#epoch: a poison tree ;

[xasha777]

In the twilight shadows of a world where history and future blur into a tapestry of the fantastical, Lady Seraphine wandered the lush, overgrown gardens of her ancient family estate. A place where roses bloomed luminous and strange, glowing softly under the light of twin moons. It was said these gardens were first planted by Pliny the Elder, who, intrigued by temporal anomalies, had seeded them with flora from both past Earth and distant, undiscovered planets.

Seraphine, clad in a gown that shimmered like starlight filtered through time, paused by a particularly radiant white rose. Its petals were silky, emitting a low hum that resonated with the pulsing of the moons. As a child, Seraphine had been told that these roses were Pliny's favorite, a living remnant of his experiments with interspatial botany.

Tonight, the air thrummed with more than just the song of roses. The fabric of reality itself seemed to quiver, as if anticipating a significant unraveling. Seraphine felt it too—a pulling at her soul, a whisper in her mind that urged her towards the heart of the garden.

There, amid ruins that flickered between ancient Roman brick and sleek, alien metal, she found it: a device, half-buried, pulsating with light and shadow. Legend had it that Pliny the Elder hadn’t just settled for writing his Natural History; he had also crafted a machine meant to traverse the threads of time, hoping to document the future as thoroughly as he had the past.

The device, known as Pliny’s Compass, was rumored to be powered by the rarest of materials, accessible only to those of true intent and pure heart. Seraphine, driven by a desire to save her dying world—its core poisoned by temporal rifts and historical bleed-through—placed her hand upon the device. It buzzed alive, the garden's hum reaching a crescendo.

The machine whirred, glyphs and numbers spiraling across its surface, aligning to the coordinates of a critical moment in time. With a breath that tasted of ozone and rosewater, Seraphine activated Pliny’s Compass, embracing the torrent of time it unleashed.

Space folded around her, a vortex of eras and epochs mingling in a chaotic symphony. She glimpsed the burning libraries of Alexandria, the construction of the first colony on Mars, scenes from Pliny's own lifetime, and far beyond—futures possible and impossible.

When the maelstrom calmed, Seraphine found herself standing in the heart of a new world, one untouched by the temporal decay of her own. Before her spread a city that sang with technology and nature intertwined, its citizens moving between trees that whispered ancient secrets and towers that pulsed with advanced life.

Armed with knowledge and seeds from Pliny’s own garden, she knew she could heal her world. With the past and future in her hands, Lady Seraphine set forth to weave a new reality where time’s tapestry held firm and beautiful.

[vitavitale]

@monstriiss​​ sent:  in ur peripheral u see drath crouched low trying to pspspsps at shadow to give pats wyd

Too unusual to be a trick of the eye—and lo and behold, when he looked, he found that thing there, trying for Shadow’s attention. So silently had the creature come upon them, V failed to notice. His demons, however, clearly knew better (though Shadow had turned her attention from her master for the briefest moment while simultaneously neglecting to rip through hideously pale flesh). The beast born of shadow wore an unmistakable snarl across her maw; she was by no means taken off her guard. Rather, she scrutinized the thing attempting to...communicate with her? Nevertheless, the sorcerer clad in black joined her side and, in equal measure, studied the woman—if that was even a fair assessment—whose countenance was devoid of facial features save for a pair of lips. A ghoulish sight to stomach. “She’s not a cat,” V informed rather brusquely. “You won’t get her to respond...nicely.” A fact stated in defense of himself and his familiar; not intended to be a threat, but the information was threatening. He’d known her for years, and the rigid stance she took along with the suspicion all about her frame suggested her master had been right.

And yet, her refusal to attack was something. What did she perceive of this interloper...? 

[aisling-saoirse]

Today let's talk about one of my favorite (and everyone else's least favorite trees) The Osage Orange Maclura pomifera

The Osage Orange is a pretty unique tree that comes from a previously wide spread variant of tree that has, within the last epoch, been disappearing. You may have noticed these lumpy unpalatable fruit on the ground inexplicably fallen from a tree left to rot as no species really eats them. This is because the animals of dispersal were Pleistocene megafauna (wooly mammoth, ground sloth, mastodon) things that have gone extinct since the last ice age. The fruit is actually poisonous to smaller animals so very large grazers were only capable of consuming these. Since their disappearance we have been left with very few examples of trees that cater to megafauna.

As for the tree itself the wood produces a beautiful yellow wood color and was only really known to Osage natives in the Central Texas region before European Colonization. Settlers utilized the wood for natural paddock fencing as younger branches produce incredibly thorny stems. Non-scientific media often urges us to force this tree into extinction (which it is in no danger of) as it's fruit is considered annoying and has no consumers, which is the most common discussion revolving around the tree online. That is frankly an incredibly stupid opinion I just wanted to make others aware. There is discussion of bringing this tree back in use of silvopasture but for now it makes a fun ornamental.

[rockislandadultreads]

Southern Gothic Books: recommendations

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award–winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

A sublime and seductive reading experience. This portrait of a beguiling Southern city was a best-seller (though a flop as a movie). ~ Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt interweaves a first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. The story is peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproarious black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

A dark fantasy historical novella that gives a supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror. D. W. Griffith is a sorcerer, and The Birth of a Nation is a spell that drew upon the darkest thoughts and wishes from the heart of America. Now, rising in power and prominence, the Klan has a plot to unleash Hell on Earth. Luckily, Maryse Boudreaux has a magic sword and a head full of tales. When she's not running bootleg whiskey through Prohibition Georgia, she's fighting monsters she calls "Ku Kluxes." She's damn good at it, too. But to confront this ongoing evil, she must journey between worlds to face nightmares made flesh--and her own demons. Together with a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter, Maryse sets out to save a world from the hate that would consume it.

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Crossing a City Highway

by Yusef Komunyakaa

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask the approaching day hides behind & from, the coyote nosing forth, the muscles of something ahead, & a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers zoom out of the curved night trees, along the rim of absolute chance. A question hangs in the oily air. She knows he will follow her scent left in the poisoned grass & buzz of chainsaws, if he can unweave a circle of traps around the subdivision. For a breathy moment, she stops on the world’s edge, & then quick as that masters the stars & again slips the noose & darts straight between sedans & SUVs. Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues or the dead nomads who walked trails now paved by wanderlust, an epoch somewhere between tamed & wild. If it were Monday instead of Sunday the outcome may be different, but she’s now in Central Park searching for a Seneca village among painted stones & shrubs, where she’s never been, & lucky she hasn’t forgotten how to jig & kill her way home.

[sasquapossum]

How To Stop Ruining A Game

(Yeah, bit of a click-bait-y title. Sorry not sorry.)

I'm a pretty big fan of Diablo-like ARPGs. Tons of loot, complex attribute/skill trees, bazillions of gear enhancements. Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, etc. I played through GD (including DLC) with six very different characters and felt like I'd exhausted it, so I moved on to PoE. I'll never exhaust all of its possibilities, especially since it keeps growing all the time, but that's kind of a problem too. Because of all the "league" mechanics that have become part of the regular game, it sometimes feels like ten games smooshed together and stuffed into a trench coat. I know the build "meta" is supposed to be the thing, and grinding is part of the genre, but after playing through the main game and *a bit* of the endgame with four different builds fatigue was already setting in. So I tried Last Epoch but it was so raw that even calling it a beta seems like an insult. So I settled on Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

There's a lot to love about VH. The setting, atmosphere, and graphics are all very good for the genre. The banter with your companion ghost and the references to other franchises (including Monty Python) have made me laugh many times. The game mechanics are pretty solid - a skill/attribute system that makes sense (though PoE's gem system will always win here), very nice maps, good variety of monsters, and so on. It could be a truly great game, except for one thing: the crowding problem.

What is the crowding problem? Well, first, it's important to understand that movement and positioning are more important in VH than in most of its peers. It's a more "kiting" play style, which some might find unappealing and good for them if they do, but I quite enjoy it. I especially like the way that it encourages you to do "environmental" kills by luring enemies near explosive/poison barrels or blast furnaces. (BTW this works despite the fact that the game is generally kind of dumb about line of sight so e.g. you can't shoot an enemy across an empty spot on the map.) But here's where the game commits a cardinal sin.

Don't encourage (or even force) players to develop one set of skills, then make those skills absolutely useless whenever it suits you.

This applies both to character skills and real-human-player skills. It's a betrayal of the trust that should exist between developers/designers and players. It's bad enough that VH relies a bit too much on the "many enemies and even more hit points" approach to increasing difficulty. I could live with that, but what they do that's infuriating is have those many enemies surround the player so they can't move and then just beat them into the ground. Sometimes this is even at the very beginning of an area, so there's no way to avoid it. And no, "dash" skills don't help much because they're not usable often enough. You just get beaten down twice instead of once before you have to respawn and slog back to where you died. That's just rude. It's also startlingly unimaginative when there are so many better ways to add difficulty. If movement and positioning are going to be part of how your game differentiates itself, force the player to do more instead of preventing it. Here are some ideas.

Give monsters powerful but highly telegraphed attacks so the player has to keep moving. VH does quite a bit of this, but often in the form of too many enemies doing this all at once so movement doesn't actually help as much. It's better if it's from only a few leaders/bosses at a time. I also don't mean most bosses having unpredictable one-shot attacks like practically every one in the PoE endgame. That's also lazy and annoying.

Make the terrain more interesting, with lots of obstacles to help the player exercise their movement skills and isolate enemies. To be fair, VH also does some of this, though too often it's just one obstacle. Running around in circles is boring. Hide and seek is more fun.

Moving or timed terrain elements can work well here, in moderation. If that makes the game a bit more like a platformer then good (as long as it's just a bit). That's your differentiator. Get used to it. Celebrate it. That's a lot better than making the game more like an exercise in designers abusing players for their own entertainment.

Give monsters weaknesses specific to time, direction, or damage type. Make the player run around to hit monsters in the most damaging ways. As with most of these suggestions, flooding the area with too many enemies works against what would make the game enjoyable. Leave the "trash horde" style to PoE, which nails it. "Fewer but better" monsters should be the goal here.

If you're going to have lots of monsters - and that should be a thing just for variety even if it's not the usual case - then give the player more area-of-effect and damage-over-time options to keep them under control. (To be fair, this might exist with character classes I haven't yet tried in VH.)

Give the player crowd-control options - stuns, freezes, snares, knockbacks, and so on - at least as good as the monsters'. As it is, the monsters get to have more fun this way than the players in this regard.

More environmental kills. These are another great differentiator, and there's literally a whole world of possibilities.

BTW yes, I've also played Souls-like games. They do apply many of these ideas, but they also have their own problems like too many attack types and combos and reliance on learning by repetition instead of playing intuitively. They also tend to have an even worse form of the "bullet sponge" (arrow sponge?) problem. The "boss changes into three different and successfully more difficult forms during the fight" (also present but not as prevalent in PoE) only exacerbates that. It's the worst. It's possible to move a little in that direction, just like moving a little more toward platformers or JRPGs, without changing the basic Diablo-like nature of the game. It would be an improvement over betraying the player.

[londontantric-blog1]

Sex, Drugs, and Rock

The area that is now known as Turkey played a major role in the Mystery Religions. The use of drugs to create "religious" experiences was developed to a fine art by various occult fraternal mystery religion groups in the Turkey area. The Assassins from where we get the word hashish controlled parts of Turkey and Lebanon in Medieval times. They used drugs to gain the allegiance of their recruits. Some of the most powerful figures for the Illuminati have been Turks. The Grand Orient has had some powerful figures in Turkey. For instance, at the Masonic Congress of all the Grand Orients' (that's European Freemasonry- although several American presidents have been members of European Freemasonry) Grand Lodges, Bou Achmed came from Turkey. The Grand Lodge of Asia was represented by Sebeyck-Kadir from Asia. Bou Achmed took a big role in the Grand Orient's decisions.

As an aside, let me explain one example of the power of the Grand Orient in America. The Grand Orient was originally strong in Louisiana but spread itself to many other US. locations. Garfield, a very powerful man in the Grand Orient, managed to become US. President because the political process got deadlocked at the convention and the Masons suggested him as a compromise candidate. Although Garfield was an extremely powerful Mason, had been perhaps the youngest general in the US. Army during the Civil War, the Illuminati ordered him shot after he had served about a year in office as President. Garfield was reported by an eye-witness to Satanic rituals to have participated in the cannibalistic rites of Satanism done to gain the spiritual power of the eaten person. The Grand Orient Freemasonry has been linked to other orders of Freemasonry that are also called Rosicrucians. Pope John XXIII joined a Rosicrucian group that had links to European Freemasonry when he was in Turkey.

While the secret Grand Orient Freemasonry was very strong in Turkey in spite of its small numbers, the regular American Freemasonry granted a dispensation for a Masonic Lodge to operate in Smyrna, Turkey in May, 1863 but the charters were withdrawn on Aug. 27, 1880. However, it is interesting that of all the Turkish cities, Smyrna was definitely the best place for Freemasonry to gain recruits. Men like Achmed Pasha and many of the other Pasha family have been leaders within Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Achmed Pasha was a Satanist and had a large harem. Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1872-1921) was a Freemason and part of the Turkish revolution of 1908. He was the leader of the Young Turks, which was a joint project of the Sufis and the Frankist Satanists. (The type of Satanism led by the Frank family has had connections to Turkey for hundreds of years.) Mehmet Talaat Pasha was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Turkey. He was held the political position in Turkey of grand vizier of Turkey (1917-18). Another Turkish Pasha was part of the Turkish royalty running Egypt when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. His name was Khedive Ismail Pasha and he was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Egypt. It was this Turk, Khedive Ismail Pasha, who gave the famous Obelisk to the United States. This Obelisk was called Cleopatra's Needle and was originally erected in the city of the sun, Heliopolis, about 1500 B.C. The Obelisk is a representation of a human penis, because sun worship, worship of regeneration (sex) and worship of the sun god Satan were all tied together. Masons helped with the moving of the obelisk, and its dedication when it arrived in New York City. Large obelisks have been erected by Masons in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, the Vatican, and London. (If my memory serves me correct Berlin received one too at one time.)" (1)

Notice the importance of Smyrna as a source of Freemasonry here. That is where the Onassis family has operated potion-pushing or altered consciousness drugs for millennia.

Sometimes, when my tiny head is spinning with disinfotainment and other artifacts of the mediasphere, I try to think what archaeologists and social historians 2,000 years from now might make of our particular little epoch. How, for instance, would they parse the word "drug"?

