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Biker, Happy Joan of Arc Day!

crosslandkelly

crosslandkelly

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Today in 1966 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience made its London performance debut at the Bag O' Nails Club. The club was a popular celebrity venue, somewhat more ‘up market’ than other venues in that it provided food and drink as well as live music. Apart from the many celebrities who frequented it – almost a ‘who’s who’ of British Sixties music, it is also known as being the meeting place of Linda Eastman and Paul McCartney at a Georgie Fame gig on 15th May 1967. Also said to have met here for the first time were the (later) Fleetwood Mac members John and Christine McVie. On the other side of the coin, it is alleged that Elton John spent an evening drinking here in 1968 with Bernie Taupin and Long John Baldry who spent the entire time talking him out of his upcoming marriage at which Baldry was going to be best man.

[video=youtube;DpkDdLZGg30]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpkDdLZGg30[/video]
 
crosslandkelly

crosslandkelly

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No problem mate.

Today in 1476 - Vlad III Dracula defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Bathory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.

[video=youtube;Xb3O46ZEJmI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb3O46ZEJmI[/video]
 
Goatboy

Goatboy

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Biker! Happy Vlad The Impaler Day!

Biker! hang on to your helmet as here on my 7000th post I bring you Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler who on this day in 1476 defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Bathory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.
Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), was a member of the House of Drăculești, a branch of the House of Basarab, also known by his patronymic name: Dracula. He was posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș pronounced [ˈvlad ˈt͡sepeʃ]), and was a three-time Voivode of Wallachia, ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. His father, Vlad II Dracul, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, which was founded to protect Christianity in Eastern Europe. Vlad III is revered as a folk hero in Romania as well as other parts of Europe for his protection of the Romanian population both south and north of the Danube. A significant number of Romanian and Bulgarian common folk and remaining boyars (nobles) moved north of the Danube to Wallachia, recognized his leadership and settled there following his raids on the Ottomans.
As the cognomen 'The Impaler' suggests, his practice of impaling his enemies is central to his historical reputation. During his lifetime, his reputation for excessive cruelty spread abroad, to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The total number of his victims is estimated in the tens of thousands The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was inspired by Vlad's patronymic.

During his life Vlad wrote his name in Latin documents as Wladislaus Dragwlya, vaivoda partium Transalpinarum (1475).
His Romanian patronymic Dragwlya (or Dragkwlya) Dragulea, Dragolea, Drăculea, is a diminutive of the epithet Dracul carried by his father Vlad II, who in 1431 was inducted as a member of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order founded by Sigismund of Hungary in 1408. Dracul is the Romanian definite form, the -ul being the suffixal definite article (deriving from Latin ille). The noun drac "dragon" itself continues Latin draco. Thus, Dracula literally means "Son of the Dragon". In Modern Romanian, the word drac has adopted the meaning of "devil" (the term for "dragon" now being balaur or dragon). This has led to misinterpretations of Vlad's epithet as characterizing him as "devilish".
Vlad's moniker of Țepeș ("Impaler") identifies his favourite method of execution. It was attached to his name posthumously, in ca. 1550. Before this, however, he was known as "Kazikli Bey" (The Impaler Lord) by the Ottoman Empire after their armies encountered his "forests" of impalement victims.
Vlad was born in Sighișoara, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (today part of Romania), in the winter of 1431 to Vlad II Dracul, future voivode of Wallachia. Vlad's father was the son of the celebrated Voivode Mircea the Elder. His mother is unknown, though at the time his father is believed to have been married to Princess Cneajna of Moldavia (eldest daughter of Alexander "the Good", Prince of Moldavia and aunt to Stephen the Great of Moldavia) but to also keep a number of mistresses.[SUP] [/SUP]He had two older half-brothers, Mircea II and Vlad Călugărul, and a younger brother, Radu III the Handsome.

