Taiwanese hell temple

The above video is from a Taiwanese hell temple which is located beneath the main temple. These sorts of places are scattered through Asia and are meant to portray Buddhist hell. Well, it's not really hell, but rather a sort of purgatory. Instead of spending the rest of eternity in it you only spend some time getting tormented for your karmic shortfalls before being shipped off to your next life. Still, what monumental pain in the you-know-what having to go through all that torture every time you keel over at the end of your life. Please, please, please -- don't reincarnate me as a mayfly.   

The White Fungus article Hell Is the Main Attraction has a good explanation of the Chinese mythological hell. Below is an exerpt from the article.

Tainan, in southern Taiwan, is home to one of the island’s more idiosyncratic entertainment and religious narrative displays. In the basement of Madou Daitian Temple (麻豆代天宮, Temple of Heavenly Viceroys), one may encounter—if they desire—an animatronic rendering of Chinese mythological hell. In this transitory purgatory, sinners atone for earthly misdeeds before being recast into the world anew. Unfolding across eighteen gory levels, each realm enacts its own distinct form of brutal cosmic justice. 

...

Punishments are meted out according to the crime, with some being gender specific. Those who have told lies, for instance, have molten lead poured down their throats, searing their insides. Through a slow, excruciating process, a murky pool of guilt is refined into a transmissible narrative product. As Charles D. Orzech explains in his article, “Mechanisms of Violent Retribution in Chinese Hell Narratives,” “Information is the excuse, not the goal of torture.”

Above ground, in the world of the living, priests, monks, nuns, folk practitioners, and various mediums attempt to “grease the wheels of bureaucracy with their ritual knowledge and with community offerings to obtain release for imprisoned souls.” The lords of hell are not above accepting bribes—received through the burning of ghost money—and there is an uneven efficacy to these rites of karmic retribution. The infernal bureaucracy is known for its occasional bungling, yet the wheels of justice grind on.

 All souls of mortals, upon death, must pass through the underworld—but this is purgatory, not eternal damnation. At the final level of hell, the wheel of fortune spins, assigning each soul to its next life vessel—whether human, insect, or another animal. Meng Po (孟婆), the goddess of oblivion, offers each mortified being a cup filled with the Broth of Oblivion (孟婆湯), a powerful elixir that erases all memories. Upon drinking this celestial potion, all is forgotten, and the cycle of life continues. 

  

Spooky ghosts

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With Halloween nearly upon us I figure it is time for some ghost paintings. They were actually more difficult to collect since most of the ghost paintings returned were in the cheerful and goofy looking Casper the Friendly Ghost style of white sperm-shaped blobs that I suppose were supposed to be spirits in sheets (and why do ghosts wear clothes?).

Anyway, I hope the samples I've collected aren't too terrifying and that you'll be able to have nightmare-free sleep tonight.

Right in Two

Get ready for a divaricated weekend with Beard of Harmony and Yann Phayphet.

 

A Roman mint

This video discusses a Roman mint from Trajan's reign. It discusses how the coins were minted and gives the organization of the mint's workers. I wondered how it was guarded. No word on that in the video, which would be handy info to have in case I wanted to build a time machine and go back to do an Ocean's 11 style heist.

  

John Martin's grand paintings

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John Martin (1789–1854) was an English painter and engraver known for his paintings of Biblical, mythological, and historical disasters. His paintings feature large and dramatic landscapes peopled with tiny figures. His art career ended in 1853 when he was paralyzed.

John Martin

Hey Man Nice Shot

Get ready for a relinquished weekend with Brass Against and Samuel Hope.

 

The birth of the modern suburb

Above is a rather odd video, but it does have some good information in it. It uses the video game Fallout 4 as a starting point and moves on from there. If you don't know, the Fallout game series is set after a nuclear war and you run around fighting mutants, and raiders, and what-not, but that's not the topic of the video.

The aesthetics of the game world is a retro-1950s futurism with robots, atomic power and a sort of goofy old-timey Americana feel to it. Generally, you only see the post-war ruins of it, but Fallout 4 starts with a pre-war segment set in a suburban cul-de-sac. The Architectural Outcast uses that as a springboard to discuss how America's suburbs came to be.