Is a "drug dealer" a pharmacist or a petty criminal? When we talk about "reasonably priced drugs for seniors," are we discussing marijuana or Lipitor {or Levitra}? What would they make of the fact that the last four American administrations have declared a "war on drugs" while taking money from drug companies?

Why is it bad when residents of Colombia build mansions from profits on the sale of drugs, but it's good when residents of Newport, R.I., do the same thing? When one person cannot live without "lifesaving drugs," we express great sympathy, unless that person is a "drug addict," in which case we may even throw him in jail. When a mood-altering drug is sold in pill form in stores, it's called an antidepressant and hailed as a medical breakthrough. When a mood-altering drug is sold on the streets, it's called felony drug trafficking and subject to stiff criminal penalties. see here london tantric

Because we are native speakers of Americanadianese, we can wend our way through the contradictions. We know that the bad drugs are the ones the cause euphoria and impair judgment, unless the drug is alcohol, but that's not ever called a drug, so there's no confusion there. We know that the good drugs are the ones that cure diseases or relieve symptoms, except sometimes the good drugs are ineffective or even counterproductive in achieving those goals.

Street dealers do not finance experimental trials on the effectiveness of the drugs they sell. Drug companies do, but they fudge the results. Street dealers have a small feedback loop because customers can tell pretty quickly whether they're loaded or not. Drug companies have a long feedback loop because human beings can't instantly tell whether their cholesterol is being lowered or their blood thinned or their insulin production stimulated. A drug with a long feedback loop is clearly more profitable than one with a short feedback loop because the dealer can keep an ineffective drug on the shelves much longer.

Interestingly, the people who sell ineffective drugs are generally said to have made "honest mistakes." If a street dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you could take five of your friends and go back and have a brisk conversation with him. If a behind-the-counter dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you'd have to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit and maybe, maybe, 10 years later you'd get some money, although probably you'd be dead by then.

Street dealers don't have patents on their drugs, which means that they'll always have plenty of competition. Drug companies do have patents, so they can set their prices without worrying about market economics. And when their patents run out, they can put out a drug with a slightly different formulation, promote it like mad and sell the new drug in a monopolistic setting {With government mandated market support in order to manage the 'money-trees' while building bureaucracy.}. You have to wonder when street dealers are going to come up with Cocaine XR or LSD Reditabs.

Since the street dealer works in a competitive atmosphere, he has to keep his prices relatively low. In order to increase his profitability, he can "step on" his product, that is, dilute it. It would be unwise for a drug company to adulterate its product, but since it owns a monopoly, it can set prices artificially high and achieve the same profitability levels. A street dealer who knowingly poisons his clientele is called "the scum of the earth." A drug corporation that knowingly poisons its clientele is called "a tobacco company." People who sell illegal drugs often rot in jail for 20 or 30 years. People who sell legal drugs are often forced to attend tedious daylong board meetings. People who take illegal drugs are called "losers." People who take legal drugs are called "everyone in America."

Glad I'm not an archaeologist in 4040; my brain would ache a whole lot.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill puts you in jail, and please do not operate heavy machinery with the ones that mother gives you. {My ex-roommate was being told to apply for his old job as a forklift truck operator while being given drugs for Schizophrenia which he did not have. He was no liar and could not expose a potential employer to the insurance risks or his fellow employees to the life threat this would entail. Many drugs people use are impairing their driving prowess, and there are laws to take away their license that go unenforced.}

Driving that train, high on ethyl 4-1-piperidinecarboxylate.

Homeopathy:

It is a wonderful thing to have the Joy of Learning and to make a career that you find is related to your studies. There are so many ways to get a Doctor label and thus claim expertise in the many fields and disciplines which we have broken knowledge into. Some of this is counter to real expertise and much of it just sets people apart from knowledge and each other. But people are also being segmented into classes within the hierarchy of government backed by and for elites in all so many ways. Medicine has been one of their more dastardly tools alongside religion. This next little factoid reminds me of how Edward Gibbon almost died because the British Medical system would not approve vaccinations through use of scabs as had been done by the likes of Paracelsus or others in antiquity and which was approved in the France of his era.

"When the Cholera epidemic reached England, it provided another opportunity to compare homeopathic treatment with the conventional methods of the day. Regular allopathic medicine yielded a mortality rate of 59 percent compared to only 16 percent for the Homeopaths. (2) When these statistics were collected, the information was so startling that a medical commission was sent to the London Homeopathic Hospital to check the records. Though the data were duly verified, it was decided not to make them public, and the facts were not released until a hundred years later." (3)

The formation of the American Medical Association is a major issue against alternative healing or real care for people. In the late 19th Century as these issues were becoming apparent there were many who knew that the allopaths or medical doctors selling laudanum and the like were actually the 'Killing-trade'. There are signs that stress management (don't fret - sweat or exercise) and the connectiveness to the 'all' around us are again making a play to be considered in health maintenance. Vitamins and supplements are able to prove to even the most duped person receiving medical care that they work and yet some doctor's groups and the governments that back them still disqualify doctors who advise their usage.

Academics are subject to a 'Knowledge Filter' (Berkeley Law Professor - Johnson) or Literary Theory (UBC English Professor Graham Good) and the outright suppression of creative or thoughtful and meaningful potentials. (4) The concept of Bucky Fuller called 'the observer of the observed' and his more detailed 'creative realization' is part of what operates as we 'project' upon reality. For example the things we see are actually a mixture of fields of energy from the dross and less excited to the highly excited or vibrational energy inside the atomic structures. One way of visualizing this includes an aura, which is the field of energy not usually visible but associated with the solar body and integrative centers called chakras. Perhaps we could contemplate a time when all people had the ability to see or sense auras. In our socially normed 'projections' that include telling our children certain things do not exist, we have lost the conscious integration or incorporation of these fields of reality.

Psychic surgeons in the Philippines and Brazil have had their energy measured during operations at the same vibration rate of 7.8 cycles. It started me thinking about how we can alter our state and how others might perceive us in these altered states. Clearly if anyone could see all the spaces between our electrons and the nuclei or between the different atoms and molecules we wouldn't seem solid by a long shot. Thus these surgeons who use no utensils would be able to energize the infected or diseased body part or tumor to remove it at an altered vibration level. There have been solid documentaries with such credible support as X-rays before a San Francisco businessman had such a tumor removed and X-rays a year later showing it hadn't returned. In the end you must decide who has the most to gain from the arguments and whether or not you want to actualize your own potential. Once you do a few things the debunkers say are impossible - then a smile will come to your face; and the intellectual conflict loses all import.

String Theory knows about the harmonic forces that are less than solid which somehow combine to make what we perceive as a solid. The astrophysicists now have told us that 95% of the universe is 'Dark Matter' or 'Dark Energy' - so get with it before you are invisible and don't know it! Just kidding! We fear that which we cannot fully comprehend and our experts or priests and doctors include many enablers of our fears. We even allow fear to pre-empt love; which is ironic because at the end of our lives it's not the fears or the differences that matter the most but whether we loved and allowed ourselves to be loved as much as possible.

"Every new perception of knowledge is always based either directly or indirectly on older knowledge. InteliTapping allows us to connect with the oldest, yet most complete source of knowledge." (5)

Nature produced a show on the origins of music and the biological and archetypal impact it has had on our evolution and emotional wherewithal. Along with reed instruments from as long ago as 60,000 years that obviously show sophisticated development of technology, they had the cave operas of those who rubbed and drummed on stalactites. They posited that the tree-swinging hominid that like the Sumatran Gibbon co-ordinates community for protection through territorial chants, is not so much less aware as most of our great Lockean influenced academics seem to be. These animals also learned what plants are dangerous and what plants alter your spiritual consciousness. You can see it when your puppy goes outside for the first time and chews on some grass to settle its tummy. Our genes contain a lot of information or the ability to tap-in to much knowledge. The buzz you get from 'weed' is the buzz coming from your Thalami and Third Eye or Pineal gland that has a crystal radio receiver and grains or crystalline structures. Crystalline structures like quartz were known to be useful in the Lost Chord of the Druids and more ancient shamans. There are magnificent quartz caves in Central America and other places that would have been used by early hominids for a certainty.

The Best Body Language - Sex:

Long before Tantra or Bhakti Yoga there were many things ancients probably learned from intercourse, even more than most people do today. Today we have drugs like Viagra to enhance the longevity of the sexual encounter. The Mayans have natural drug for this. There are so many things which keep us busy or deflect us from spiritual insight as is noted in many Eastern systems which refer to the 'busy-mind' or samsara and the illusion of Maya.

Second degree Wiccan students who have advanced through a rigorous training in esoteric knowledge begin a quest that many would regard as perverse pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification. The partners are often involved in other committed relationships. When a man and a woman who are interested in spiritual growth combine to experience the Tantric or Bhakti (Yoga) or ritualistic growth potential to free more than just their personal self or ego to reach the heights of spiritual or psychic possibilities; who can say what is real and what is imagined. This effort to commune with spirit is termed 'working partners' and the allies or guides is who they really seek to merge or work with. The imagination is undoubtedly a part of the dynamic. It isn't necessary for them to care for each other in the way lovers do. I have not done this 'work'.

Many people talk about 'soulmates' or 'dual flames' and the words become mere shadows of the real potential. At the same time sex is a dirty 'word', and act, in much of society.

What can a writer say to convey the essence of all these things?

If I absolve myself from the challenge of integrating these concepts, rituals and soulful realities I would simply say trust your soul and know that wherever you may go you will find something more than whatever you thought was real to begin with.

If I talk about 'la petite mort' or empathic attunements with the soul of the partner that allows the self to disintegrate and become part of something larger than one person; and almost dissolve in the vastness of spirit - it will only seem like prose and poetry. The phrase 'la petite mort' or 'the little death' can in fact lead to a Kundalini type experience which can cause death.

Of course, one can wax eloquent and carry on at length about any of their hopes and desires. The essence of a great working partner most probably has little to do with these aspirations and more to do with the way the soul interpenetrates all people. The glimpses of insight gained through empathy and love with those who shared my needs are special to me and will forever stay in the part of my soul (if there is such a part) that cherishes all we were and hungers for what we could have been.

To deprecate the witch who 'draws down the moon' into their partner on the path to worship of things no one can fully know is the stuff of fearful and insecure people. That kind of bigotry without actual experience is rampant in all areas of society. It is truly just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when one contemplates all the ways mankind has developed to separate himself from what we are collectively and what god truly wishes for us to realize. No amount of constant seeking or obsession with these pursuits will ever get a man any closer to his soul than what he was while in his mother's womb.

The joy and creativity of the challenge to know is as great a gift as our maker can give us - except perhaps the acquiescence to the soul within the loved one you are blessed to have the chance to know and share your life with. In the moment of creation each day as we grow and learn to be, we are forever drawn by some force that seeks greater harmony and purpose for all energy.

Many (if not most) people think the 24 hour orgasm is like alien abductions but the EEG and other ways of measuring physical responses would convince them otherwise. A similar number of people find the misuse of Tantric Yoga by the likes of Crowley and Hubbard is tantamount to whatever is evil in man. I say they are right, but that is not the fault of Tantric Yoga. These techniques are very seductive and in some ways the participants would choose to have the experience even if they knew a great deal about it because it is a sad truism that Masters and Johnson or Kinsey are right. They say a full third of women never have an orgasm through intercourse.

Many people seldom enjoy sex and some significant number of the rest of us are in varying stages of poor to decent ability and openness to what great learning sex can provide. It could be said that our sexual relations are a good barometer of the state of society. I favour sex education and all the opportunities and responsibilities that go with the natural and soulful functions of the act. It is easy to understand why some people are hesitant to have strangers teach their loved ones about sex. But Father Leo Booth is right when he notes that parents who repress their children or foist suppressive behavior upon them are just as guilty of abuse.

[industravelsblog-blog1]

New Zealand - Wikipedia

>>These are rainforests of the temperate and subtropical zone, which differ significantly from the rainforests of the tropical zone in terms of fauna and flora. A comparable vegetation with often evergreen deciduous and coniferous woods and partly tree ferns can be found on the south coast of South Africa, in Tasmania, Chile and along the Pacific coast from California to Canada.

What dangerous animals are there in New Zealand?

Dangerous animals in New Zealand In the countryside there are fewer or, apart from the rare Katipo spider, hardly any dangerous animal species. In New Zealand more than 1100 spider species live from the 40 000 spider species known worldwide so far. Only a few are weakly poisonous.

Until about 200 million years ago New Zealand - like most of today's land masses in the southern hemisphere - belonged to the primordial continent of Gondwana. Since then New Zealand has been able to develop a flora and fauna independent of all other land areas. Read more about campervan hire New Zealand here.

Although the beginnings of rugby actually come from the state schools of England, rugby in New Zealand is the popular sport of the "average Kiwi". Even before Sir Ernest Rutherford split the atom in the early twentieth century, New Zealanders were making groundbreaking discoveries and inventions. Many of them were literally made in a backyard. Today's most famous kiwi inventions are probably frozen meat, the Hamilton jet boat and the bungee jump, but there are many others. New Zealand's European pioneers were courageous, robust and independent.

They live mainly on the Otango Peninsula, where conservationists anxiously check their population.

The tree nettle (Urtica ferox) does the same as all nettles and sheds piercing hairs when touched, which bring the poison into the victim's skin.

These ethnic groups live mainly in the south of the greater Auckland area.

> The rest of the Kiwis live mainly in the big cities Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton.

The southern movement continued until the Carboniferous and Permian ( million years ) and brought New Zealand close to its present position. In the epoch of the Cambrian, Silurian and Ordovician ( mio. years) New Zealand reached up to the 45th, later up to the 20th New Zealand's friendly and down-to-earth inhabitants are something very special and remain - in the best sense - in the memory of visitors for a long time. This database can then be accessed by the police during a search. This giant snail can grow up to 10cm in size and noisily eats earthworms, insects and occasionally conspecifics. The Kauri snails live almost exclusively in the ancient Kauri forests of Northland and reach an age of up to 20 years. More species of penguins live in New Zealand than in any other country, but their population is endangered.

Also interesting:

New Zealand is home to some of the most active volcanoes on earth. These are located exclusively in the northern half of the country, a large part of them are concentrated in the Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ), which is located in the centre of the North Island. This is a large alluvial plain, which is well suited for agricultural purposes, such as livestock farming. From this plain, the volcanically shaped Banks Peninsula rises into the Pacific Ocean, which is part of the urban area of Christchurch, the largest agglomeration in the South Island and the third largest in the country. Around the free-standing volcano is a broad rainforest belt, which is protected by the Egmont National Park.