In the year of his birth, Vlad's father, known under the nickname Dracul, had travelled to Nuremberg where he had been vested into the Order of the Dragon[SUP].[/SUP]
Vlad and Radu spent their early formative years in Sighișoara. During the first reign of their father, Vlad II Dracul, the Voivode brought his young sons to Târgoviște, the capital of Wallachia at that time.
The Byzantine chancellor Mikhail Doukas showed that, at Târgoviște, the sons of boyars and ruling princes were well-educated by Romanian or Greek scholars commissioned from Constantinople. Vlad is believed to have learned combat skills, geography, mathematics, science, languages (Old Church Slavonic, German, Latin), and the classical arts and philosophy.

After Radu's sudden death in 1475, Vlad III declared his third reign in 26 November 1476. Vlad began preparations for the reconquest of Wallachia in 1476 with Hungarian support. Vlad's third reign had lasted little more than two months when he was assassinated. The exact date of his death is unknown, presumably 31st of October or the end of December 1476, but it is known that he was dead by 10 January 1477. The exact location of his death is also unknown, but it would have been somewhere along the road between Bucharest and Giurgiu. Vlad's head was taken to Constantinople as a trophy, and his body was buried unceremoniously by his rival, Basarab Laiota, possibly at Comana, a monastery founded by Vlad in 1461. The Comana monastery was demolished and rebuilt from scratch in 1589.
In the 19th century, Romanian historians cited a "tradition", apparently without any kind of support in documentary evidence, that Vlad was buried at Snagov, an island monastery located near Bucharest. To support this theory, the so-called Cantacuzino Chronicle was cited, which cites Vlad as the founder of this monastery. But as early as 1855, Alexandru Odobescu had established that this is impossible as the monastery had been in existence before 1438. Since excavations carried out by Dinu V Rosetti in June– October 1933, it has become clear that Snagov monastery was founded during the later 14th century, well before the time of Vlad III. The 1933 excavation also established that there was no tomb below the supposed "unmarked tombstone" of Vlad in the monastery church. Rosetti (1935) reported that "Under the tombstone attributed to Vlad there was no tomb. Only many bones and jaws of horses." In the 1970s, speculative attribution of an anonymous tomb found elsewhere in the church to Vlad Țepeș was published by Simion Saveanu, a journalist who wrote a series of articles on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Vlad's death. Most Romanian historians today favor the Comana monastery as the final resting place for Vlad Țepeș.

Even during his lifetime, Vlad III Țepeș became famous as a tyrant taking sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing. He is shown in crypto-portraits made during his lifetime in the role of cruel rulers or executioners. After Vlad's death, his cruel deeds were reported with macabre gusto in popular pamphlets in Germany, reprinted from the 1480s until the 1560s, and to a lesser extent in Tsarist Russia. As an example of how Vlad Țepeș soon became iconic for all horrors unimaginable, the following pamphlet from 1521 pours out putative incidents like this one:
"er liess kinnder praten die musten ire mütter essen. Und schneyd den frawen den prüst ab den musten ire man essen. Danach liess er sie all spissen."
​
He roasted children, whom he fed to their mothers. And (he) cut off the breasts of women, and forced their husbands to eat them. After that, he had them all impaled.

Estimates of the number of his victims range from 40,000 to 100,000. According to the German stories the number of victims he had killed was at least 80,000. In addition to the 80,000 victims mentioned he also had whole villages and fortresses destroyed and burned to the ground.
Impalement was Vlad's preferred method of torture and execution. Several woodcuts from German pamphlets of the late 15th and early 16th centuries show Vlad feasting in a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brașov, while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses on the banks of the Danube. It has also been said that in 1462 Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man noted for his own psychological warfare tactics and the impalement of subjugated peoples in the Ottoman Empire, returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses outside Vlad's capital of Târgoviște.
Allegedly, Vlad's reputation for cruelty was actively promoted by Matthias Corvinus, who tarnished Vlad's reputation and credibility for a political reason: as an explanation for why he had not helped Vlad fight the Ottomans in 1462, for which purpose he had received money from most Catholic states in Europe. Matthias employed the charges of Southeastern Transylvania, and produced fake letters of high treason, written on 7 November 1462.

​

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crosslandkelly

crosslandkelly

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1703 - The first Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed in the Great Storm of 1703.

