16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Man On The Moon    1969

For those of us with an interest all astronomy, it is a depressing fact that 1969 saw the first man to walk on the moon and 1972 saw the last one because we haven't bothered going back since and just abandoned our lunar partner and we are still trying, and failing, to successfully land probes on the red planet so landing a man on one of our nearest planetary neighbours is still a pipe dream.
Weirdly we have Adolf HItler of all people to thank for reaching the Moon at all, it was him who pushed the Nazi scientists to create a rocket that reached Space before plummeting back to Earth on top of some terrified bystanders.
The maths behind launching a human safely to the Moon and then bringing them back again safely is mind boggling but we did it and have this photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the Sea of Tranquillity as proof which was indeed a great step, if not the greatest, for mankind.

Special Guest Blogger: Tenzing Norgay

Namaste, everyone. Or, as my old friend Ed Hillary used to say when he was trying to sound rugged while shivering uncontrollably: Hullo there, do you think my toes are still attached?
Usually, when people talk about me, they use big words pioneer or legend but let’s be honest, mostly, I was a man who was very, very good at walking uphill while carrying other people’s heavy luggage.
I was a young Sherpa with a dream and a very sturdy back. In the 1930s, I joined three British expeditions. Back then, high-altitude gear meant a thick wool sweater, a leather jacket, and a positive attitude. We didn't have fancy GPS or lightweight down suits. We had grit, canned mutton and enough tweed to outfit a small university.
I was a high-altitude porter. In 1951 my job was to carry the dreams (and the tents, and the stoves, and the extra tea biscuits) of British gentlemen who were convinced that if they just climbed high enough, they’d find the end of the Empire. We didn't reach the top then, of course but  then came 1952 and I went with the Swiss. I liked the Swiss. They brought better chocolate. With Raymond Lambert, I reached 8,600 metres and we were so close I could practically smell the thin, oxygen-depleted air of the summit. We spent a night at that height without sleeping bags or a stove.
So, 1953 rolls around. This was my seventh time on the mountain. At this point, the rocks on Everest were starting to recognise me and the leader was John Hunt. He was a good man, very organized. He brought a whole mountain of gear and a tall, lanky New Zealander named Edmund Hillary.
One day, Ed fell into a crevasse and I jammed my ice axe into the snow, wrapped the rope, and held on like my life depended on it which it literally did.
From that moment on, we were a team. He decided I was his climbing partner of choice and I decided he was the guy I had to keep from falling into holes and on May 29th, 1953 at 11:30 AM, we did it. We stood on the highest point on Earth, incredibly out of breath and very cold.
We were there for exactly fifteen minutes. People spend more time choosing a movie on Netflix than we spent on top of the world.
I buried some sweets and chocolate in the snow as an offering to the gods, Ed buried a small crucifix and then we looked around. What did we see? More mountains. It turns out that when you’re on the tallest mountain, everything else looks disappointingly small.
As soon as we got down, the world went crazy. Everyone wanted to know who stepped on the top first? Was it the British subject or the local hero but we had a secret pact, saying we reached it simultaneously but it was actually Ed who took the last few steps first.
After Everest, my life changed. I moved to Darjeeling, became the Director of Field Training for the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, and traveled the world. I met Kings, Queens, and Presidents before i died from a cerebral hemorrhage. It wasn't a mountain that got me in the end, it was just time. But I like to think that somewhere up there, near the South Summit, there’s still a small piece of chocolate I buried in 1953 and if any of you find it, don't eat it. It’s for the gods. And honestly, after seventy years in the snow, it probably tastes like a British wool sweater.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

USA Olympics        1968

At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, 200m sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the victory podium during the U.S. national anthem to protest racial injustice, poverty, and systemic oppression, the media depicted it as a Black Power Salute but Smith called it a 'Human Rights Salute'.
Often overlooked is the third athlete in the picture, Australian Peter Norman, who wore a humans rights badge and was similarly ostracised by his own nation after the protest was screened live around the World.
The International Olympic Committee condemned the act as against Olympic apolitical rules although it was pointed out that 30 years earlier, they never condemned the Nazi Salutes at the Berlin Olympics.
Both Smith and Carlos faced an intense public backlash and death threats upon returning to the United States but they reached the pinnacle of sporting achievement, and selflessly used it to draw attention to what was going on in their World and put their principles and professional career before their own personal interests.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Earthrise        1968