[autodidact-adventures]

Plants: Holly (Ilex aquifolium)

Ilex aquifolium is known as common holly, European/English holly, sometimes Christmas holly, and often just holly.  It grows as an evergreen tree or shrub/bush.

Kingdom: Plantae

Clade: Angiosperms (flowering plants)

Clade: Eudicots (also known as tricolpates & non-magnoliid dicots)

Clade: Asterids

Order: Aquifoliales

Family: Aquifoliaceae

Genus: Ilex (about 480 holly species).  Ilex is the only living genus in the Aquifoliaceae family.

Species: Ilex aquifolium

Holly trees.

Holly bushes.

Holly hedges.

Ilex aquifolium is native to western & south-western Europe, south-west Asia, and north-west Africa.  It is one of Britain's few native evergreen trees.

Holly is often found in the shady undergrowth of oak forests, and in beech hedges, but sometimes forms a dense thicket as the dominant species.  It adapts very well to various conditions, but requires moist, shady environments – e.g. forests, shady slopes, cliffs and mountain gorges.  It can tolerate both frost and summer drought.

Holly is a “pioneer species” that repopulates the margins of forests or clearcuts.  It grows slowly, and usually doesn't manage to mature fully, due to cutting or fire.

While it can grow to over 10m tall, common holly is usually about 2-3m tall and broad.  It has a straight trunk and pyramidal crown, branching from the base.  It can live up to 500yrs, but usually doesn't make it to 100yrs.

Pure stands of holly can grow into a labyrinth of holly vaults, where deer and thrushes can find refuge.  Smaller birds are protected among the spiny leaves.

The woody stems can be 40-80cm wide in diameter, or even over 1m wide (although this is rare).  The leaves are 5-12cm long and 2-6cm wide, and last about 5yrs.  They are dark green on the top side and lighter on the bottom; they are roughly oval-shaped, leathery, and glossy.

In young trees, the leaves are spiky, with 3-5 spikes (or spines) on each side.  In mature trees, only the lower limbs have spiky leaves. This heterophylly (growing different types of leaves at the same time) is an epigenetic reaction to animals eating the leaves.

Different leaves from the same holly tree.

Holly is dioecious – there are male and female plants.  The plants usually begin flowering between 4 and 12 years old, and this is when they can be differentiated.  Male flowers are yellowish-white and appear in axillary shoots (diagram below), while female flowers are white or slightly pinkish-white, smaller than the male flowers, and grow separately or in groups of three.  The female flowers have four petals and four sepals partially fused at the base.  All holly flowers are four-lobed, and pollinated by bees.

Axillary buds are located at the intersection of the leaf and stem of a plant.

Only the female plants have berries, so there need to be male plants nearby to fertilize them.  The holly berry is a bright red or bright yellow drupe (stone fruit) about 6-10mm in diameter.  The berries mature around October/November (late autumn), but they are very bitter at this stage due to their ilicin content.

Birds, rodents, and larger herbivores usually eat them in late winter, after the frost has made them softer and more edible, and they fall to the ground.  They are an important food for birds in winter, because of the scarcity of resources.  Each fruit has 3-4 seeds, and they germinate during the second or third spring.

Bees, wasps, small butterflies and flies obtain nectar from the flowers. Phytomyza ilicis, the holly leaf miner, causes the pale patches on the leaves.

Leaf miner damage.

The berries are poisonous for humans.  They contain alkaloids, caffeic acid, caffeine, saponins, theobromine, and ilexanthin (a yellow pigment).  They are emetic (i.e. they cause vomiting), possibly due to the compound ilicin.  The berries are also poisonous for cats & dogs, because of the caffeine & theobromine.

Holly isn't native to North America, but it is very invasive along the west coast of Canada and the USA.  It spreads quickly into native forests, thriving there and crowding out native species.  In the state of Washington, it is on the Noxious Weed Control Board's monitor list.  In Portland (Oregon), it is listed as a Class C invasive plant.  Holly is also an invasive plant in Hawai'i.

During the [early?] Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago until today), Europe, the Mediterranean, and north-western Africa had a wetter climate than now, and were mostly covered in laurel forests.  This is a type of subtropical forest that grows in regions with high humidity, and mild temperatures that are relatively stable.  Plants from the Lauraceae (laurel) family are not necessarily part of a laurel forest.  What mostly grows are broad-leaved, evergreen tree species with glossy, elongated leaves.  Holly grew well in these laurel forests, and many of the present-day Ilex species, including common holly, were found there.

However, the Mediterranean Basin dried up in the Messinian Salinity Crisis during the Pliocene Epoch (about 5.33 million years ago – 2.58 million years ago), forcing the laurel forests to gradually retreat.  They were replaced with more drought-tolerant sclerophyll plant communities.  Most of the remaining laurel forests in the Mediterranean region probably died out around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.

Today, holly is also commonly found in garigue and maquis, scrubland and shrubland regions in the Mediterranean areas.

From the 1200s – 1700s, common holly was grown as winter fodder for cattle and sheep (this was before turnips were introduced).  Less spiny varieties were preferred, and the leaves near the top of the tree were most suitable, as they aren't spiny at all.

In the past, holly was one of the traditional woods used to make the Great Highland bagpipe.  However, imported dense, tropical woods eventually took over.

Ilex aquifolium leaves can be used for on-and-off fevers, joint pain (rheumatism), swelling, water retention, and chest congestion.

[poorquentyn]

Remember Your Name, Part 3: When That Other Man Had Come This Way

Series so far here

“That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.”

At the end of In the Mood for Love, the film’s protagonist visits the ruins of Angkor Wat. He’d earlier mused to a friend about how back in the day, if you had a secret burning inside that you couldn’t bring yourself to share, you dug a shallow hole into a tree and whispered your secret into it, filling the hole with mud afterwards to keep the truth at bay.

But when our hero decides to try and leave behind the story of forsaken love we saw unfold over the course of the movie, he does not seek out a living thing that can survive and change and grow. He instead unburdens himself to a ruin: a monument to the ravages wrought and distances forged by time. In the sequel 2046, he disappears into the rose-colored fog within, surrounded by his ghosts on parade. Try as he might, he could not seal them away forever.

I have come this way before. It was a dangerous thought, and he regretted it at once.

“No,” he said, “no, that was some other man, that was before you knew your name.” His name was Reek. He had to remember that. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leek. When that other man had come this way, an army had followed close behind him, the great host of the north riding to war beneath the grey-and-white banners of House Stark. Reek rode alone, clutching a peace banner on a pinewood staff. When that other man had come this way, he had been mounted on a courser, swift and spirited. Reek rode a broken-down stot, all skin and bone and ribs, and he rode her slowly for fear he might fall off. The other man had been a good rider, but Reek was uneasy on horseback. It had been so long. He was no rider. He was not even a man. He was Lord Ramsay’s creature, lower than a dog, a worm in human skin. “You will pretend to be a prince,” Lord Ramsay told him last night, as Reek was soaking in a tub of scalding water, “but we know the truth. You’re Reek. You’ll always be Reek, no matter how sweet you smell. Your nose may lie to you. Remember your name. Remember who you are.”

“Reek,” he said. “Your Reek.”

The Drunkard’s Tower leaned as if it were about to collapse, just as it had for half a thousand years. The Children’s Tower thrust into the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the wind and rain. The Gatehouse Tower, squat and wide, was the largest of the three, slimy with moss, a gnarled tree growing sideways from the stones of its north side, fragments of broken wall still standing to the east and west. The Karstarks took the Drunkard’s Tower and the Umbers the Children’s Tower, he recalled. Robb claimed the Gatehouse Tower for his own. If he closed his eyes, he could see the banners in his mind’s eye, snapping bravely in a brisk north wind. All gone now, all fallen.

Memory and identity are inextricable. Who you were informs who you are, and who you are invariably filters your perspective on who you were. The weight of backstory has always been one of ASOIAF’s central claims to profundity. R+L=J, the story’s central revelation and the beating heart of the fandom, is also the burdensome duty that defined our fakeout protagonist Eddard Stark. What makes Ned’s life so meaningful is that he put it all on the line not to keep the secret that his purported bastard Jon is in fact his sister Lyanna’s son by Rhaegar Targaryen, but in the name of the values that keeping that secret instilled in him.

Time was perilously short. The king would return from his hunt soon, and honor would require Ned to go to him with all he had learned. Vayon Poole had arranged for Sansa and Arya to sail on the Wind Witch out of Braavos, three days hence. They would be back at Winterfell before the harvest. Ned could no longer use his concern for their safety to excuse his delay.

Yet last night he had dreamt of Rhaegar's children. Lord Tywin had laid the bodies beneath the Iron Throne, wrapped in the crimson cloaks of his house guard. That was clever of him; the blood did not show so badly against the red cloth. The little princess had been barefoot, still dressed in her bed gown, and the boy…the boy…                 

Ned could not let that happen again. The realm could not withstand a second mad king, another dance of blood and vengeance. He must find some way to save the children.

Jaime floats in heat and memory in the Harrenhal bathtubs, the truth finally swimming to the surface; Barbrey stares deep into a dead man’s face, the pleasure and pain of it eternally intermingled; Robert himself admits that all he wants most is to leave behind the crown it was all ostensibly for. They all sing the same sad song, the one Reek sings as he rides fearfully into Theon Greyjoy’s past at Moat Cailin: I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. They followed the red comet, over the edge. Their songs broke, and broke them in their fall.

Following on Theon briefly coming unstuck in time in his first ADWD chapter, Reek II builds on that disorientation by externalizing it onto his environment. The chapter is thick with memory and riddled with decay, all swathes of mist that give way to fountains of blood, because that’s what the inside of Theon Greyjoy’s head looks like. That opening chapter in the Dreadfort gave us a blood-curdling glimpse of the crucible in which Theon became Reek before forcing him out of it; now, the story goes widescreen, taking in how the North has changed along with our POV since last he stepped out into it.

The hall was dark stone, high ceilinged and drafty, full of drifting smoke, its stone walls spotted by huge patches of pale lichen. A peat fire burned low in a hearth blackened by the hotter blazes of years past. A massive table of carved stone filled the chamber, as it had for centuries. There was where I sat, the last time I was here, he remembered. Robb was at the head of the table, with the Greatjon to his right and Roose Bolton on his left. The Glovers sat next to Helman Tallhart. Karstark and his sons were across from them.

The reference to time’s fire in which we burn (“blackened by the hotter blazes of years past”), the epochal weight of the table filling the chamber “as it had for centuries,” the evocation of the ghosts that haunt Theon--all of it grounds the business of the plot in memory and time, and thus in what’s happened to our POV. 

Theon smiled. Reek cannot. Theon had friends. Reek is a pariah. Theon came to Moat Cailin with an army. Now, that army is dead and gone, except for those who turned on the rest...just as he did. Moat Cailin has been made a ruin all over again, defeat and despair folded into it like Lannister crimson into Stark steel, a testament like Tristifer’s tomb to a shattered kingdom. Theon helped shatter it, and now he stumbles back shattered to help melt down what’s left. He is Moat Cailin, more or less, the broken towers a misty mirror for our broken man, the splintered teeth of his smile writ large. The fog that cloaks the fortress reflects how he’s been forced to compartmentalize his past, which is now screaming its way to the surface. There are ghosts in Moat Cailin, and he is one of them.

(image by warsandpoliticsoficeandfire.wordpress.com)

This sense of desolation and loss is mirrored in the chapter’s purpose in the larger plot. The standoff between the Boltons and the Ironborn over the Moat (and by extension, the North as a whole) is little more than a feast for crows. Both sides went for the direwolf’s throat with no higher cause than plunder and the pleasure of it; all they’re fighting over is who did it more successfully. The Ironborn here were left to rot by their Lord Captain when he went chasing his brother’s crown...

“Victarion commanded us to hold, he did. I heard him with my own ears. Hold here till I return, he told Kenning.”

“Aye,” said the one-armed man. “That’s what he said. The kingsmoot called, but he swore that he’d be back, with a driftwood crown upon his head and a thousand men behind him.”

“My uncle is never coming back,” Reek told them. “The kingsmoot crowned his brother Euron, and the Crow’s Eye has other wars to fight. You think my uncle values you? He doesn’t. You are the ones he left behind to die. He scraped you off the same way he scrapes mud off his boots when he wades ashore.”

Those words struck home. He could see it in their eyes, in the way they looked at one another or frowned above their cups. They all feared they’d been abandoned, but it took me to turn fear into certainty. These were not the kin of famous captains nor the blood of the great Houses of the Iron Islands. These were the sons of thralls and salt wives.

...and the Dreadfort men can’t lay any credible claim to be acting as defenders of the North from the reaving invaders, given the Northern blood they’ve both happily spilled throughout. (Those who hunt people for sport shouldn’t throw stones, and all that.) Ramsay in this chapter is merely mopping up after and reaping the benefits of the hard-earned victory won by Howland Reed and his guerilla fighters, and even that he’s not doing himself, but forcing a helpless tortured prisoner to do for him. The Bastard’s unspeakably hideous treatment of the Ironborn after they surrender to him in good faith is the punchline to a very dark joke, poisoned icing on bitter cake. And of course, it’s all in the service of welcoming an army soaked in the blood of the men and women with whom they sat down to dinner, as allies, as friends, as guests at a wedding.

Three days later, the vanguard of Roose Bolton’s host threaded its way through the ruins and past the row of grisly sentinels—four hundred mounted Freys clad in blue and grey, their spearpoints glittering whenever the sun broke through the clouds. Two of old Lord Walder’s sons led the van. One was brawny, with a massive jut of jaw and arms thick with muscle. The other had hungry eyes close-set above a pointed nose, a thin brown beard that did not quite conceal the weak chin beneath it, a bald head. Hosteen and Aenys. He remembered them from before he knew his name. Hosteen was a bull, slow to anger but implacable once roused, and by repute the fiercest fighter of Lord Walder’s get. Aenys was older, crueler, and more clever—a commander, not a swordsman. Both were seasoned soldiers.

The northmen followed hard behind the van, their tattered banners streaming in the wind. Reek watched them pass. Most were afoot, and there were so few of them. He remembered the great host that marched south with Young Wolf, beneath the direwolf of Winterfell. Twenty thousand swords and spears had gone off to war with Robb, or near enough to make no matter, but only two in ten were coming back, and most of those were Dreadfort men.