The first lighthouse on Eddystone Rocks was an octagonal wooden structure built by Henry Winstanley. Construction started in 1696 and the light was lit on 14 November 1698. During construction, a French privateer took Winstanley prisoner, causing Louis XIV to order his release with the words "France is at war with England, not with humanity".

The lighthouse survived its first winter but was in need of repair, and was subsequently changed to a dodecagonal (12 sided) stone clad exterior on a timber framed construction with an octagonal top section as can be seen in the later drawings or paintings, one of which is reproduced here. This gives rise to the claims that there have been five lighthouses on Eddystone Rock. Winstanley's tower lasted until the Great Storm of 1703 erased almost all trace on 27 November. Winstanley was on the lighthouse, completing additions to the structure. No trace was found of him, or of the other five men in the lighthouse.

The cost of construction and five years' maintenance totalled £7,814 7s.6d, during which time dues totalling £4,721 19s.3d had been collected at one penny per ton from passing vessels.

The Eddystone Rocks are an extensive reef approximately 12 miles SSW of Plymouth Sound, one of the most important naval harbours of England, and midway between Lizard Point, Cornwall and Start Point. They are submerged at high spring tides and were so feared by mariners entering the English Channel that they often hugged the coast of France to avoid the danger, which thus resulted not only in shipwrecks locally, but on the rocks of the north coast of France and the Channel Islands. Given the difficulty of gaining a foothold on the rocks particularly in the predominant swell it was a long time before anyone attempted to place any warning on them.

View attachment 25773

[video=youtube;T1nF4eRdXIA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1nF4eRdXIA[/video]
 
P

petrochemicals

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Jul 30, 2012
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crosslandkelly said:
I'm wondering if the threads dead.


Biker, Huon, and Bob all conspicuous by there absence. Could be a gathering at the lodge.
Click to expand...

I saw on the news the slavery arrests of the cult, you can only think they may have been caught or are accomplices on the run. Maybe they're fitting out the basement, probably be on the blog

110011100110110011100011010100110100100001010100010100010100101010010010
 
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H

Huon

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May 12, 2004
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Spain
crosslandkelly said:
I'm wondering if the threads dead.

[video=youtube;fC7gEIAKE5c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC7gEIAKE5c[/video]

Biker, Huon, and Bob all conspicuous by there absence. Could be a gathering at the lodge.
Click to expand...

Not so much dead as dead tired. Olive picking is seriously hard work :)

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
 
H

Huon

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May 12, 2004
1,327
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crosslandkelly said:
Do still pick by hand, or have you mechanised?

View attachment 25806 Found this interesting report too.

[video=youtube;AXozp1h6P-8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXozp1h6P-8[/video]
Click to expand...

By hand. Beat the trees to drop the olives into nets, pick any olives that don't drop, pick through the olives to remove leaves and branches and bag or box olives ready to have the oil extracted.

We start first thing in the morning and finish when the light goes. I'm helping a neighbour this week and he'll help me next week. We have about 110 trees between us.

It is very hard work but a lot of fun.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
 
crosslandkelly

crosslandkelly

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Friends of ours live in Cyprus. Five years ago we spent a fortnight with them, they have four Olive trees and two Almond trees, we spent two hard days harvesting them. As you say, hard work but fun.
 
H

Huon

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May 12, 2004
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crosslandkelly said:
Friends of ours live in Cyprus. Five years ago we spent a fortnight with them, they have four Olive trees and two Almond trees, we spent two hard days harvesting them. As you say, hard work but fun.
Click to expand...

I guess the almond trees were what slowed you down?

We've taken 4 days to do about 35 of my neighbour's trees. The last few will be done this weekend.

I'll probably go back to normal life for a few days before we start on ours. This is the first year we've done this and I'm looking forward to seeing and tasting the end product.
 
crosslandkelly

crosslandkelly

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Do you take the Olives to a central press, or press them yourself. The village where our friends live, has a communal processing shed? for want of a better word. It won't be long now till you can enjoy the product.
 
H

Huon

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May 12, 2004
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There are a few co-operatives around who'll press for you and most people seem to go that route. We don't really have enough trees to make it worth investing in the equipment to press ourselves although I must admit I am tempted.
 
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