WWII soldiers were not well paid, but as compensation they were promised certain post-war benefits via the GI Bill. One of these benefits was an affordable house with no down-payment. The problem was that during the war, and the Great Depression that proceeded it, not a lot of houses had been built and so there was a shortage of housing, and what houses that were available were old and rather worn out.  

The U.S. solved the problem by going on a massive housing boom. Much of it was via planned housing developments surrounding cities, which led to the modern suburbs. For efficiency's sake, different models in these developments were limited, and so we got the cookie-cutter feel the suburbs are known for.

There were also attempts at kit houses. Because it was featured in the Fallout neighborhood, he discusses the Lustron House, a prefabricated steel house that never gained traction and is nothing more than an oddity today. 

The Lustron Home
 

Columbus's acheivement

Columbus's fleet departs for its historic trip

It is Columbus Day. Some of the common talking points around it strike me as being rather puerile. For example, we have the 'stolen land' bit, and the strange 'Columbus didn't really discover it because other people were already there' point. 

As for the first, while the Indians undoubtably got ravaged in their encounter with Europeans, throughout history populations have sloshed back and forth taking and losing land. In fact, prior to the arrival of the Europeans the Indian tribes had been long engaged in chronic warfare with each other, with their areas of control shifting as their fortunes ebbed and flowed. If you had the misfortune of being a captive atop an Aztec pyramid you were already being ravaged.

As for the 'Columbus didn't really discover it' snark, Columbus isn't only, or even principally, known for being the first European to step foot on the soils of the Americas. We know other Europeans had travelled that far already. Rather, his voyage led to something theirs did not, the meaningful connection of the two hemispheres. As I've said in an earlier Columbus Day post, "The world changed from an academic's sphere to a physical globe on which the oceans were routes to all its lands." That is the importance of his achievement. 

His discovery was world altering. We have a term for its consequence -- the Columbian Exchange. Columbus's discovery led to the opening of transatlantic trade, and with that plants, animals, diseases, and people passed from one hemisphere to the other. Wheat, corn, potatoes, rice, barley, cattle, pigs, and horses all crossed the Atlantic to the benefit of all. Unfortunately, diseases did as well, much to the detriment of the Amerindians. That transfer greatly impacted both sides of the Atlantic. It shaped the world we live in today, and that is the legacy of Columbus's voyages and the true reason he is to be remembered. 

       

Lamps

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When the sun goes down human eyeballs need to get light somehow or another. In this post I present paintings of our friend the lamp, in all of its either electric or flaming glory. 

Pink Skies

Get ready for a neo-psychedelic weekend with The Bloomfields.

 

Walking in space

Two astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough, exit ISS to fiddle about doing this and that. Seeing the station up close is interesting, we're used to seeing cheesy and rather plain movie sets with astronauts clomping around on them in magnetic 'gravity' boots or dangling from wires to simulate weightlessness, but the actual surface is quite detailed. The amount of external cabling surprised me, and I imagine it would horrify IT network engineer types with its sometimes rather haphazard looking routing. Also, since gravity isn't an issue, the station spreads out in a far more organic manner, with the modules, solar panels, and what-not laid out as needed. 

There was, in a couple of shots, what looked like debris of some sort that was orbiting in proximity of the station. Were I ever to do an ISS spacewalk, that debris would probably include my space suited body when I forgot to secure my safety harness properly and floated away to my doom.  

I gave it my 'walking in cities' tag. There is no city, and for that matter no walking, but it's close enough I guess.

 

Gibson Girls

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My previous picture post was of Isidre Nonell's artwork who painted mainly poor people on the bottom rings of society. Today we go to the opposite end of the spectrum with the work of Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1946), a magazine illustrator, who created the Gibson Girls. They are an icon of the affluent, beautiful and stylish modern women of the day.

A fair number of the illustrations feature courting or marriage scenes. Naturally, as with a lot of works aimed at women, the men in them are a rather hapless lot being manipulated by the Gibson Girls who are, by and large, a rather smug looking group of young ladies.  

Charles Dana Gibson

My Blue Heaven

Get ready for a blissful weekend with
Natalie Hanna Mendoza, Jonathan Stout, and Sam Rocha.