Even as Reek struggles to keep Theon at bay (thinking of his life before the Dreadfort dungeons as the time “before he knew his name”), making contact with the people with whom Theon rode to war is stirring something inside him, and that’s reflected in the big picture of what it means for this army to arrive in the North. Grey Wind’s forlorn eyes from the House of the Undying are watching, and judging, and waiting. Wolves prowl and howl through the opening chapters of ADWD’s Northern half, singing the song of their fall, and of Jojen’s solemn promise: “the wolves will come again.” The ghosts of the Red Wedding follow this army to Winterfell, and hang heavy on the Ramsay-Jeyne wedding and everything that follows, crying out for redress. The gods have been insulted, and will have their due. Thankfully, there’s a man going ‘round taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame...

...but discussion of His Grace King Stannis Baratheon, the Wrath of God, will have to wait for later chapters, as will Wyman Manderly’s culinary interpretation of divine judgment.

For the purposes of Theon’s arc, the Ironborn at Moat Cailin serve as the mirror from which he’s trying so desperately to look away. I said last time that what Reek fears most right now, even more than Ramsay, is being Theon. That name carries so much shame and pain with it that he prefers to be “your Reek,” fearing not only the external consequences of defiance (more torture and maiming), but also the internal consequences of identifying as his old self. All Theon wanted to do in ACOK was take control of his life, and now that’s the last thing he wants, because of what he did with that power once he had it. He returns to Moat Cailin flying a white flag of peace, but it may as well be one of surrender.

“I am Ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been Ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak.

“Ralf Kenning is dead,” he said. “Who commands here?”

The drinkers stared at him blankly. One laughed. Another spat. Finally one of the Codds said, “Who asks?”

“Lord Balon’s son.” Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with cheek.

One of the Codds pushed to his feet. A big man, but pop-eyed and wide of mouth, with dead white flesh. He looked as if his father had sired him on a fish, but he still wore a longsword. “Dagon Codd yields to no man.”

No, please, you have to listen. The thought of what Ramsay would do to him if he crept back to camp without the garrison’s surrender was almost enough to make him piss his breeches. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leak.

What gives this chapter its charge is that our POV is being forced by the man who shattered his old identity to resume that identity. It’s Theon playing Reek playing Theon, and he’s being made to remember his name in order to sway the people who represent his old life, because they’d never surrender to Reek. He knows that, because he used to be like them...or he wanted to be, anyway. When Theon first became a POV, his mind was aflame with song, lashing his in-between identity to the values and visions of the Old Way:

Once I would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he thought to himself as he slid his fingers through her tangled hair. Once. When we still kept the Old Way, lived by the axe instead of the pick, taking what we would, be it wealth, women, or glory. In those days, the Ironborn did not work mines; that was labor for the captives brought back from the hostings, and so too the sorry business of farming and tending goats and sheep. War was an ironman's proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire and blood and song.

Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black Harren, gave Harren's kingdom back to the weakling rivermen, and reduced the Iron Islands to an insignificant backwater of a much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around driftwood fires and smoky hearths all across the islands, even behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon's father numbered among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words boasted that We Do Not Sow.

It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion. Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon thought as the captain's daughter slid her lips up and down the length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man.

This chapter, Theon I ACOK, slots right in between Davos I (the one with Lightbringer) and Daenerys I (the one in the Red Waste), both of them positively soaked with messianic imagery and focused on weighty questions of power, prophecy, and the price you pay. But in Theon’s chapter, the launching pad for the most stubbornly secular storyline in ACOK, the messianic mindset is stripped of its finery and exposed as pitiful self-delusion. This is who you are, Chosen One, all the more clearly with neither dragons nor shadowbinders at your back: a mirror-drunk fool dreaming of atrocities while your dick gets sucked.

Three books later, that self-image has been racked and flayed and castrated before being spat back out at us as Reek. He thinks of himself as having been born beneath the Dreadfort, molded like clay from Theon’s blood and pain; are you my mother, Ramsay? He keeps retreating to his new name in his thoughts, a mantra to keep the fear away. The identity of which he dreamed is now the nightmare he cannot shake. And what better way for the author to reflect that than by bringing him up against the death of his dream, the most unshakable images of the rot eating away at the Old Way?

Reek passed the rotted carcass of a horse, an arrow jutting from its neck. A long white snake slithered into its empty eye socket at his approach. Behind the horse he spied the rider, or what remained of him. The crows had stripped the flesh from the man’s face, and a feral dog had burrowed beneath his mail to get at his entrails. Farther on, another corpse had sunk so deep into the muck that only his face and fingers showed.

Closer to the towers, corpses littered the ground on every side. Blood-blooms had sprouted from their gaping wounds, pale flowers with petals plump and moist as a woman’s lips.

Ralf Kenning lay shivering beneath a mountain of furs. His arms were stacked beside him—sword and axe, mail hauberk, iron warhelm. His shield bore the storm god’s cloudy hand, lightning crackling from his fingers down to a raging sea, but the paint was discolored and peeling, the wood beneath starting to rot.

Ralf was rotting too. Beneath the furs he was naked and feverish, his pale puffy flesh covered with weeping sores and scabs. His head was misshapen, one cheek grotesquely swollen, his neck so engorged with blood that it threatened to swallow his face. The arm on that same side was big as a log and crawling with white worms. No one had bathed him or shaved him for many days, from the look of him. One eye wept pus, and his beard was crusty with dried vomit.

“What happened to him?” asked Reek.

“He was on the parapets and some bog devil loosed an arrow at him. It was only a graze, but…they poison their shafts, smear the points with shit and worse things. We poured boiling wine into the wound, but it made no difference.”

This is how the Old Way has always died, with broken towers and the stench of corpses, from Aegon melting Harrenhal to Robert smashing Pyke. Every time it falls, the seeds are sown for its next rise; the ideology’s exposed festering folly is folded into a Lost Cause mythos that weaponizes resentment and ennobles suffering. The last time it fell, part of the price paid was Theon’s identity, and his desperate drive to reclaim it by reviving the Old Way is what led him here. He’s unrecognizable to the very world in which he hoped to finally recognize himself.

The garrison will never know me. Some might recall the boy he’d been before he learned his name, but Reek would be a stranger to them. It had been a long while since he last looked into a glass, but he knew how old he must appear. His hair had turned white; much of it had fallen out, and what was left was stiff and dry as straw. The dungeons had left him weak as an old woman and so thin a strong wind could knock him down.

And his hands…Ramsay had given him gloves, fine gloves of black leather, soft and supple, stuffed with wool to conceal his missing fingers, but if anyone looked closely, he would see that three of his fingers did not bend.

That fall from grace, the violent collapse of his projected identity, is reflected back at him by the sorry state of the Ironborn garrison. They came here as an army, together, one people; they knew who they were. And now...?

Someone seized him and dragged him inside, and he heard the door crash shut behind him. He was pulled to his feet and shoved against a wall. Then a knife was at his throat, a bearded face so close to his that he could count the man’s nose hairs. “Who are you? What’s your purpose here? Quick now, or I’ll do you the same as him.” The guard jerked his head toward a body rotting on the floor beside the door, its flesh green and crawling with maggots.

“I am ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak. He had to forget that for a little while, though. No man would ever yield to a creature such as Reek, no matter how desperate his situation. He must pretend to be a prince again.

His captor stared at his face, squinting, his mouth twisted in suspicion. His teeth were brown, and his breath stank of ale and onion. “Lord Balon’s sons were killed.”

“My brothers. Not me. Lord Ramsay took me captive after Winterfell. He’s sent me here to treat with you. Do you command here?”

“Me?” The man lowered his knife and took a step backwards, almost stumbling over the corpse. “Not me, m’lord.” His mail was rusted, his leathers rotting. On the back of one hand an open sore wept blood. “Ralf Kenning has the command. The captain said. I’m on the door, is all.”

“And who is this?” Reek gave the corpse a kick.

The guard stared at the dead man as if seeing him for the first time. “Him…he drank the water. I had to cut his throat for him, to stop his screaming. Bad belly. You can’t drink the water. That’s why we got the ale.” The guard rubbed his face, his eyes red and inflamed. “We used to drag the dead down into the cellars. All the vaults are flooded down there. No one wants to take the trouble now, so we just leave them where they fall.”

“The cellar is a better place for them. Give them to the water. To the Drowned God.”

The man laughed. “No gods down there, m’lord. Only rats and water snakes. White things, thick as your leg. Sometimes they slither up the steps and bite you in your sleep.”

Reek remembered the dungeons underneath the Dreadfort, the rat squirming between his teeth, the taste of warm blood on his lips. If I fail, Ramsay will send me back to that, but first he’ll flay the skin from another finger. “How many of the garrison are left?”

“Some,” said the ironman. “I don’t know. Fewer than we was before. Some in the Drunkard’s Tower too, I think. Not the Children’s Tower. Dagon Codd went over there a few days back. Only two men left alive, he said, and they was eating on the dead ones. He killed them both, if you can believe that.”

Moat Cailin has fallen, Reek realized then, only no one has seen fit to tell them.

And now they are lost, turning on each other, their god forgotten. Cannibalism rears its head again and again in ADWD, as the taboo wilts in the face of winter and war. Theon came here with the knights of summer; Reek returns to find the living dead. Two different armies, two different peoples, as one in his mind now. After all, he’s been trying to bridge this particular gap for most of his life. The abyss awaited both armies to occupy the Moat, as it awaited Theon. Never forget Kubrick’s parting shot in Barry Lyndon:

In ACOK, Theon tried to shed the Northern self exemplified by that shining army at the Moat like dead skin, giving himself over to the image of the Ironborn self in his head. Now Reek returns to Moat Calin to play that image, only to sacrifice it as he was as a child, sacrificed like the men at Moat Cailin to the Old Way...

“Kill him,” Reek told the guard. “His wits are gone. He’s full of blood and worms.”

The man gaped at him. “The captain put him in command.”

“You’d put a dying horse down.”

“What horse? I never had no horse.”

I did. The memory came back in a rush. Smiler’s screams had sounded almost human. His mane afire, he had reared up on his hind legs, blind with pain, lashing out with his hooves. No, no. Not mine, he was not mine, Reek never had a horse. “I will kill him for you.” Reek snatched up Ralf Kenning’s sword where it leaned against his shield. He still had fingers enough to clasp the hilt. When he laid the edge of the blade against the swollen throat of the creature on the straw, the skin split open in a gout of black blood and yellow pus. Kenning jerked violently, then lay still.

...and then again as an adult, this time to the Bastard of Bolton.

Reek swung down from his saddle and took a knee. “My lord, Moat Cailin is yours. Here are its last defenders.”

“So few. I had hoped for more. They were such stubborn foes.” Lord Ramsay’s pale eyes shone. “You must be starved. Damon, Alyn, see to them. Wine and ale, and all the food that they can eat. Skinner, show their wounded to our maesters.”

“Aye, my lord.”

A few of the Ironborn muttered thanks before they shambled off toward the cookfires in the center of the camp. One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

When the last of them were gone, Ramsay Bolton turned his smile on Reek. He clasped him by the back of the head, pulled his face close, kissed him on his cheek, and whispered, “My old friend Reek. Did they really take you for their prince? What bloody fools, these ironmen. The gods are laughing.”

“All they want is to go home, my lord.”

“And what do you want, my sweet Reek?” Ramsay murmured, as softly as a lover. His breath smelled of mulled wine and cloves, so sweet. “Such valiant service deserves a reward. I cannot give you back your fingers or your toes, but surely there is something you would have of me. Shall I free you instead? Release you from my service? Do you want to go with them, return to your bleak isles in the cold grey sea, be a prince again? Or would you sooner stay my leal serving man?”

A cold knife scraped along his spine. Be careful, he told himself, be very, very careful. He did not like his lordship’s smile, the way his eyes were shining, the spittle glistening at the corner of his mouth. He had seen such signs before. You are no prince. You’re Reek, just Reek, it rhymes with freak. Give him the answer that he wants.

“My lord,” he said, “my place is here, with you. I’m your Reek. I only want to serve you. All I ask …a skin of wine, that would be reward enough for me…red wine, the strongest that you have, all the wine a man can drink…”

Lord Ramsay laughed. “You’re not a man, Reek. You’re just my creature. You’ll have your wine, though. Walder, see to it. And fear not, I won’t return you to the dungeons, you have my word as a Bolton. We’ll make a dog of you instead. Meat every day, and I’ll even leave you teeth enough to eat it. You can sleep beside my girls. Ben, do you have a collar for him?”

“I’ll have one made, m’lord,” said old Ben Bones.

The old man did better than that. That night, besides the collar, there was a ragged blanket too, and half a chicken. Reek had to fight the dogs for the meat, but it was the best meal he’d had since Winterfell.

And the wine…the wine was dark and sour, but strong. Squatting amongst the hounds, Reek drank until his head swam, retched, wiped his mouth, and drank some more. Afterward he lay back and closed his eyes. When he woke a dog was licking vomit from his beard, and dark clouds were scuttling across the face of a sickle moon. Somewhere in the night, men were screaming. He shoved the dog aside, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

The next morning Lord Ramsay dispatched three riders down the causeway to take word to his lord father that the way was clear. The flayed man of House Bolton was hoisted above the Gatehouse Tower, where Reek had hauled down the golden kraken of Pyke. Along the rotting-plank road, wooden stakes were driven deep into the boggy ground; there the corpses festered, red and dripping. Sixty-three, he knew, there are sixty-three of them. One was short half an arm. Another had a parchment shoved between its teeth, its wax seal still unbroken.

“So few. I had hoped for more.” The soul shudders. And oh, how casually “somewhere in the night, men were screaming” strolls into the middle of a paragraph, and Reek rolls back over to sleep...

To be clear, I’m not holding Theon responsible for what happens to his sixty-three fellow Ironborn left at the Moat. He’s in no position to refuse Ramsay, as GRRM makes clear in his inner monologue throughout the chapter. But Ramsay is deliberately putting his prisoner through a gauntlet of the self. He has our POV act as Prince Theon son of King Balon, forces him through a cruel mummer’s farce of “choosing” to stay at Ramsay’s side as Reek, and then viciously annihilates the people who represent Theon’s connection to that old identity. It has exactly the effect Ramsay wants: “He pulled down the kraken banner with his own two hands, fumbling some because of his missing fingers but thankful for the fingers that Lord Ramsay had allowed him to keep.” This is what it means to have been Theon and to now be Reek.

