Built 1904-1905 beside Wiśniowa Avenue and Sudecka Street junction, the tower supplied water to the residents of the southern districts of Wrocław for many years. The tower is 63 meters high. It was equipped with an electric lift from the very beginning... Two sculptors, Taschner and Bednorz, decorated the lower part of the building with bas-reliefs in sandstone, representing fantastic creatures reminiscent of medieval bestiaries.
"The restaurant also had a television set, which sat in a corner with a “television light” on top—a prism of soft colors which supposedly kept people from ruining their eyes on TV waves."
Yes, indeedy, there were special TV lights. My aunt and uncle had one atop their set. That was circa 1959, and I believe the practice was old-fashioned by then. Theirs was a small (under a foot tall), dim lamp with a cylindrical shade that rotated, probably powered by heated air rising from the lamp. There was a mountain scene printed on the shade and as the cylinder rotated it made a waterfall appear to flow.
Ficus microcarpa, also known as Chinese banyan, Malayan banyan, Indian laurel, curtain fig, or gajumaru is a tree in the fig family Moraceae. It is native in a range from China through tropical Asia and the Caroline Islands to Australia...The largest known specimen is Auntie Sarah's Banyan at the Menehune Botanical Gardens near Nawiliwili, Kauai, Hawai'i which is 110.0 feet (33.53 meters) in height, 250 feet (76.2 meters) in crown spread, and having over one thousand aerial trunks.
I first tried this in December of 2009 as a Christmas card, then revived the concept in 2017 and again in 2018 as a New Year's endeavor, which is what it will be this year.
Here are the instructions on how to participate:
1) In the comment section of THIS post, give me a LINK to a photo (or a bit of artwork or other image) that you have in your blog, or in your Flickr photostream or in some other online storage site that I can access. I'd prefer that you not email me the photo - just give the link and I'll go there and copy/paste it.* (but see addendum)
The picture can be of you, or your family, or your computer, or your cat, or whatever - it doesn't matter. It should belong to you (not a commercial image with copyright issues).
2) With the photo link send a brief (~25 words) greeting, directed to the other readers and visitors. This is to be a greeting to other readers, not a comment to me or about TYWKIWDBI.
3) Sign with the avatar name you use in commenting here, or in your blog, or your real name if you wish. This is not a venue to be used to say "Hi from anon." I recognize that a number of readers here prefer to leave comments anonymously - which is fine - but this greeting card is for identifiable people.
Note - as various trolls have realized, for TYWKIWDBI I am the "autocrat at the breakfast table" and reserve absolute right to control the content. For this venture I may edit comments for length and trim pictures if they are too big. I may limit the number of entries if there are too many, and I will absolutely vaporize anything that hints of spam or might be offensive to other readers.
And it doesn't need to be "Christmasy" - this will be posted after Christmas as a New Year's greeting, so it can celebrate the end of the past year or express hope about the one to come. But mostly it's just to say "hi" to other readers whose names you have seen in the comments.
*Addendum: I realize that not everyone has online places to store photos, so once again I will let you email me a photo/text/name if you have no other option. You can send it to the blog's address: retag4726(at)mypacks.net. But please send smallish pix (compress them with JPEG if needed). I don't want to have ten people send 5 MB photos and thus have my emailbox overfull so that I can't conduct my regular life. Thanks.
I'm looking forward to seeing what arrives. This was last year's collective greeting.
One of the classic physical signs of allergic rhinitis, here depicted in a 6-year-old girl. Brief discussion at the New England Journal of Medicine.