There is another Earth picture later in this series but this one was taken by an Apollo 8 astronaut orbiting the Moon and is the first photograph of Earth taken by a human and shows the Earth 'rising' and was on the cover of the  '100 Photographs that Changed The World' Life book of photographs.
The beautiful image has been called the most influential environmental photograph ever taken and is widely attributed to the start of the Environmentalism movement and the need to protect our fragile planet.
The man who snapped the picture, William Anders stated that seeing this made him an Atheist, stating that once he saw the Earth emerging from behind the lunar horizon surrounded by the black void of Space, it 'snapped' his concept of a God who created the universe solely centered around humanity and went from a devout Christian to an Atheist in that moment.

Special Guest Blogger: Noor Inayat Khan

So, I’m dead. Now, don’t look so shocked. It happened in 1944, and unless I’d discovered some truly revolutionary ancient Indian skin-care secret involving actual immortality, I’d be roughly a hundred and twelve years old by now. Trust me, being a ghost is much better for the posture, you’d be surprised how much those heavy wireless radios weigh on a girl’s spine.
I was a peace loving Sufi, a musician and a writer of children’s stories about gentle bunnies. Naturally, the British government looked at me and thought, there’s the woman we should send to occupied France to blow things up. Logic was not exactly the Allied Forces' strongest suit in 1943.
My life started with a bit of a geographical identity crisis. I was born in the Kremlin because my father, a Sufi teacher and musician, was visiting Russia. In 1914, just as the world decided to start its first round of global fisticuffs and we fled to Britain and then to France.
Being a pacifist in the middle of a World War is like being a vegan at a barbecue, eventually, someone is going to try to shove a hot dog in your face. My brother Vilayat and I sat down and decided that even though we hated violence, we couldn’t sit around while the world turned into a giant, goose-stepping nightmare. So, back to England we went.
I joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and trained as a wireless operator, which was essentially the 1940s version of being IT support and  the Special Operations Executive (SOE) eventually scouted me. My training reports were colorful. My instructors wrote that I was clumsy, unsuitable and scared of weapons and they wasn't wrong. I was terrified but apparently, the SOE was running low on people who could speak fluent French and tap out Morse code at 20 words per minute, so they gave me a fake passport, a cyanide pill and a one-way ticket to a dark field in Angers.
I was the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France and I was given the code name Madeleine and I arrived, lugging a B2 wireless set in a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. Do you know how hard it is to look like a nonchalant Parisian chic lady while carrying what feels like a box of bricks?
Within weeks, the Prosper resistance network I was supposed to work with was decimated. Everyone was being arrested and I was the only one left with a radio. I was basically the only person in Paris provide the Wi-Fi for the Resistance.
For three months, I played a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek by changing my hair color and changing apartments while travelling all over Paris with my suitcase of doom. I was sending messages about arms drops and sabotage operations, all while the Gestapo was driving around in vans with direction-finding gear trying to triangulate my position and then i got caught but not by a brilliant piece of German counter-intelligence but being betrayed for 100,000 francs by the sister of my circuit leader. Apparently, she was jealous because she thought I was getting too much attention.
They sent me to Dacha Pforzheim prison which wasn't the five-star resort the brochures didn't promise where I was kept in chains because they thought the girl who used to play the harp and write about  kittens was dangerous.
I was taken to the wall and they shot me through the back of the neck and though I was given me the George Cross posthumously, though it’s a bit hard to pin it on a spirit. I also have a statue in Gordon Square, London which is very strange to have pigeons sitting on your head for eternity, but if it helps people remember that a timid Sufi writer helped bring down the Third Reich, I can live with a bit of bird poop.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Flower Power    1967

The Hippy movement of the 1960's was something i very much align with and this picture shows a young man who had marched to the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War, when confronted by armed soldiers who had encircled the protesters, went along the line
placing carnations in the barrels of the M14 rifles pointed at him.
The man has since been identified as George Harris who died on AID's in the 1980's and was part of a mass peace movement who handed flowers and soft toys to policemen, the press, politicians, and spectators to fight violence with peace and this is an image which shows that amidst all the violence and atrocities in the World, there are some of us who hope that at some point, we can change and move on from the carnage and to coin a phrase from that era: 'Make love, not war'.