This pattern will repeat itself over the course of Theon’s next two chapters, as Roose and Barbrey conspire to have him give Jeyne away to Ramsay publicly, as Theon, and so help cement Bolton control of Winterfell. At every step, Theon's identity is weaponized and turned against him. He flinches from his past, drinks to annihilate his present, and can barely conceive of a future. He is unmoored, drifting through external and internal fog, and he has once again unlocked the North on behalf of heinous authority figures he desperately wants to please. Indeed, Ramsay has wrought a fearsome image of himself in Theon’s mind, a devil equally at home tempting and punishing, and that dynamic is recreated at Moat Cailin:

One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

On that note, one persistent critique of both AFFC and ADWD is that the violence stopped meaning anything--the author started leaning on brutality for brutality’s sake, because he bought into his own rep and/or was out of ideas. I think it’s a valid complaint when it comes to, say, Biter eating Brienne’s face. But on the flipside, the horrific violence in Theon’s storyline is consistently linked to intertwined themes of memory and identity in a manner that I find resonant. Look no further than the man who accepts Ramsay’s offer, and why:

It was the one-armed man who’d flung the axe. As he rose to his feet he had another in his hand. “Who else wants to die?” he asked the other drinkers. “Speak up, I’ll see you do.” Thin red streams were spreading out across the stone from the pool of blood where Dagon Codd’s head had come to rest. “Me, I mean to live, and that don’t mean staying here to rot.”

The one-armed man walked at the head of the procession, limping heavily. His name, he said, was Adrack Humble, and he had a rock wife and three salt wives back on Great Wyk. “Three of the four had big bellies when we sailed,” he boasted, “and Humbles run to twins. First thing I’ll need to do when I get back is count up my new sons. Might be I’ll even name one after you, m’lord.”

Aye, name him Reek, he thought, and when he’s bad you can cut his toes off and give him rats to eat. He turned his head and spat, and wondered if Ralf Kenning hadn’t been the lucky one.

“All they want is to go home, my lord.” And so does Theon, but he has no home to go back to.

Now, of course, Adrack Humble’s dream of counting up his sons is hardly a utopian vision--he kidnapped and enslaved most of their mothers. But the world to which he belongs is the world to which Theon wanted to belong, believing in it so badly he put his life on the line for it...and it failed him, just as it always ultimately fails your average [H]umble man of the Iron Islands. As such, Reek now thinks that the man who rotted without getting his hopes up was the lucky one. This is how he talked when the Young Wolf’s army marched south...

"But such a battle!" said Theon Greyjoy eagerly. "My lady, the realm has not seen such a victory since the Field of Fire. I vow, the Lannisters lost ten men for every one of ours that fell. We've taken close to a hundred knights captive, and a dozen lords bannermen. Lord Westerling, Lord Banefort, Ser Garth Greenfield, Lord Estren, Ser Tytos Brax, Mallor the Dornishman … and three Lannisters besides Jaime, Lord Tywin's own nephews, two of his sister's sons and one of his dead brother's…"    

Theon Greyjoy was seated on a bench in Riverrun's Great Hall, enjoying a horn of ale and regaling her father's garrison with an account of the slaughter in the Whispering Wood. "Some tried to flee, but we'd pinched the valley shut at both ends, and we rode out of the darkness with sword and lance. The Lannisters must have thought the Others themselves were on them when that wolf of Robb's got in among them. I saw him tear one man's arm from his shoulder, and their horses went mad at the scent of him. I couldn't tell you how many men were thrown—"    

...but his story is always interrupted, his comrades died at dinner, and now he dreams only of blood. We rode to war with songs on our lips, but by the time the last notes faded and left us alone with the silence, we were utterly transformed. When Theon eagerly embraces his wine and his half-chicken and his collar, trusting them to silence the screams, all I can think of is this:

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well.”

Two chapters prior to Reek II, half a world away, the Shy Maid sailed through another mournful ruin, and when Tyrion stared into the Sorrows, they stared back.

The grey moss grew thickly here, covering the fallen stones in great mounds and bearding all the towers. Black vines crept in and out of windows, through doors and over archways, up the sides of high stone walls. The fog concealed three-quarters of the palace, but what they glimpsed was more than enough for Tyrion to know that this island fastness had been ten times the size of the Red Keep once and a hundred times more beautiful. He knew where he was. “The Palace of Love,” he said softly.

“That was the Rhoynar name,” said Haldon Halfmaester, “but for a thousand years this has been the Palace of Sorrow.”

The ruin was sad enough, but knowing what it had been made it even sadder. There was laughter here once, Tyrion thought. There were gardens bright with flowers and fountains sparkling golden in the sun. These steps once rang to the sound of lovers’ footsteps, and beneath that broken dome marriages beyond count were sealed with a kiss. His thoughts turned to Tysha, who had so briefly been his lady wife. It was Jaime, he thought, despairing. He was my own blood, my big strong brother. When I was small he brought me toys, barrel hoops and blocks and a carved wooden lion. He gave me my first pony and taught me how to ride him. When he said that he had bought you for me, I never doubted him. Why would I? He was Jaime, and you were just some girl who’d played a part. I had feared it from the start, from the moment you first smiled at me and let me touch your hand. My own father could not love me. Why would you if not for gold?

Through the long grey fingers of the fog, he heard again the deep shuddering thrum of a bowstring snapping taut, the grunt Lord Tywin made as the quarrel took him beneath the belly, the slap of cheeks on stone as he sat back down to die.

And therein lies a theme that runs through ASOIAF but for me finds its richest expressions in A Dance with Dragons: you can’t go home again.

Quentyn did not want to die at all. I want to go back to Yronwood and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her flower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my father sends me. I want Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry to be alive again.

Home is haunted, by the love you lost and the family you failed.

The door to the roof of the tower was stuck so fast that it was plain no one had opened it in years. He had to put his shoulder to it to force it open. But when Jon Connington stepped out onto the high battlements, the view was just as intoxicating as he remembered: the crag with its wind-carved rocks and jagged spires, the sea below growling and worrying at the foot of the castle like some restless beast, endless leagues of sky and cloud, the wood with its autumnal colors. “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” Prince Rhaegar had said, standing right where Jon was standing now. And the boy he’d been had replied, “One day they will all be mine.” As if that could impress a prince who was heir to the entire realm, from the Arbor to the Wall.

Griffin’s Roost had been his, eventually, if only for a few short years. From here, Jon Connington had ruled broad lands extending many leagues to the west, north, and south, just as his father and his father’s father had before him. But his father and his father’s father had never lost their lands. He had.

Home is a border wall, a chain digging and twisting.

“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper.

“Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gruff as ever. “Five, we were. All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our mother. Dacey was murdered.”

“The Red Wedding.”

“Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s only two. My daughter’s nine.”

“You started young.”

“Too young. But better that than wait too late.”

A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. “You are wed.”

“No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and find mates in the woods. Everyone knows.”

Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all fighters too.”

The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea.”

The Old Way. Asha turned away, chains clinking faintly.

Home is leagues and years away, and yet so close you can almost touch it.

Bran closed his eyes and slipped free of his skin. Into the roots, he thought. Into the weirwood. Become the tree. For an instant he could see the cavern in its black mantle, could hear the river rushing by below.

Then all at once he was back home again.

Lord Eddard Stark sat upon a rock beside the deep black pool in the godswood, the pale roots of the heart tree twisting around him like an old man’s gnarled arms. The greatsword Ice lay across Lord Eddard’s lap, and he was cleaning the blade with an oilcloth.

“Winterfell,” Bran whispered.

“I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.”

You have no home. You never will.

Water splashed against the soles of her feet. She was walking in the stream. How long had she been doing that? The soft brown mud felt good between her toes and helped to soothe her blisters. In the stream or out of it, I must keep walking. Water flows downhill. The stream will take me to the river, and the river will take me home.

Except it wouldn’t, not truly.

You’ll give up everything just to get home, please, please...

Jon flexed the fingers of his sword hand. The Night’s Watch takes no part. He closed his fist and opened it again. What you propose is nothing less than treason. He thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon’s breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady’s coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair as tangled as a bird’s nest. I made him a warm cloak from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…

...but it’s gone.

“I have no wish to die, I promise you. I have …” His voice trailed off into uncertainty. What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to raise, lands to rule, a woman to love?

Home is a time, not a place, and there were so few times that Theon was at home. One of them was here, not so long ago, though it feels like it was. For a brief shining second as the banners caught the breeze, with roaring Umbers and fierce Karstarks, with a powerful army around him, with his brother in all but blood marching to avenge his (their?) father, he knew who he was.

And now, he can’t even remember his name.

How could who I was mean anything if it can be taken away from me like this? I was a Greyjoy among Starks, and then a Stark among Greyjoys; I was Theon and had to become Reek, I am Reek and have to become Theon. Forgive me, he calls through time to the smiling man he used to know, I was not strong enough. But Theon can’t hear Reek and never will.

...and yet.

A light rain had begun to piss down out of the slate-grey sky by the time Lord Ramsay’s camp appeared in front of them. A sentry watched them pass in silence. The air was full of drifting smoke from the cookfires drowning in the rain. A column of riders came wheeling up behind them, led by a lordling with a horsehead on his shield. One of Lord Ryswell’s sons, Reek knew. Roger, or maybe Rickard. He could not tell the two of them apart. “Is this all of them?” the rider asked from atop a chestnut stallion.

“All who weren’t dead, my lord.”

“I thought there would be more. We came at them three times, and three times they threw us back.”

We are Ironborn, he thought, with a sudden flash of pride, and for half a heartbeat he was a prince again, Lord Balon’s son, the blood of Pyke.

We are Ironborn. We are Ironborn. The point isn’t that being Ironborn is, in itself, some great moral progression for Theon. The point is that he just thought of himself as one of them, as Theon, in spite of Ramsay arranging everything that happens in Reek II to convince him that he is not. He has, just for a second, found himself.

This spark grows in strength when Roose Bolton and his army arrives to escort his bastard’s bride home. As I said last time, the identity shell-games extend beyond Theon himself; his arc in ADWD only works as well as it does because it resonates with what’s happening in the plot. The North went south united, but returns divided. Roose doesn’t exactly have “a peaceful land, a quiet people” on his hands, and bringing the hated Freys north will only further provoke Stark loyalists (as we’ll see in later chapters). Moreover, his army had to pass through the Neck, controlled by one of said Stark loyalists, Howland Reed. As such, it’s not safe these days to be Roose Bolton...so he outsourced the job.

Collared and chained and back in rags again, Reek followed with the other dogs at Lord Ramsay’s heels when his lordship strode forth to greet his father. When the rider in the dark armor removed his helm, however, the face beneath was not one that Reek knew. Ramsay’s smile curdled at the sight, and anger flashed across his face. “What is this, some mockery?”

“Just caution,” whispered Roose Bolton, as he emerged from behind the curtains of the enclosed wagon.

This is a terrific way to reintroduce a villain. We haven’t seen Roose since he shed all pretense and revealed himself, a snake with new skin, at the Red Wedding. What could be more fitting than for him to wrong-foot us along with Ramsay upon re-entry? We lean forward to see him, only to hear his soft voice behind us...

Reek pretending to be Theon paved the way for the man pretending to be Roose and the girl pretending to be Arya. It’s a mockery, a mummer’s farce, a hall of mirrors. By weaving the central question of Theon’s story--who am I?--into the characters and plot points surrounding him, GRRM elevates that story. It’s the classic existentialist quest: the eternal hunt of the elusive Real. The question of whether Theon will remember his name fits like a puzzle piece with the question of whether the North will remember its name. And the North remembers.

But Theon, try as he might, is not a Stark...and neither is Ramsay’s bride-to-be.

(image by Elia Fernandez)

Jeyne Poole is not Arya Stark, and everyone knows it. Her presence is a marker of Bolton success: the key to Winterfell, a gift from their Lannister patrons, a declaration that the old has been humbled before and folded into the new. Yet more than anything else, it is the lack of anyone willing to call the Dreadfort men on their fraud that points to their rising fortunes at this moment. This is precisely why Davos’ defiant stand against the Freys in the Merman’s Court (in the chapter immediately prior to this one, worth noting?) hits home so hard. The man who stuck his neck out for the truth will not suffer these noxious lies about what happened to the Northerners who went south, and it’s all the more admirable because he (seemingly) stands alone.

And after a chapter of his identity being used against him, rewarded with a collar for handing his people over to a butcher, telling himself again and again that he is Reek, not Theon but Reek...our POV finally drops the disguise.

The girl was slim, and taller than he remembered, but that was only to be expected. Girls grow fast at that age. Her dress was grey wool bordered with white satin; over it she wore an ermine cloak clasped with a silver wolf’s head. Dark brown hair fell halfway down her back. And her eyes…

That is not Lord Eddard’s daughter.

Arya had her father’s eyes, the grey eyes of the Starks. A girl her age might let her hair grow long, add inches to her height, see her chest fill out, but she could not change the color of her eyes. That’s Sansa’s little friend, the steward’s girl. Jeyne, that was her name. Jeyne Poole.

“Lord Ramsay.” The girl dipped down before him. That was wrong as well. The real Arya Stark would have spat into his face. “I pray that I will make you a good wife and give you strong sons to follow after you.”

“That you will,” promised Ramsay, “and soon.”

It’s only internal. There’s nothing moral about it yet. He’s yet to relate her fortunes to his own. But by allowing Reek to play Theon, Ramsay has unknowingly reintroduced his captive’s pre-captivity identity into his bloodstream like an antivirus, and Jeyne’s arrival crystallizes what this means for our POV. If she’s not Arya, then he’s not Reek.

The past is present. The mud you pack into that hole in the ruined wall won’t keep your ghosts at bay. But (to borrow from Barristan) mud can nourish the seeds from which you will grow, your past the fertilizer for your rebirth.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell's chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.    

[thewordcollector2]

And Then There Was Rain: 35+ Uplifting Reminders for Those Rainy Days

Bismillaahir-Rahmaanir-Raheem بسم الله الرّحمن الرّحيم… In the name of Allah (God), the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Assalaamu 'alaikum السّلام عليكم… Peace be with you

Hi, Readers :). There are those times in life when we experience dismal days. These are the days when you feel like the world is coming to an end, and everything just seems to be going downhill. During these moments you feel gutted (down or depressed), and as if a dark cloud is following you everywhere. But fear not! Your days will not always be sunless and cheerless, as sadness never lasts forever. There is hope in the rain, and you just need to hold on, InshaaAllah إن شاء الله (God willing)! :)

Persian / Farsi Idiom: Havaa-toh daaram هواتو دارم / I have your back.

