this Blog, are taken from;www.george-orwell.org]

From, George Orwell, 'Down and Out, in London and Paris',

[Ch xii]

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that 
only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the 
customers in all their splendour--spotless table-cloths, bowls of 
flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a 
few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting 
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered 
about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled 
food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, 
sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream 
pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat. Everywhere in 
the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of food 
that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing 
basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the 
water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of 
this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door, 
and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the picture 
of cleanliness. 

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel 
dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set 
of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped 
off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like 
air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D'HOTEL, a fiery Italian, pausing at 
the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of 
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more 
or less soundproof): 

'TU ME FAIS--Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a 
waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came 
from. MAQUEREAU!' 

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he 
delivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES. 

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, 
graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a 
customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, 
with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put to 
shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him. 

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job--not hard, but boring 
and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend 
their whole decades at such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was 
quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen hours a day, six 
days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly bullied by the 
waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress--actually, I 
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to 
see that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde 
wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So 
apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with some vitality.

From, George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia'.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and 
yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events 
have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 
1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper 
articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time 
and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The 
Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was 
still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it 
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was 
ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was 
something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been 
in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building 
of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with 
the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the 
hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost 
every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were 
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an 
inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been 
collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers 
looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial 
forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or 'Don' or 
even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 
'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first 
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a 
lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and 
all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and 
black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in 
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs 
of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of 
people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing 
revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the 
crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town 
in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small 
number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. 
Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some 
variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in 
it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I 
recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I 
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' 
State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or 
voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers 
of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as 
proletarians for the time being. 

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The 
town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the 
streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air--raids, the shops were mostly 
shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there 
was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of 
bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. 
Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was 
no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very 
few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above 
all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having 
suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying 
to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the 
barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) 
solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were 
coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone 
from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English--speaking races there 
was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic 
Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary 
ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the 
wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. 
I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously 
spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it 
to an appropriate tune. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

COMPARE; END CHAPTER.....

In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first 
class and a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had 
been only one class on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the 
train taking the names of foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car 
they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had 
changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking 
like a proletarian that made you respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to 
Cerberes a French commercial traveller in my carriage had said to me in all 
solemnity: 'You mustn't go into Spain looking like that. Take off that collar 
and tie. They'll tear them off you in Barcelona.' He was exaggerating, but it 
showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the frontier the Anarchist guards had 
turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife, solely--I think--because 
they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about; to look bourgeois was 
the one salvation. At the passport office they looked us up in the card--index 
of suspects, but thanks to the inefficiency of the police our names were not 
listed, not even McNair's. We were searched from head to foot, but we possessed 
nothing incriminating, except my discharge--papers, and the carabineros who 
searched me did not know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M. So we slipped 
through the barrier, and after just six months I was on French soil again. My 
only souvenirs of Spain were a goatskin water-bottle and one of those tiny iron 
lamps in which the Aragon peasants bum olive oil--lamps almost exactly the 
shape of the terra-cotta lamps that the Romans used two thousand years ago-- 
which I had picked up in some ruined hut, and which had somehow got stuck in my 
luggage.  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Interestingly, Herman Melville,

'The Confidence Man'......

CHAPTER XLV.

the cosmopolitan increases in seriousness.

In the middle of the gentlemen's cabin burned a solar lamp, swung from the ceiling, and whose shade of ground glass was all round fancifully variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo. The light of this lamp, after dazzlingly striking on marble, snow-white and round—the slab of a centre-table beneath—on all sides went rippling off with ever-diminishing distinctness, till, like circles from a stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in the furthest nook of the place.

Here and there, true to their place, but not to their function, swung other lamps, barren planets, which had either gone out from exhaustion, or been extinguished by such occupants of berths as the light annoyed, or who wanted to sleep, not see.

[wikisource.org]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Old Lamps? for New? hahahaha!

DISNEYSHOPPER

DISNEYSHOPPER, IS, AN, E-BAY, STORE. I LOVE TO BROWSE, THEIR PRODUCTS...

Northern Soul - Candy and the Kisses - The 81

Bullit -- On the Road Again -- Canned Heat -- Car Chase

,

Seriously! The Best,- Ever, Movie, Car Chase!

This , is,
Awesome!!!, the Guy ,who, put, this music, to, this Scene? -Genius!

RIP... Steve!McQ!.......You were..... THE BEST!

Four Movies With lots of Helicopters

1, Apocalypse Now
2, Starman
3,Godzilla
4, We were soldiers

The Sun and The Rain

It's raining again,
I'm hearing it's pitter patter down.
It's wet in the street
Reflecting the lights and splashing feet,
Nowhere to go,
And nothing I have to do, have to do.
It's raining again,
I follow the Christmas lights down town.
I'm leaving the flow
Of people walking all around,
Round and round,
I hear the sound of rain falling in my ears
Washing away the weariness like tears.
I can feel my troubles running down,
Disappear into the silent sound.
Just walking along,
My clothes are soaked right through to the skin,
I haven't a doubt, that this is what life is all about,
The sun and the rain.
Scraps of paper(???) washing down the drain.
I feel the rain falling on my face
I can say there is no better place
Than standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown.
It's raining again
A crack in the clouds reveals blue skies
I've been feeling so low(low)
But now everything is on my side
The sun and the rain.
Walk with me fill my heart again
I hear the rain falling in my ears
Washing away the weariness like tears.
I can feel my troubles running down,
Disappear into the silent sound.
I feel the rain falling on my face
I can say there is no better place
Than standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown.
Do de do do de do do do
Do de do de do de do do do
...
> 'The Sun And The Rain' (1983) taken from the LP 'Utter Madness' (1986)