 

Walking in Zamboanga City

Zamboanga City is in the southern Philippines. The walk starts in a market area and wends its way to the city center. The video was photographed nicely, without all the aimless camera pans you can get in these types of videos. 

I did like seeing the jeepneys in the city center area. Jeepneys are a wildly painted means of semi-official public transportation that I always identify as being unique to the Philippines. Their decorations mix religious and secular iconography, often with the sacred heart of Jesus next to a Playboy centerfold. They're quite an experience to ride in.

      

Isidre Nonell's art

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Isidre Nonell y Monturiol (1872-1911) was a Catalan artist who is known for his paintings of the poor, gypsies, and other people living on the margins of polite society. His colors are bold, and his brushwork very heavy. He died early from typhoid fever.

Isidre Nonell

Floresta

Get ready for a verdant weekend with Esteves.

 

The electron microscope

The above video explains the workings of electron microscopes. A beam of emitted electrons is guided and shaped into a focal point by a lens of electromagnets. There can be multiple electromagnet lenses to further focus the beam. Eventually they can narrow it down to resolving individual atoms. It was not clear to me how the image was captured, but then again, most of the details of it all passed well over my head.  

It reminded me of the 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. In it the hero, Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud while out sailing. This causes him to start shrinking a few days later. As he continues to get smaller his shrinkage starts to ruin his marriage (insert your own joke here) and, when word of his condition leaks out, it turns into a media circus. He gets small enough to move into a doll house. Unfortunately for him, his pet cat spots him and decides he would make a tasty appetizer. In escaping the cat, he falls down the stairs into the basement and is too small to climb back up. He monkeys with a mouse trap to get some cheese to eat and is interrupted by a giant spider -- well it is a giant to him -- and has to battle it for the cheese. Below is the ending, where he climbs through a screen and ponders his fate. It is a good, albeit very odd, movie. 

The end of hotdogs

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OK, hotdogs aren't really finished, but the end of summer means it is the end of grilling them on the patio. So, to prevent our memory of hotdogs from fading into Paul Revere and the Raiders territory, here is a picture post showing hotdogs and hotdog carts. I particularly like the last picture of the Japanese woman trying to daintily eat one with chopsticks.

Tennessee Waltz

Get ready for a larcenous weekend with Stringspace.

  

Hockey's goalie masks through the ages

I used to follow hockey. I started following it when I was but a young sprout in 1967 when hockey doubled its size via expansion. They did that expansion by creating what was a 6 team expansion division, which faced off against the older 6 team division when it came to Stanley Cup time. As a result, for years the older division routinely clobbered the expansion division in the Cup playoffs.

Since I didn't have a team, I decided to root for the St Louis Blues, the best of the new expansion teams. My sports heroes were Red Berenson as well as Bob and Barclay Plager, which caused many a confused look among my peers because none of them payed any attention to hockey back then. The early Blues dominated their division, but the Stanley Cup eluded them until 2019.

 

John F. Peto

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John F. Peto (1854–1907) was a painter who was unknown in his day. Early in his career he entered paintings to the Philadelphia Academy, but in 1899 he moved to the resort town of Island Heights and his public work as an artist ended. He rented rooms and played clarinet in a local band to support himself. Occasionally he sold paintings to tourists. He primarily painted still lifes.  

John F. Peto 

Goodnight, Irene

Get ready for a misstepping weekend with Ringo Nischack and Harry von Glahn.

 

September 11

9/11 sketch by Laurie D. Olin

I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy…
I will never forget seeing what love can heal…

― Steve Maraboli ―

 

Japanese pirates

Japanese pirates were call Wakō. While originally entirely Japanese, later they included Chinese, Philipino and other southeast Asians. The video is a good history that covers the growth, spread and the ebb and flow of the Wakō's fortunes (as well as a fight over a slave girl mentioned in passing, a seeming constant of history when it comes to warriors).   

 

Cantinières and other camp followers

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Old-timey armies, and for that matter modern ones as well if you consider civilian contractors, almost always had a cloud of non-combatants that traveled with them. Cantinières were women attached to an army to provide canteen services. Camp followers were people, generally women and their children, who would informally travel with an army. They provided a variety of services: cooking, laundry, nursing, selling goods, and companionship, both unpaid and paid.