Literal Translation: I have your air / weather.

Today, I wish to bring back some hope, optimism and confidence in YOU. This post is mostly centered around rainy days* (figurative and literal). It is especially for the downhearted, but anyone is welcome to read. Please try some of my reinvigorating treatment. Don't worry, it's totally safe and poison-free. And, guess what? It won't cost you a dime. Happy swallowing! :)

*rainy day

(n.) A time of need or trouble. (The Free Dictionary)

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Important Notice:

Readers, I apologise for the unclickable URLs and hyperlinks in this post. My blog seems to have a glitch right now, so please be patient with me. Thank you for your understanding, and again I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience.

For the while, you guys can copy and paste URLs (web addresses) from the "Sources, Credits and Further Reading" section to the address bar (location bar or URL bar) of your web browser, and then hit / press "Enter" to visit them.

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25+ Inspirationally Refreshful Quotes for Rainy Days

"Don't confuse your path with your destination. Just because it's stormy now doesn't mean that you aren't headed for sunshine."

Only a select few are able to see the true beauty that lies behind what just might seem like a rainy day or a grey sky. ~Jessica M. Laar

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. ~Rumi

Fall seven times, stand up eight. ~Japanese proverb*

*Japanese Idiom - Wiktionary

七転び八起き (hiragana ななころびやおき, rōmaji nana korobi ya oki)

Meaning:

the ups and downs of life (lit. seven falls, eight get-ups)

Note:

"This proverb implies that you have a lot of ups and downs throughout your life, but you will be fine at the end. It encourages you to tackle your problems again and again until you overcome it, even when you cannot see the light. This is often used when you want to encourage somebody facing difficult problems." (Japanese Words of Wisdom)

Let a smile be your umbrella on a rainy day. ~Perry Como

If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. The world needs more of that. ~Anonymous

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated. ~Lou Holtz

"Thank Allah* for what you have. Trust Allah for what you need."

*"Allah الله is the Arabic word for God in Abrahamic religions. In the English language, the word generally refers to God in Islam. The word is thought to be derived by contraction from al-ilāh, which means 'the god', and is related to El and Elah, the Hebrew and Aramaic words for God.

The word Allah has been used by Arabic people of different religions since pre-Islamic times. More specifically, it has been used as a term for God by Muslims [both Arab and non-Arab] and Arab Christians." (Wikipedia)

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other. ~Abraham Lincoln

Everyone wants happiness; no one wants pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain. ~Zion Lee

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud. ~Maya Angelou

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. ~Maya Angelou

HasbunAllaahu wa ni'mal Wakeel حَسْبُنَا اللَّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ.

"Allāh is sufficient for us and He is the Best Guardian."

(Qur'ān, Sūrat Āl 'Imrān)

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it. ~Mohandas Gandhi

When you feel like giving up and quitting, remember why you started in the first place. ~Unknown

Without rain nothing grows, learn to embrace the storms of your life. ~Expanded Consciousness

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. ~Dolly Parton

Learn Something New: Island Talk

Caribbean Idiom: Guava Season

Guava

Meaning:

"The term 'guava season' is used to describe a period of difficulty, of economic woe and hardship, when there is nothing to eat but wild fruit like guava… when it used to be wild."

(Guava Superfruit | The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper)

When it rains look for rainbows, when it's dark look for stars. ~Oscar Wilde

Predicting rain doesn't count. Building arks does. ~Warren Buffett

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. ~Roger Miller

A true friend is like an umbrella that opens her heart to protect you on those rainy days. ~Debasish Mridha

"Good friends will come out, even on rainy days, if we need shelter."

"Sometimes life just calls for an umbrella."

No matter how much it rains, there is a place in you that never stops shining. ~Princess Sassy Pants & Co.

Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will. ~Zig Ziglar

"Life is like a rainbow. You need both the sun and the rain to make its colors appear."

"God didn't promise days without pain, laughter without sorrow, sun without rain, but He did promise strength for the day, comfort for the tears, and light for the way."

Ya Allah يا الله (O God), please enlighten the darkness of my heart. Aameen آمين

A gentle word, like summer rain, may soothe some heart and banish pain. What joy or sadness often springs, from just the simple little things! ~Willa Hoey

"In our lives there is bound to come some pain, surely as there are storms and falling rain; just believe that the One who holds the storms will bring the sun."

"And O my people! Ask forgiveness of your Lord, and turn to Him (in repentance): He will send you the skies pouring abundant rain, and add strength to your strength: so turn ye not back in sin!"

The Qur'aan 11:52

When someone is mean, don't listen. When someone is rude, walk away. When someone tries to put you down, stand firm. Don't let someone's bad behaviour destroy your inner peace. ~Author Unknown

Don't let insignificant / trivial / little things break (destroy) your happiness.

Arabic Transliteration 1: Laa taj'al al-ashyaa'a at-taafihata tudammiru sa'aadataka لَا تَجْعَل الْأَشْيَاءَ التَّافِهَةَ تُدَمِّر سَعَادَتَكَ.

Arabic Transliteration 2: Laa tada' al-ashyaa' at-taafihah tudammir sa'aadatak لاتدع الأشياء التافهة تدمر سعادتك.

Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that. Unconditional self-acceptance is the core of a peaceful mind. ~Francis de Sales*

*Saint Francis of Sales, also called Francis de Sales, French Saint François de Sales

"Let the rain wash away all the pain from yesterday."

Be strong because things will get better. It might be stormy now but it can't rain forever. ~Hailee

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass... It's about learning to run in the rain."

After a storm comes a calm. ~Matthew Henry

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come. ~Robert H. Schuller

If you want to see the sunshine, you have to weather the storm. ~Frank Lane

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew. ~Francis de Sales

"For indeed, with hardship [will be] ease. Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease."

(Al Qur'aan, 94: 5-6)

An Inspiring Pick-Me-Up Poem for People Who Feel Like Giving Up

Don't Quit by John Greenleaf Whittier

When things go wrong as they sometimes will,

When the road you're trudging (walking) seems all uphill,

When the funds are low and the debts are high

And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,

When care is pressing you down a bit,

Rest if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is strange with its twists and turns

As every one of us sometimes learns

And many a failure comes about

When he might have won had he stuck it out;

Don't give up though the pace seems slow—

You may succeed with another blow.

There is no success without hardship. - Sophocles

Success is failure turned inside out—

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,

And you never can tell just how close you are,

It may be near when it seems so far;

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit—

It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.

This poem is in the public domain.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  ― Oscar Wilde

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book. ~Bill Watterson

12 Lovely Little Words for Rain Addicts

rain

(n.) water falling in drops condensed from vapor in the atmosphere (Merriam-Webster)

rain cloud / raincloud

(n.) a cloud (as a nimbus) bringing rain (Merriam-Webster)

cloudburst

(n.) a sudden, very heavy rain (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)

pluvial

adj.

1. Of or relating to rain; rainy.

2. Marked or formed by abundant rainfall: pluvial periods; a pluvial lake.

n.

An extended period of abundant rainfall, especially such a period of the Pleistocene Epoch. (American Heritage Dictionary)

Pluviophile - Wiktionary

English

Etymology

From Latin pluvia +‎ -phile.

Noun

pluviophile (plural pluviophiles)

1. (biology) Any organism that thrives in conditions of heavy rainfall

2. One who loves rain, a rain-lover

Pluviophile: (n.) a lover of rain; someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days.

ombrophile (ombrophil)

(n.) a plant which survives well or flourishes in rainy conditions (Collins English Dictionary)

ombrophilous (ombrophilic)

(adj.) of a plant: capable of withstanding or thriving in the presence of much rain (Merriam-Webster)

bibliophile

(n.) a person who loves or collects books (Cambridge English Dictionary)

mizzle

(n.) light rain; drizzle. (Oxford Dictionaries)

pitter-patter

(n.) the sound of a rapid succession of light beats or taps, as of rain, footsteps, etc. (Dictionary.com)

petrichor

[pe-trahy-kawr, ‐ker]

(n.) a distinctive scent, usually described as earthy, pleasant, or sweet, produced by rainfall on very dry ground. (Dictionary.com)

rainstorm

(n.) A storm with heavy rain. (Oxford Dictionaries)

Did you know?

The word “pitter-patter” is an example of an onomatopoeia. The following is the definition of “onomatopoeia”: “Onomatopoeia is when a word’s pronunciation imitates its sound. When you say an onomatopoeic word, the utterance itself is reminiscent of the sound to which the word refers.”

(101 Onomatopoeia Examples | Ereading Worksheets)

Fikar mat karo, sab theek ho jayega فکر مت کرو، سب ٹھیک ہو جائے گا = "Don't worry, everything will be okay / fine" in Urdu

"Rain" in 23 Languages

Afrikaans: reën

Arabic: maṭar مَطَر

Estonian: vihm

Finnish: sade

French: pluie

Greek: vrochí βροχή

Hausa: ruwa, ruwan sama

Hawaiian: ka ua (pronounced 'kah-oo-ah')

Hindi-Urdu: baarish बारिश  بارش

Italian: pioggia

Japanese: ame 雨  あめ

Latin: pluvia

Malay: hujan (the 'h' is silent)

Mandarin: yǔ 雨

Persian / Farsi: bârân باران‎‎

Portuguese: chuva

Spanish: lluvia

Swahili: mvua

Tagalog / Filipino: ulan

Thai: fǒn ฝน

Turkish: rahmet

Welsh: glaw

Yoruba: ojo

How to Say "Enjoy the rain" in Arabic, Indonesian, Malaysian and Spanish

Arabic: Istamti' bil-maTar اِسْتَمْتِعْ بِالْمَطَرِ

Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia): Selamat menikmati hujan

Malaysian (bahasa Malaysia): Selamat berhujan / Selamat berhujan-hujan / Selamat berhujan-hujanan*

*rough translations

Spanish: Disfruta de la lluvia

It's Raining Wisdom: 7 Fantabulous International Proverbs

Prepare the umbrella before it rains / Sediakan payung sebelum hujan. ~Malay Proverb

Meanings:

- "Prevention is better than cure." (steemKR)

- "Always be cautious when you can sense danger." (steemKR)

- "Thatch your roof before the rain begins." (Peribahasa Melayu dan Inggeris)

- "Dig the well before you are thirsty." ( Peribahasa Melayu dan Inggeris)

The sign (i.e. precursor) of rain is clouds / Dalili ya mvua ni mawingu. ~Swahili proverb

Meaning:

"Pay attention to indications for something which is going to happen." (www.kiswahili.net)

How beautiful it is to see the rain and not get wet / How nice to see the rain and not get wet / Qué bonito es ver la lluvia y no mojarse. ~Spanish Proverb

Meanings:

- "Don't criticize others for the way they do something unless you've done it yourself." (BuzzFeed)

- "Criticism is easy, art is difficult." (Culture Trip)

All clouds bring not rain. ~English Saying

Meaning:

"We can rephrase this: 'Not every cloud brings rain.' And that's true. Sometimes there are many clouds in the sky, but it doesn't rain. Don't judge things by appearances." (EnglishClub)

Kay koule twompe soley soley men li pa twompe lapil / Kay koule twompe soley men li pa twompe lapli / Kay koule tronpe soley men li pa tronpe lapli / A leaky house can fool the sun, but it can't fool the rain / A leaking roof may fool sunny weather, but cannot fool the rain. ~Haitian proverb

Meaning:

"When things are going well, it is easy for us to appear solid, intact, grounded, strong, etc., but it is during and after a crisis, loss, failure, or other misfortune that we discover the power of our resilience i.e. our courage, fortitude and stamina." (Quozio)

There is no bad weather, there are only bad clothes / There's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes / Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder. ~Swedish proverb

Meaning:

"Any weather is tolerable as long as you have the right clothing." (Wikiquote)

Rain wets a leopard's skin, but it does not wash out the spots / Rain beats a leopard's skin but does not wash off the spots. ~Ashanti Proverb from Ghana

Meaning:

"In life each person will encounter hardship, which in this proverb is represented by rain. The supposition that rain cannot wash out a leopard's spots alludes to the fact that hardship is temporary and can only strengthen a person in the end. Eventually the rain will stop falling, and all things can be overcome." (DePauw University)

Miscellaneous Section: 3 Special Islamic Prayers

Du'aa* of Prophet Musa, aka Moses (AS)

رَبِّ إِنِّي لِمَا أَنْزَلْتَ إِلَيَّ مِنْ خَيْرٍ فَقِيرٌ

Rabbi innee limaa anzalta ilayya min khairin faqeer.

Translation:

"O my Lord, truly I am in need of whatever good You bestow on me."

(Surat al-Qasas, 28:24)

*prayer, supplication, etc. = du'aa دُعَاء (Arabic)

Du'aa (Supplication) for Distress, Sadness and Anxiety

اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنَ الْهَمِّ وَالْحُزْنِ وَالْعَجْزِ وَالْكَسَلِ, وَالْبُخْلِ وَالْجُبْنِ وَضَلَعِ الدَّيْنِ, وَغَلَبَةِ الرِّجَالِ

Allaahumma innee a'oodhu bika minal-hammi wal-ḥuzni wal-'ajzi wal-kasali wal-bukhli wal-jubni wa ḍala'id-daini wa ghalabatir-rijaal.

"O Allah [God], I take refuge in You from anxiety and sorrow, weakness and laziness, miserliness and cowardice, the burden of debts and from being overpowered by men."

or...

اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنَ الْهَمِّ وَالْحَزَنِ، وَالْعَجْزِ وَالْكَسَلِ، وَالْجُبْنِ وَالْبُخْلِ، وَضَلَعِ الدَّيْنِ، وَغَلَبَةِ الرِّجَالِ

Allaahumma innee a'oodhu bika minal-hammi wal-ḥazani wal-'ajzi wal-kasali wal-jubni wal-bukhli wa ḍala'id-daini wa ghalabatir-rijaal.

"O Allah [God]! I seek refuge with You from worry and grief, from incapacity and laziness, from cowardice and miserliness, from being heavily in debt and from being overpowered by [other] men."

Du'aa (prayer) for when it rains

اللَّهُمَّ صَيِّبًا نَافِعًا

Allaahumma ṣayyiban naafi'an.

"O Allah [God], may it be a beneficial rain cloud."

