Parks Place

08/08/2023

Pawsome Portraits for Tank is THIS SATURDAY! Bring your pets out for a professional portrait you can cherish while supporting a fellow fur-baby mama.
Full resolution portraits are available for only $25, with 100% of the proceeds going towards remaining vet bills.

Where? Parks Place 120 NW 39th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32609
When? Saturday, August 12th from 10am-2pm

Food and drinks will be available for purchase from Park's Place. If you haven't been, come check them out! Truly a one of a kind shop.

More info: https://fb.me/e/2uThKxyqn

04/18/2023

MUMMIES FOR SALE

Street vendor selling mummies in Egypt, 1865 ।

During the Victorian era of the 1900s, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt threw open the Gates of Egypt’s history for the Europeans. At that time, mummies were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European elites and in fact, mummies could be purchased from street vendors (as shown in the picture) to be used as the main event for parties and social gatherings that took place in the 18th century.

The elites of the era would often hold “Mummy Unwrapping Parties”, which, as the name suggests, had the main theme in which a Mummy would be unwrapped in front of a boisterous audience, cheering and applauding at the same time.

During that period of time, the well-preserved remains of ancient Egyptians were routinely ground into a powder and consumed as a medicinal remedy. Indeed, so popular was pulverized mummy that it even instigated a counterfeit trade to meet demand, in which the flesh of beggars was passed off as that of ancient mummified Egyptians.
As the Industrial Revolution progressed, so Egyptian mummies were exploited for more utilitarian purposes: huge numbers of human and animal mummies were ground up and shipped to Britain and Germany for use as fertilizer.

Others were used to create mummy brown pigment or were stripped of their wrappings, which were subsequently exported to the US for use in the paper-making industry. The author Mark Twain even reported that mummies were burnt in Egypt as locomotive fuel.
As the nineteenth century advanced, mummies became prized objects of display, and scores of them were purchased by wealthy European and American private collectors as tourist souvenirs. For those who could not afford a whole mummy, disarticulated remains – such as a head, hand, or foot – could be purchased on the black market and smuggled back home.

So brisk was the trade-in mummies to Europe that even after ransacking tombs and catacombs there just were not enough ancient Egyptian bodies to meet the demand.

And so fake mummies were fabricated from the corpses of the executed criminals, the aged, the poor, and those who had died from hideous diseases, by burying them in the sand or stuffing them with bitumen and exposing them to the sun.

Mummy brown was originally made in the 16th and 17th centuries from the white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies, both human and feline.

As it had good transparency, it could be used for glazes, shadows, flesh tones, and shading. Artists believed that when bitumen and mummified flesh were used in oil paint it wouldn’t crack or dry.

Mummy Brown eventually ceased being produced in its traditional form later in the 20th century when the supply of available mummies was exhausted.

Mummia or mummy is either a substance used in the embalming of mummies or a powder made from ground mummies, used as a “medical preparation”. Ancient Egyptian mummy-making often utilized asphaltum (Persian: mumiya) as an ingredient for filling the empty body cavities once the organs were removed.

In the Middle Ages, the resin that had been used on ancient Egyptian mummies was believed to have superior medicinal and chemical value to regular asphaltum, and the resulting demand for the ingredient caused the term to be applied to the dead bodies required to harvest it as much as to the ingredient itself.

Jewel Fitila

07/11/2022

07/10/2022

"When the authorities are stupid, they will tend to side with the stupid children and acquiesce, at least tacitly, in rough treatment for those who show intelligence. In that case, a society will be produced in which all the important positions will be won by those whose stupidity enables them to please the herd."
Bertrand Russell

[ FULL CITATION ]

"Children are instinctively hostile to anything ‘odd’ in other children, especially in the ages from ten to fifteen. If the authorities realize that this conventionality is undesirable, they can guard against it in various ways, and they can place the cleverer children in separate schools. The intolerance of eccentricity that I am speaking of is strongest in the stupidest children, who tend to regard the peculiar tastes of clever children as affording just grounds for persecution. When the authorities also are stupid (which may occur), they will tend to side with the stupid children, and acquiesce, at least tacitly, in rough treatment for those who show intelligence. In that case, a society will be produced in which all the important positions will be won by those whose stupidity enables them to please the herd.

Such a society will have corrupt politicians, ignorant schoolmasters, policemen who cannot catch criminals, and judges who condemn innocent men. Such a society, even if it inhabits a country full of natural wealth, will in the end grow poor from inhability to choose able men for important posts. Such a society, though it may prate of Liberty and even erect statues in her honour, will be a persecuting society, which will punish the very men whose ideas might save it from disaster.

All this will spring from the too intense pressure of the herd, first at school and then in the world at large. Where such excessive pressure exists, those who direct education are not, as a rule, aware that it is an evil; indeed, they are quite apt to welcome it as a force making for good behaviour."

— Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand (1961), Part. XI The Philosopher of Politics Russell, 49. The Reconciliation of Individuality and Citizenship, p. 436

Image: Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) was a philosopher, mathematician, educational and sexual reformer, pacifist, prolific letter writer, author and columnist. Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential and widely known intellectual figures of the twentieth century. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his extensive contributions to world literature and for his "rationality and humanity, as a fearless champion of free speech and free thought in the West." Russell died of influenza at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom 2 February 1970, where his ashes were scattered over the Welsh hills.

06/04/2022

05/27/2022

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