Lawrence R. Spencer's Blog

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

____________________________________________

an immortal

lives forever

futures are passed

past become future

eternal now passes

now now now now

you know

but agree not to

you can’t forget

though you try to

that you are

who you are

_____________________________________________

 

— copyright © lawrence r. spencer. 2001. all rights reserved.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

“Exhaustive research conducted by a wide range of investigators during the 300 years since his death proves that Vermeer had no other studio outside of his home in which to paint.  The logical extension of this fact, inasmuch as Vermeer and his wife Catharina produced 15 children during his short life, what that he must have been constantly, and continually surrounded by his family in the house while he painted!  By extrapolation, is it not obvious, even at the most casual investigation, that the most readily available models for his paintings would be his own family members?   This observation is compounded and ratified by the fact that nearly every one of his surviving paintings features young women as the principle model!

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Vermeer worked at home, and that he painted pictures of the women in his own family.  It is clearly documented that Vermeer had 5 daughters old enough to be the women shown in the paintings.  Also, his wife and mother-in-law, are very likely candidates to be women shown in his paintings.  A very thorough comparison of the faces of each of the women shown in his paintings reveals the obvious observation that the same women are being painted again and again. ”

— Excerpted from the book, “Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime”, by Lawrence R. Spencer

 

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

This picture is a modern spoof on the world famous painting by the 16th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.   The girl in the legendary painting (as well as in several other of his paintings) is his second daughter, Elizabeth!  Vermeer never hired models — he painted only family and friends.  It doesn’t take a cosmetic surgeon to compare the features of the women in the majority of his paintings to observe that the same women are being painted in their own home, again and again in different poses, settings, lighting and clothing.  Most of his paintings feature his wife, Catharina, who was not only his constant accomplice in creating a family, she was his foremost ally in his life as an artist!

The painting named (by others), “Girl with a pearl earring“, as well as “The girl with a red hat”, and “The girl with a flute”, and others, are all of his second daughter, Elizabeth, who was a teenager when they were painted.  He used her as the model for a series of very small “tronie” or facial portraits, which were popular at the time.

These miniature “head shots” were especially well suited to the use of the camera obscura to create what we know now to have a photographic quality, rendering the light and perspective differently than the unaided lens of the human eye perceives it.

To learn all of the details about the women who posed for Johannes Vermeer in all of his famous paintings, read the book VERMEER: PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME, by Lawrence R. Spencer.

DOWNLOAD THIS BOOK FROM iTUNES
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/vermeer/id443800993?mt=11 

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Jack Kerouac ( March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian descent. All of his books are in print today, including The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, and Big Sur.

Visit his website to learn more about his life and writing….  http://jackkerouac.com/

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

There are too many people on TV and the Internet demanding that we “believe” their version of “reality”, all of which are divergent, conflicting, self-contradictory, self-serving, or absurd.  So, why waste your time and attention on “believing” anything when there is an ingenious labor-saving device called:  The Electric Monk

(VIDEO CLIP BELOW NARRATED BY DOUGLAS ADAMS)

(from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams)

“High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having a problem.

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the gray rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest.

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually about its lot.

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? An unusual horse perhaps?

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects. There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. You wouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose, drinking beer and sending out for pizzas.

So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.

That was it. Done.

The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.

For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric trust in rocks, birds, clouds, and a form of non-existent elephant-asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock, overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of the Monk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit.

Time passed.”

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Plenty of phrases from the first self-described hipster generation have lasted into modern conversation: people still get bent out of shape, annoying people bug us and muscular guys are still built, just to scan the b-words. Here are 26 words and phrases that don’t get much use today, but are worth sneaking into conversation.

1. A shape in a drape
A well-dressed person. “Usually she just wears jeans, but she sure is a shape in a drape in that dress.”