Was this entry interesting? If so, you may also want to read "23 Courage Quotes to Spark Your Inner Spunk", InshaaAllah إن شاء الله. Here ya go:

http://thewordcollector2.tumblr.com/post/168641993628/23-courage-quotes-to-spark-your-inner-spunk

Sources, Credits and Further Reading:

https://visionpdf.com/guide-to-persian-phrases-learn-persian-with-chai-and-convers.html

https://golbou.com/2014/09/09/13-things-persians-say-that-dont-make-sense-in-translation/

https://pixabay.com/

https://svgsilh.com/8bc34a/

https://www.pexels.com/

https://www.maxpixel.net/

https://pixlr.com/

https://www.freeonlinephotoeditor.com/

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https://spark.adobe.com/home/

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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rainy_day

http://quoteshunter.com/rainy-day-quotes/

http://www.amyreesanderson.com/blog/just-because-its-stormy-now-doesnt-mean-you-arent-headed-for-sunshine/#.Wz-g9cInZVc

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/428038-raise-your-words-not-voice-it-is-rain-that-grows

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201201/40-quotes-help-you-get-through-the-day

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%83%E8%BB%A2%E3%81%B3%E5%85%AB%E8%B5%B7%E3%81%8D#Japanese

This post includes text from the Wiktionary entry, “七転び八起き - Wiktionary”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

https://wisdomjapan.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/falling_down_getting_up/

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/you-have-the-power-make-someone-happy.html

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah

This post includes text from the Wikipedia article, "Allah - Wikipedia", available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/everydayinspiration/2014/06/10-inspirational-quotes-to-lift-you-up-when-life-is-hard.html

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https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/zig_ziglar_125675

http://www.quotes.thinkexist.com/quotation/life_is_like_a_rainbow-you_need_both_the_sun_and/341219.html

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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%85%D8%B1#Arabic

http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/trivial?s=t

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http://whisper.sh/whisper/05185b0e678eaa3115941ef48d977f65978fca/Let-the-rain-wash-awayAll-the-pain-from-yesterday

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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/880713-rainy-days-should-be-spent-at-home-with-a-cup

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rain

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rain%20cloud

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cloudburst

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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluviophile

This post includes text from the Wiktionary entry, “pluviophile - Wiktionary”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pluviophile

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ombrophile

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ombrophilous

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bibliophile

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mizzle

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pitter-patter

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/petrichor

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rainstorm

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https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#ur/en/%D9%81%DA%A9%D8%B1%20%D9%85%D8%AA%20%DA%A9%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%8C%20%D8%B3%D8%A8%20%D9%B9%DA%BE%DB%8C%DA%A9%20%DB%81%D9%88%20%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%A6%DB%92%20%DA%AF%D8%A7

http://amante-de-idiomas.tumblr.com/post/153831423205/dont-worry-fikar-mat-karo-%D9%81%DA%A9%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%AA-%DA%A9%D8%B1%D9%88-urdu

https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Rain-In-Different-Languages/#.ya12cdqsb

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rain#Translations

This post includes text from the Wiktionary entry, “rain - Wiktionary”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

https://www.freearabicdictionary.com/dictionary/search/%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1

http://hausadictionary.com/rain#Noun

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https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#en/yo/rain

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B9#Arabic

https://www.freearabicdictionary.com/dictionary/search/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B9

https://www.freearabicdictionary.com/dictionary/search/%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1

https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#ar/en/%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B9%20%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-say-Enjoy-the-rain-in-Arabic-Can-it-be-translated-as-Istamti-bil-maTar-%D8%A7%D9%90%D8%B3%D9%92%D8%AA%D9%8E%D9%85%D9%92%D8%AA%D9%90%D8%B9%D9%92

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/have_fun

https://id.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/indonesian-english/selamat

https://id.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/indonesian-english/menikmati

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http://masteringbahasa.com/indonesian-daily-words

https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#id/en/Selamat%20menikmati%20hujan

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-say-Happy-rainy-day-in-Malay-Can-it-be-translated-as-Selamat-hari-hujan

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disfrutar#Spanish

https://cooljugator.com/es/disfrutar

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/disfrutar%20de

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-spanish/enjoy

https://www.lawlessspanish.com/grammar/verbs/verbs-with-de/

http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=rain

https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#es/en/Disfruta%20la%20lluvia

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-say-Enjoy-the-rain-in-Spanish-Can-it-be-translated-as-Disfruta-la-lluvia

https://steemkr.com/teammalaysia/@asyrafahamed/malay-proverb-in-english-part-1

https://peribahasa-melayu-inggeris.blogspot.com/2014/06/sediakan-payung-sebelum-hujan.html

http://www.kiswahili.net/3-reference-works/proverbs-and-riddles/proverbs-content.html

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jameschapman/spanish-proverbs-translated-literally-into-english?utm_term=.imWdvXWv4#.ue16W2zW4

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/11-proverbs-in-spanish-that-make-no-sense-in-english/

https://www.englishclub.com/ref/esl/Sayings/Quizzes/Looks/All_clouds_bring_not_rain_511.php

http://www.haitianproverbs.com/

http://www.gwenstrauss.com/fooling_the_sun_110228.htm

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Haitian_proverbs

This post includes text from the Wikiquote page, "Talk:Haitian proverbs - Wikiquote", available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

http://quozio.com/quote/47547bcc#!t=1006

https://blogs.transparent.com/swedish/swedish-proverbs-2/

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Swedish_proverbs

This post includes text from the Wikiquote page, "Swedish proverbs - Wikiquote", available under the Creative Commons Attribution license, CC By-SA 3.0.

The License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

About CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

http://academic.depauw.edu/mkfinney_web/teaching/Com227/culturalPortfolios/GHANA/Values%20and%20Proverbs.html

https://books.google.tt/books?id=NeePAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&dq=Rain+beats+a+leopard%27s+skin,+but+it+does+not+wash+off+the+spots.&source=bl&ots=gSVeWfi8zn&sig=2WU3Qdjm_G6BohCYRvAywavQ02A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDlbeW07fcAhUN2VMKHQGyAz8Q6AEIgQEwCg#v=onepage&q=Rain%20beats%20a%20leopard's%20skin%2C%20but%20it%20does%20not%20wash%20off%20the%20spots.&f=false

https://www.freearabicdictionary.com/dictionary/search/%D8%AF%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%A1

https://blog.islamiconlineuniversity.com/dua-musa-alayhisalam/

http://seekershub.org/ans-blog/2012/09/26/supplication-for-a-spouse/

https://muslimmatters.org/2010/02/10/the-supplication-series-distress-sadness-and-anxiety-2/

http://thebeautyofislam.tumblr.com/post/15660867741

https://sunnah.com/bukhari/80/66

http://duas.com/dua/312/dua-when-it-is-raining

https://slideplayer.es/slide/4621550/

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/the%20sun

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/the%20clouds

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/the%20flowers

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/atardecer#Spanish

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paseo#Spanish

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/por%20el%20campo

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/porque

http://www.spanishdict.com/translation

https://translate.google.tt/?hl=en&tab=wT#es/en/Disfruta%20de%20la%20lluvia%2C%20del%20sol%2C%20de%20las%20nubes%2C%20de%20las%20flores%2C%20de%20los%20atardeceres%20y%20de%20los%20paseos%20por%20el%20campo%2C%20porque%20todo%20est%C3%A1%20ah%C3%AD%20para%20ti

https://www.quora.com/What-does-this-Spanish-sentence-mean-in-English-Disfruta-de-la-lluvia-del-sol-de-las-nubes-de-las-flores-de-los-atardeceres-y-de-los-paseos-por-el-campo-porque-todo-est%C3%A1-ah%C3%AD-para-ti-Also-is-it

Dios te bendiga hoy, mañana y siempre - God bless you today, tomorrow and forever (Spanish)

May you always have walls for the winds, a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire, laughter to cheer you, those you love near you and all your heart might desire. ~Irish Blessing

Okay readers, that's it for today. I hope that my remedy worked well. No need to worry, the treatment only has favourable side effects :). Do enjoy the rest of your summer days, InshaaAllah إن شاء الله. Keep well, Wassalaam 'alaikum والسّلام عليكم (and peace be with you)! :) :-h

Thank you for stopping by,

Sam سام.

"Enjoy the rain, the sun, the clouds, the flowers, the sunsets and the walks in the countryside, because it's all there for you / Disfruta de la lluvia, del sol, de las nubes, de las flores, de los atardeceres y de los paseos por el campo, porque todo está ahí para ti." (Spanish)

[vitavitale]

@vaenaku​ sent:  Desperation burned through him as easily as flame did paper, but he could not and would not stand to allow V to fall victim to the fowl demon before him. Gnarled glaws dug into hellish earth and deep, vicious growl vibrated in his throat, smoke and noxious fumes billowing from his maw. [ remember that malphas bit? yes ]

Life could not have been more cruel: to dangle his own demise in front of his face like a piece of meat, to lure toward him the device of his death and subsequently excite his heart to such a level that it threatened to burst before he'd even had his chance, before she could ever lay a claw on him. That would have been the worst of all ironies; but here, in its criminality, life could be fair, could be merciful, and so afforded V time sorely needed. With flames bursting at the seams had one of his deliverers come: the wolf torn from his side by infernal powers. For a moment V believed some hellish fate had befallen him; that there would be no partnership beyond that point, that Malphas had tipped the scales irreversibly, condemning a puny slayer of demons to a premature end. V did worry for him, truthfully, in the fleeting moments he was allowed a stray thought. Through the process of reclaiming his bonded familiars, he saw not a whisker nor heard even the smallest of whines. And V did not stop to look for him. V did not chance to wait for a possibility—but he was too strongly driven to put on hold that for which he pushed his failing body. With impossible stakes to face, everything else paled in comparison. In essence, Daemon had to be forgotten. Nero couldn't keep V waiting either. If V had to drag his useless body all the rest of the way to reach the self-made demon king, he would. And he still intended to. Now that his allies had arrived, an infinitesimal glimmer of hope tickled from within. But from where he stood to watch the fray, above and out of immediate danger, he was no more helpful than the arena in which friends would battle foe. All he could do was to lean his weight upon the wall of the recess and worry.

To see them alive and mostly well was a relief. To see that Daemon had not been lost to trickery or defeat was still more heartening, but why should V have ever feared for him? He'd seen what the devil was capable of, time and time again both surprised and impressed by the punishment he could endure—and doubly so by the destruction he could inflict upon others, the awesome, horrifying damage dealt by every inch of his being. The claws, the jaws, the fumes and the fire were far more lethal than anything V had witnessed. That demon was...a demon. Through and through, when he wasn't hiding in human's skin. But even then...well, V had grown accustomed to him. V knew him by now, at least in these few crucial ways, and whether he liked to admit it or not, he came to appreciate Daemon's help (an invaluable thing), his company… Him? Why not. Was there any real harm in it? V expected he would die soon, and to find a friend in someone nigh insufferable was not at all unnatural. And perhaps that was why he worried so, because after spending over a month of steady companionship there developed some affinity, and he came to care. He did not want to see Daemon hurt, lose a limb or life. He did not want him to meet a tragic end; quite the contrary, in fact. For all of his trouble, he was good. He was good. There wasn't a lot to dislike about that; rather, it had been a while since V had known anyone he could like. It had been a while since V had known anyone.

Even Nero, the boy wonder, had been distant with him.

But in a mind ravaged by panic and doubt, perplexity had no room. V could not have wondered of his own feelings when he worried for the lives he'd put in peril. It was his mistake to have stumbled upon Malphas just as it was his own to freeze where she'd found him. He should not have led them here—and now the angry devils below were poised to destroy utterly the diabolical amalgam before them. But it was Daemon who fumed in more ways than one; V could see the fire in his eyes, he'd known what sort of magma flowed through his veins. There was an intent that was murderous and unparalleled flaring across his maw, not quite the same as in other occasions, that gave the impression he was ready to do battle to the death. That he would so readily lay down his life in defense of—

But that was reckless of him. V was...no one to die for. He understood duty and promise, but this was stupid. Daemon had surely more to live for, more to do, a life to return to once all the drama of the day was done. V couldn't have caused him to lose so much, or everything. He wasn't worth it. He wouldn't allow it; he cared more about that demon's life now than he ever had, and he would not let Daemon die for him. Even if he couldn't do a damned thing about it…

He shouldn't have come this far.

But that thought was futile. Daemon would not have listened, it wasn't likely.

I shouldn't have let him.

A potential mistake. If only V had refused him sooner, but he thought selfishly then. All that mattered was the help; but now there was more at stake. There was more for V to think about, and more and more he'd begun to see in the demon to whom he gave little credit. And he came to chide himself for his frostiness, when he initially believed Daemon to be more an irritation than an asset. To watch him now and realize to what lengths he would go to defend, protect—V felt undeserving, but he felt admiration and appreciation all the same. The sight might have moved him more than he counted on. He was weak now, of course, but that couldn't have changed the facts of the matter: he had a sense of what was happening, he knew when it started, and he knew that he could not be so free with his heart as to let it speak through his lips. He could not afford it now, it was simply too late. He feared shame for it, he knew he would make of himself a fool, and he had no way of being certain that it was only a thing in passing. V never forgot that he would breathe his last at the top of the Qliphoth. It was a belief he held firmly, and even Daemon knew it—or must have figured as much. So the battle had to be won, at any cost, and the war waged until victory was on the tongue.

Before V's eyes would his heroes do their worst, but with plumes of smoke shrouding the battlefield he could not grasp the violence in full detail. Malphas was hell-bent, and she'd done them harm—but the same was true of Daemon and Nero, and all the while the flames would burn brighter and hotter, and steel would slash away flesh, and the villain would howl her anguish, screech her fury. But this undoubtedly took its toll as much on the pair as on V: his senses had not left him and, rather, he was more aware of his body than he'd ever been. Every minute that passed took an ounce of his strength, and with every ounce gone he wished increasingly to lie down and rest, and he'd even think it would be best to do so eternally. The punishment weighed too heavily on his shoulders; he was no Atlas, not even built like one, and the longer this all dragged on, the sooner he'd collapse beneath his burden.

He worried definitely, undoubtedly, holding his breath whenever it looked like Nero was downed; wincing every time Daemon was struck; he prayed that he himself would survive this. Man's greatest horror arose when faced with his own mortality, and nothing truer applied to V. He was scared almost out of his mind, he didn't want to die. But what's a man in his position to do? He couldn't have lost his nerve now, not while others needed to see it holding firm. To imagine how Daemon might have carried on otherwise was not something V could have even pictured, for the wolf was invested, involved, and dutiful to a fault. V still hadn't deciphered why—and supposed he never would. He may as well enjoy the last he'd see of that fire-spewing fiend in action: he was not likely to do battle by his side any longer. The mere thought of that...had his heart sink so low. V wasn't ready to lose that, either. Not when he'd begun to miss the time spent in good company. It's a miserable thing to be so frail, but...here he must be strong for all, cost be damned.