Sorry Ukraine But You're Jiggered

After the success of the peace talks between Israel and Hamas and the ongoing war with Iran, US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have arrived in Moscow to try to resuscitate a deal to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the one which is currently standing at 593 days after the current laughably bad US President said he would end it but this time we have high hopes because the pair have a good track record so far.
Israel is no longer committing a Genocide in Gaza after agreeing not to (it says here) and the Iranians are all cute and cuddly with the USA now so why should we doubt that someone who runs a real estate business and his friend and fellow real estate investor Witkoff can pull this off?
Now some may say why has he been sent when he obviously sucks at peace talks but you have to remember that he is Trump's Son in Law and he must have learnt something from his own father who discovered his brother-in-law was cooperating in an investigation into his business affairs so hired a prostitute to seduce said brother in law, video-taped it and sent it to his wife, his own sister.
Daddy Kushner was then convicted of 18 crimes for tax evasion and witness tampering but was pardoned by Trump and is now the US Ambassador to France so this is a big week for Ivanka's hubby who has so far popped his head up in so many seismic moments, and failed miserably.   
His plan for ending the horrendous war on Ukraine is reportedly based on the deal they discussed previously where Ukraine cede the rest of the Russian-occupied eastern Donbas region which Moscow has been unable to take by force, cut its armed forces by half and abandon certain types of long range weaponry which could hit targets in Russia while Russia, the nation that started the war, would promise not to keep aiming deadly missiles at them, even crossing their hearts and hoping to die.
Onwards then to this week and Ukraine's hopes of an end depend on two members of the Board of Peace Executive Board which is chaired by Donald Trump and includes our own Mr Tony Blair, who we know is unlikely to be war-crime-adjacent so a couple of inexperienced peace negotiators who have failed miserably to bring peace to anywhere they have tried and overseen by a sex offending pedophile who kidnapped one World leader and needlessly bombed and killed the family of another and a man who should be in the Hague for war crimes.
Sorry Ukraine, but if this pair is who you are depending on to bring peace to your nation while not selling you down the river, then you are truly jiggered.

Holding My Peace

I stay deliberately anonymous on this blog and my blog partner for the past 6 years or so also prefers to but his reason is that he is a man of the cloth and i will insist on writing religion bashing posts which make him cringe like this which would see him in a lot of hot (holy) water with his Bishop so if half of it goes missing between me emailing it to him and him posting it then we will know why.
My story starts, as it usually does, with a group in town who tried to engage me in the usual 'God Loves You, come to my Church' type thing where a polite: 'No thank you' leads to them questioning why i was failing to receive God into my life with the implication that everything would be immensely more hunky dory if i did.
Now I have a rule where i don't push my Atheism onto strangers unless they try and push their religious views onto me first and I have had so many discussions with folk who refuse to believe that i refuse to believe that i have so many ready arguments to pick from and just need a starting point, and this one was printed on the leaflet she held out to me which said: 'God gave his only begotten Son for our sins'.   I felt a bit sorry for this young lady, she was only about 18 and was wearing a Nirvana Hoodie and obviously brainwashed by her parents into believing what they did so i just smiled, decided to cut a fellow Nirvana fan a break and put my hand on her shoulder and just said: 'Not interested thank you' and carried on to my car.
What i wanted to say was 'Actually, in the original Bible which was based on the ancient Hebrew texts of Judaism, called the Tanakh, God was going by the name of Yahweh and in that he ruled side by side as a divine man with his wife with Asherah and she was held in very high esteem by many worshipers who erected many wooden pillars and statues in her honor and they had 77 Children but when the ancient Bible Authors began gathering the stories from other religions for their shiny new Christian Bible they edited her out, by referring to her as a sacred tree in an effort to hide her and make Christianity a Monotheistic religion unlike the other ones which had an array of Gods.
After being written out of the Christian Bible, to further kick her further away from her ex-husband, she became morphed into a Pagan goddess and worshiping Pagans was a huge no-no and any statues to her had to be destroyed because of the whole False Idols bit of the commandments and the 77 kids became 1, Jesus, so basically your God had 76 other children with a wife, not just the one who he 'gave for our sins'.
Of course you know all this because you have studied early Christianity before deciding it is the right one for you and you haven't just blindly gone with the one you was 'told' was the right one because if not that would be a bit naive to not check it out for yourself, wouldn't it?
Instead I walked away and decided to write about it here instead and make my blogging partner uncomfortable by having post this instead.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Buddhist Fire    1963