Some clinicians believe that meditation can cause psychological problems in people without underlying conditions, and that even forty minutes of meditation per day can pose risks...As in other studies, her twelve subjects said they had been sleeping better since taking up meditation five days a week. And the data seemed to support that for the group that was meditating less than thirty minutes per day. But any more than a half hour and the trend started moving in the other direction. Compared with an eight-person control group, the subjects who meditated for more than thirty minutes per day experienced shallower sleep and woke up more often during the night. The more participants reported meditating, the worse their sleep became...On a vipassana meditation retreat in 2006, she told one of her instructors about her research. “The teacher kind of chastised me, like, ‘Why are you therapists always trying to make meditation a relaxation technique? That’s not what it’s there for. Everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough . . . you stop sleeping.’..The Buddhist ascetics who took up meditation in the fifth century bc did not view it as a form of stress relief. “These contemplative practices were invented for monastics who had renounced possessions, social position, wealth, family, comfort, and work”... Monks and nuns sought to transcend the world and its cycles of rebirth and awaken in nirvana, an unfathomable state of equanimity beyond space and time... In other words, mindfulness was not invoked to savor the beauty of nature or to be a more present, thoughtful spouse. According to the Pali suttas, the point of meditation was to cultivate disgust and disenchantment with the everyday world and one’s attachments to people and things... If meditation conferred any practical benefit, it was in helping ascetics “accept the discomfort of a hard bed and a growling stomach or in preventing them from being beguiled by physical beauty.”..There are reliable ways to induce psychosis and other disturbances in a healthy subject—via drugs, sleep deprivation, and prolonged confinement or isolation. “If you deprive the brain of normal inputs—through sensory or social deprivation—that can produce psychosis,” he said. “And you can think of prolonged meditation as a form of deprivation.” The brain is accustomed to a certain amount of activity...Britton’s research was bolstered last August when the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a systematic review of adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies. Sixty-five percent of the studies included in the review found adverse effects, the most common of which were anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment. “We found that the occurrence of adverse effects during or after meditation is not uncommon,” the authors concluded, “and may occur in individuals with no previous history of mental health problems.”
"... Acts against the environment are not perpetrated solely by the world's uncaring, nor by the profiteers and/or misguidedly self-interested. The taxes we impose upon Nature are being levied by all of us—intentions, ideals, and political allegiances aside. The damages that environmentalism seeks to address stem from the very basis and structuring of our modern cultures and societies as a whole. Our demands of this Earth are hidden behind the most common, and passively accepted, ways in which we think, act, expend, consume, and live..."
How much is there? At least 39,000 tons worth of accumulated cloth waste in a tiny area in a free trade zone – the equivalent of 390 million average cheap T-shirts by weight to give you an idea.Why? Chile is Latin America's largest importer of second-hand garments (59,000 tons worth per year). Apparently up to half of the imports aren't sold and are dumped illegally nearby by the companies involved in the trade after the local landfill started refusing to take in the waste because there was too much of it and it was deemed too toxic.
At its first meeting in Edinburgh on 27 May 1908, a committee was appointed and a constitution agreed with the main aim to:' … bring together Ladies who are lovers of mountain-climbing, and to encourage mountaineering in Scotland, in winter as well as summer.'The ladies of the climbing club enjoyed all the trappings of their status that allowed them to indulge in such leisure activities. Married to lawyers, doctors and other middle-class professions, often with housekeepers and servants they had the leisure time to enjoy outdoor pursuits. A luxury relatively few Edwardian women had.
A neighbor dropped off this carton of locally-sourced eggs for us this morning. They provide a nice example of the proper use of the adjective "motley." They also have the advantage of being unwashed - which gives them an extended unrefrigerated shelf life (because washing removes a protective film on eggs, potentially facilitating the entry of oxygen or bacteria). They were also quite tasty, as judged by the first three. 
"...they use the forearm “flap” based on the radial artery to reconstruct the cancer defect in the head and neck (sometimes tongue, sometime floor of mouth, etc) and hook it into an artery and vein in the neck. This allows for durable coverage that includes skin and fat in the flap. It can withstand effects of radiation and fill in the hole which a simple skin graft cannot. A skin graft from the thigh is then used to cover the forearm defect."
"The two decades of China’s WTO membership have seen the country enjoy economic growth that has been mostly coal-powered. For many reasons, coal is a cheap way to produce energy. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been trying to shift to other forms of energy, which tend to be more expensive.
China now has an appalling pollution problem, and probably wants to stop burning so much coal. Its recent energy crisis is a sign of attempts to shift away from coal reliance. That leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: either China keeps polluting itself (and the rest of the world), or it doesn’t and other emerging countries do so instead. Or, none of them keep burning coal. In all these scenarios, that thereby increases the prices of the goods China sells to everyone else.
You could argue that this is a price worth paying in the battle against climate change. And the levels of pollution in China’s big cities are horrifying; the leadership would be remiss if if didn’t try to do something. But the bottom line is that the rest of the world needs to get used to monitoring China as a potential source of inflation, not deflation."