2. Bright disease
To know too much. “He has bright disease. Make sure he doesn’t rat us out.”

3. Claws sharp
Being well-informed on a number of subjects. “Reading Mental Floss keeps your claws sharp.”

4. Dixie fried
Drunk. “It’s Friday and the eagle flies tonight. Let’s go get dixie fried.”

5. Everything plus
Better than good-looking. “He wasn’t just built, he was everything plus.”

6. Focus your audio
Listen carefully. “Shut your trap and focus your audio. This is important.”

7. Gin mill cowboy
A bar regular. (A gin mill is a bar.) “Cliff Clavin was the _flossiest gin mill cowboy of all time.”

8. Hanging paper
Paying with forged checks. “I hope that chick who stole my purse last week goes to jail for hanging paper.”

9. Interviewing your brains
Thinking. “I can see you’re interviewing your brains, so I’ll leave you alone.”

10. Jungled up
Having a place to live, or specific living arrangements. “All I know is that he’s jungled up with that guy he met at the gin mill last month.”

11. Know your groceries
To be aware, or to do things well. (Similar to Douglas Adams’ “know where your towel is.”) “You can’t give a TED Talk on something unless you really know your groceries.”

12. Lead sled
A car, specifically one that would now be considered a classic model. “His parents gave him their old lead sled for his sixteenth birthday.”

13. Mason-Dixon line
Anywhere out of bounds, especially regarding personal space. “Keep your hands above the Mason-Dixon line, thanks.”

14. Noodle it out
Think it through. “You don’t have to make a decision right now. Noodle it out and call me back.”

15. Off the cob
Corny. “Okay, some of this old Beat slang is kinda off the cob.”

16. Pearl diver
A person who washes dishes. “I’m just a pearl diver at a greasy spoon, but it’s a job.”

17. Quail hunting
Picking up chicks. “I’m going quail hunting and you’re my wingman.”

18. Red onion
A hole in the wall; a really crappy bar. “I thought we were going somewhere nice but he just took me to the red onion on the corner.”

19. Slated for crashville
Out of control. “That girl’s been in college for five minutes and is already slated for crashville.”

20. Threw babies out of the balcony
A big success; interchangeable with “went down a storm.” “I was afraid the party would suck, but it threw babies out of the balcony.”

21. Used-to-be
An ex, a person you used to date. “I ran into my used-to-be in Kroger’s and I looked terrible.”

22. Varicose alley
The runway in a strip club. “Stay in school or you’ll be strutting varicose alley, girls.”

23. Ways like a mowing machine
An agricultural metaphor for impressive sexual technique, from the song “She’s a Hum Dinger” by Buddy Jones. “She’s long, she’s tall / She’s a handsome queen / She’s got ways like a mowing machine.” (Let us know if any of you ever successfully pull this one off in conversation.)

24. X-ray eyes
To understand something, to see through confusion. “That guy is so smart. He’s got x-ray eyes.”

25. Yard
A thousand dollars. “Yeah, it’s nice, but rent is half a yard a week. Let’s jungle up somewhere else.”

26. Zonk on the head
A bad thing. “It stormed all night and we lost power, but the real zonk on the head was when hail broke the bedroom window.”

These were collected from Straight From the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang by Max Décharné and A Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The first is exceptional in its completeness and worth purchasing if you love dictionaries, and the second is free online and easily searchable. Try them both!

Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/141912#ixzz26iRs1Nlk
–brought to you by mental_floss!

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

If you are watching television on this planet, you are witnessing an “artificial reality”, contrived and controlled by the CIA and other agencies whose only purpose is manipulation and control of your personal universe, and the physical universe.
A top German Journalist and Editor Dr. Udo Ulfkatte has admitted that the entire mainstream media is false information. He talked about how the CIA gets control over all of the major journalists.  If you would like to understand the details of when and how the control of media is done, read the well documented book,  “THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: THE CIA AND THE WORLD OF ARTS AND LETTERS” by Frances Stonor Saunders, which documents in intricate detail the secret operation of the CIA, since 1945, to manipulate the artists, the intellectual community, the entertainment industry, and mainstream media to create a “false facade” of mind-control mis-information and dis-information to serve the Rothschild Banks and their servants, the Military / Industrial / Congressional Complex.  However, there is a simple remedy to this affliction, as an immortal spiritual being:  unplug the TV, remember who you really are, and create your own universe!

Also read the book ALIEN INTERVIEW, to discover who is “behind the curtain” on this planet, and why.