There are many photographs which are too gruesome or gory to make it onto the news but that doesn't mean that the ones deemed worthy are not heart-breakingly awful and hard to look at.
Monk Thich Quang Duc, sat down on a cushion at a busy Vietnamese crossroads, poured a can of petrol over himself and said a prayer before striking a match and dropping it on himself.
It was inj protest at the rising rivalry between the Catholics and the Buddhists and witnesses state that the Monk didn't even move and remained absolutely still even while burning.
US President, John F. Kennedy, said of of the photograph: 'No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world' and the photographer, Malcolm Browne, described the scene he captured as: 'Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.'

Special Guest Blogger: Philo Farnsworth

For those of you who haven’t spent your Friday nights reading patent filings (honestly, what are you doing with your lives?), let me introduce myself. I am Philo T. Farnsworth. I was a farm boy from Idaho who grew up to be the man who was granted the first patent for the television by the United States Government.
People always ask me how does a teenager in a horse-drawn plow come up with the world’s first working all-electronic television system and it was simple. I was bored.
In 1921, I was fourteen years old, tilling a potato field in Idaho. I looked back at the neat, parallel rows I’d just plowed, and it hit me like a heavy clod of dirt). Why couldn’t we scan an image the same way? Line by line. Electronic beams moving back and forth across a vacuum tube, just like my plow moving across the dirt.
While most fourteen-year-olds were worrying about puberty or how to talk to girls, I was drawing diagrams for an image dissector on a blackboard for my high school chemistry teacher.
Fast forward a few years to San Francisco. I wasn’t exactly living the high life, I was basically a mad scientist in a rented lab, trying to prove that mechanical spinning disks (the television of the time) were a joke. Mechanical TV was clunky, loud, and looked like a moving shadow through a screen door.
In 1927, I finally did it. I transmitted a simple straight line using my video camera tube. My wife, Pem, was there. I turned to her and said, "There you are, honey. A line." and she was thrilled or as thrilled as one can be when their husband spends the grocery money on vacuum tubes and glass blowing. But that line was everything. It was the birth of the electronic age. It was the moment I built the world’s first working all-electronic television system. I figured I’d be a billionaire by Tuesday.
By 1930, I had the patents, but I also had a target on my back. A little company called RCA decided they didn't want to pay me and claimed their guy, Zworykin, invented it first.
We went to court. It was a mess. But remember that high school teacher? He had kept the drawing I made on the blackboard when I was fourteen. Long story short, I won. I am officially the guy who was granted the first patent for the television by the United States Government. Suck on it, RCA.
However, the world is a strange place. My technology, specifically the image dissector, ended up being used by the Germans to broadcast the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Imagine that. I’m sitting in my lab and halfway across the world, my invention is being used by Nazis to show Jesse Owens making them look like losers in high-definition (for the time).
Once television became a thing and commercials for soap and cigarettes started clogging up the airwaves, I got bored again. Also, I was tired of fighting lawyers. I moved on to something bigger. Something hotter, I invented a small nuclear fusion device called the Fusor.
While everyone else was trying to figure out how to make color TV work, I was in my basement trying to bottle the sun. I wanted to give the world clean, limitless energy. I wanted to fix the planet. Unfortunately, the world was more interested in watching I Love Lucy.
The Fusor technically worked, but it wasn’t the energy for everyone miracle I’d hoped for, still, you’re welcome, science.
In my later years, I became somewhat dependent on alcohol. Look, if you had spent your youth fighting corporate giants for the rights to your own brain, and your middle age trying to build a sun in your garage, you’d probably fancy a drink too.
Television had turned into a monster and by the 1960s, It wasn't the educational, world-uniting tool I had envisioned. It was a wasteland and I didn’t even let my own kids watch it much. The irony wasn't lost on me that I’d created a window to the world, and I didn't like the view.
Eventually, the lifestyle and the stress caught up with me. I became seriously ill with pneumonia and died which is a real drag when you’ve still got three or four more world-changing inventions in your head but what I left behind was a bit of a mixed bag really as i was the man who gave you the ability to watch a man walk on the moon from your living room, but I’m also the reason people know what a Kardashian is.