[trcyprkr]

The Destroyer is Coming

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=apophis;old=0;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=0#orb

Future History for you

Forthwith and straight away (eutheos) with (meta) the Tribulation (thlipsis - great affliction caused by applying pressure and pressing together leading to oppression and anguish) of those days the sun will be darkened (skotizo - obscured) and the moon will no longer provide light (pheggos) and celestial bodies (aster - asteroids, stars, or comets which can be seen radiating or reflecting light) shall fall (pipto - descend, being thrust down) from space (ouranos - the expanse of the sky, universe, or heavens) and the power (dunamis - energy, force, and influence) of the universe (ouranos) will be set in motion and be unsettled (saleuo)." (Mattinyahw / Matthew 24:29)

There is such an event looming on our horizon. And it is predicted to occur right on schedule. NASA scientists reveal that there is a 1 in 60 chance (some astronomers say a 1 in 38 chance according to the Washington Post) that quarter-mile wide (390 meter long) asteroid called 2004 MN4 (also named Apophis) will impact our planet on Friday, April 13, 2029 - about two and a half years into the Tribulation, toward the end of the Magog War. While current calculations show this stone missile missing the Earth by a scant 15,000 miles (less than a tenth of the distance to the moon) Yahowshah said that it would "be unsettled" sufficiently to impact our planet.

Interestingly, the reason the doomsday asteroid isn't well known is that its discovery coincided with the Christmas 2004 tsunami (another of the seven signs) that devastated South Asia. Apophis isn't large enough to completely destroy the earth - only an area the size of all of America's mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states. Its impact is estimated at being equivalent to 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. The Washington Post claims: "2004 MN4 is a 'regional' hazard - big enough to flatten Texas or a couple of European countries with an impact equivalent to 10,000 megatons of dynamite - more than all the nuclear weapons in the world." The dust of its impact would envelope the entire planet, darkening the sun and eliminating the moon's light, consistent with the prophecy.

I'm not going to be dogmatic here, but what if the Revelation 8:8 mid-tribulation second trumpet prophecy predicting "something like a great (megas) mountain which was consumed in fire (kaio pyr - lit by being set on fire and burning [sure sounds like an asteroid]) was thrown (ballo - fell, allowing gravity to do its work) into the sea...." correlates to Yahowshahs mid-tribulation prediction in Matthew 24? Could the asteroid Apophis represent the literal stone which is going to be "set in motion and be unsettled" so as to descend from the heavens into the sea, spewing enough debris into the atmosphere to darken the sun? The smallest interaction with another piece of space debris would be sufficient to nudge Apophis' current orbit sufficiently to cause it to hit the earth rather than miss. And an asteroid of its size would generate sufficient heat to make it look like a fireball as it entered the earth's atmosphere, thus being "a great celestial body (aster - asteroid, star, or comet) shall fall (pipto - descend, being thrust down) from space (ouranos - the expanse of the sky, universe, or heavens) burning (kaio - set on fire and consumed) like a torch as it fell." (Revelation 8:9)

But beyond the timing and the description there is another fascinating Scriptural connection to Apophis. John tells us that the asteroid he is describing in revelation "has a name and it is called Apinthos (errantly replaced with "Wormwood" in English Bibles)." Apinthos (as it is rendered in the earliest Greek manuscripts versus Apsinthos in all reference dictionaries) and Apophis are remarkably similar names, one being of Egyptian origin and the other Greek. Apophis in Egyptian mythology is the name of "the evil spirit of destruction that will plunge the world into darkness." What a coincidence, that's exactly what John and Yahowshah said Apinthos will do.

The universal portrayal of the Greek name Apinthos as "Wormwood" is telling. In a small way it helps explain why Christians remain unaware of Yahowah's message and timeline. You will find "Wormwood" in the King James Version, the American Standard Version, the English Standard Version, the International Standard Version, the New Century Version, the New International Version, the New King James, the New American Standard, the New Revised Standard Version, and in Young's Literal Translation. This uniformity tells us that one of two things is true. Either apinthos is a word which requires translating and is not a name which must be transliterated, and also that apinthos is the Greek word for "wormwood" or all English Bibles are derivatives of the highly politicized, purposely corrupt, and grotesquely errant King James Version rather than being faithful translations of the inspired text.

Every lexicon readily admits, and the Scriptural text clearly confirms, that Apinthos is a name and not a word, so it should have been transliterated in every Bible and not translated in any one of them. John's testimony says: "The name (onoma) of the aster is called (lego) Apinthos (αψινθος)." (Revelation 8:11) That's as clear as words allow. The simple truth is, the name can't be translated because apinthos doesn't mean anything. It is of "uncertain derivation."

To add insult to injury, Revelation ends with this warning: "I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the set-apart and purified city which are written in this book." (Revelation 22:18-19) Yahowah doesn't like it when men copyedit His revelation and change His name and His words to their own.

The explanation, or should I say excuse, for this universal blunder is that the asteroid is said to make the waters pikraino which means: "to make them bitter and to embitter, to exasperate and irritate." The root of pikraino is pikros, and it means "to cause agony and suffering by being virulent - something that is marked by a rapid, severe, and malignant course and whose venoms or poisons overcome life's defensive mechanisms." From that, the KJV translators replaced αψινθος with "Wormword." Scholars now allege that is because this plant, known as the species Artemisia absinthium and named after the pagan deity Artemis, made water taste bitter. Then these same scholars justify their translation, or more accurately, their opinion, by saying that "the choice of Wormwood is universally supported by the early church." Sorry boys and girls. Every early Revelation manuscript renders the name of the asteroid "αψινθος," which is transliterated "Apinthos." There was no early "church" because the first followers of the Way didn't substitute the sungoddess' name for Yahowshah's descriptive term: ekklesia/out-calling. And, "Wormwood" is an English term. The transition from Anglo-Saxon to English occurred in the 15th century, and therefore it was hardly an "early church" affair.

Unable to resist the temptation of copy editing God, these same fellows plastered Wormwood all over the Old Covenant, too. The Hebrew word lanah, from an unused root meaning "to curse and to embitter" is cited metaphorically by Yahowah to demonstrate the consequence of turning away from Him to serve the foreign and false gods of the Gentiles. Such people's roots become rotten and Yahowah says that they will not be spared according to Moshe's testimony in Dabarym /  Deuteronomy 29:18-20.

Apart from the similarities of name, timing, and description, I also find it interesting that the aster Apinthos is listed as the second of seven trumpet judgments in Revelation. The first describes the kind of nuclear winter that would follow an atomic war - something that the Magog conflict is predicted to devolve into. It speaks of "giant hail storms mingled with fire and blood," saying that "one third of the earth's land and a third of our planet's trees and grasslands will be burned up" in it. I find this telling because we should expect the Magog war to begin in 2027 and go nuclear in late 2028 putting the spring 2029 arrival of Apinthos/Apophis right on schedule.

Oddly enough by the Yowbel count the man in opposition to the Towrah will assume his world leadership role in late Oct 2026

Bringing it all together, one (3968-2968 BCE) is about God who is one creating a one on one relationship with the first man. Two (2968-1968 BCE) is the presentation of choice, choosing the Ark of the Covenant or the deluge brought on by the Devil’s delusion. Three (1968-968 BCE) is the story family, and so Abraham established what would become the family of God in the third millennia of man. Four (968 BCE-33 CE) completes the time of testing and the arrival of the greater light at the twilight of the fourth millennial epoch. Five (33-1033 CE) designates the time of the great serpent and consequently the era of religious confusion. Six (1033-2033 CE) is the time of man, the time that gave rise to Socialist Secular Humanism, and its replacement moral code—Political Correctness—where being judgmental has become a sin. This has led to injustice, immorality, irrational opinions, deceit, destruction, and death at an unparalleled scale. Seven (2033-3033 CE) is the shabat, the time man and God come together, our debts settled so that we can settle down with Him to form a perfect paradise.

[vaultsixtynine]

since i am apparently now a person who posts poetry on her blog, ‘crossing a city highway’ by yusef komunyakaa

(or, a poem about wyn, obliquely)

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask the approaching day hides behind & from, the coyote nosing forth, the muscles of something ahead, & a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers zoom out of the curved night trees, along the rim of absolute chance. A question hangs in the oily air. She knows he will follow her scent left in the poisoned grass & buzz of chainsaws, if he can unweave a circle of traps around the subdivision. For a breathy moment, she stops on the world’s edge, & then quick as that masters the stars & again slips the noose & darts straight between sedans & SUVs. Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues or the dead nomads who walked trails now paved by wanderlust, an epoch somewhere between tamed & wild. If it were Monday instead of Sunday the outcome may be different, but she’s now in Central Park searching for a Seneca village among painted stones & shrubs, where she’s never been, & lucky she hasn’t forgotten how to jig & kill her way home.

[political-fluffle]

Here’s How Dumb Bill Barr’s Great Mifsud Conspiracy Story Really Is - DailyBeast

Mifsud’s deep connections with Putin’s foreign policy establishment and his glowing appraisals of Russia’s role in global affairs show Barr has barked up the wrong tree.

(...) Barr’s interest is all part of a broader effort pushed obsessively by President Donald Trump in an effort to prove, at least in the public mind, that he was the victim of a conspiracy in 2016 rather than the beneficiary of one. Trump’s pressure on the recently elected government in Ukraine to promote this line features in the impeachment proceedings against him. (...)

The teams led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI reported that Mifsud, who disappeared from public view in late 2017,  received his information about the Clinton emails through highly placed members of the Russian government, and ex-FBI Director James Comey, fired by Trump, even said that Mifsud was a Russian agent. 

Barr and his boys are operating on a different theory—that Mifsud was part of a setup by the CIA and FBI to smear Trump. Pursuing this theory, Barr even went abroad recently to talk with Italian and British intelligence officials about Mifsud, who taught at universities in both Britain and Italy. 

But Mifsud’s deep, long-standing connections with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign-policy establishment and the highly favorable views he has expressed publicly about Russia’s role in global affairs show just how far Barr has barked up the wrong tree. (...)

Mifsud, who briefly employed the Italian wife of Papadopoulos when he was affiliated with a socialist group in the European Union, was by all accounts terrific at networking. After beginning frequent trips to Russia in 2010, he was soon hobnobbing with Kremlin-linked Russians as an expert on international diplomacy, despite his lack of credentials in that field. In 2012 his academy formed a collaboration with Moscow State University, where Mifsud became a regular visitor. And in May 2014, he was received personally by the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko—an unusual honor for someone of Mifsud’s minor stature—to discuss the lofty subject of “Russian-British cooperation in the sphere of international relations, diplomacy, science and education.”

One of Mifsud’s key Russian contacts was Ivan Timofeyev, a young mover and shaker in the Russian foreign-policy establishment, whose résumé includes more than 80 published articles on international affairs. 

Timofeyev is an associate professor at the Moscow State Institute for International Affairs (MGIMO), a well-known feeder school for the Russian foreign ministry and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), where he received his doctorate in 2006. Timofeyev is also program director for the Russian Council on International Affairs (RIAC), a think tank whose board of trustees is headed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. (...)

In April 2016, right before Mifsud told Papadopoulos about the Russian dirt on Clinton, Timofeyev hosted a discussion on global stabilization and oil markets in which Mifsud participated, along with his Swiss-German lawyer Stephen Roh, who would later be questioned aggressively by the FBI. (...)

Mifsud went on to lament that “we see an openly anti-Russian, demonizing Russia view of Western media… we cannot demonize governments, countries, individuals, and then expect a working relationship with them…What I cannot understand is the fact that people trying to build bridges and facilitate dialogue become targets for all this. This should never happen.”  He also observed: “Today the EU needs Russia as a strong partner in order to exchange information and to resolve problems in the sphere of cyber threats... of course, the work of security services, special services and the exchange of information with these services are becoming critically important.”

Mifsud’s comments not only echoed the Kremlin line; they also reflected what Trump was starting to say in defense of the Putin regime. (...)

(...) Roh, who is married to a Russian woman with her own connections and speaks fluent Russian, owns numerous energy consultancies as well as a law firm with offices in major cities, including Moscow. He was also a “visiting fellow” at Mifsud’s strange Diplomatic Academy. One of Roh’s companies, ISL Energy, has published studies in which he, Mifsud, and Timofeyev—the academic superstar—are contributors. (...)

In 2011, Roh formed a business partnership with a Russian entrepreneur named Gleb Ageev, who owns a financial company called Finrusinvest, which earns a huge revenue from contracts with Russian oil companies. From 2007 to 2014, Ageev directed administrative affairs for the now-defunct Federal Agency for the Development of the State Border (Rosgranitsa), which worked closely with the FSB’s powerful Border Service.

Roh does not hide his sympathies for the Putin regime. According to BuzzFeed, just after the March 2018 poisonings with the nerve agent Novichok of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, Roh changed the name of one of his British companies, Inverhold Ltd., to No Vichok Ltd. When asked why he made the change, Roh told BuzzFeed in an email that the Salisbury attack was a conspiracy by Western intelligence services. (...)

Roh is an investor in Rome’s Link Campus University, where Western diplomats and retired intelligence officials frequently lecture and Mifsud worked for over a decade. 

The president of Link, former Italian Foreign Minister Vincenzo Scotti, a Christian Democrat, recently told The New York Times that Mifsud “was a loudmouth know-nothing,” although he acknowledged that Mifsud helped negotiate a partnership between Link and a Moscow university. And, according to Roh, as cited by the Epoch Times (not necessarily a reliable source) Scotti and Mifsud went to Russia together in October 2016 as part of a Link delegation that was formalizing a cooperation agreement with Moscow State University. (...)

It should be clear to Attorney General Barr that Mifsud was no CIA asset, but rather part of a cabal, including Roh and Timofeyev, that spreads pro-Kremlin propaganda under the guise of academia and acts as a conduit between the Kremlin and Western policy wonks who are sympathetic to the Putin regime.  

In pursuing his CIA-FBI conspiracy theory, Barr is entering a complicated maze of secret and not-so-secret relationships that characterize Russia’s efforts to undermine Western democracies. If Barr were wise, he would back off.

[homeopathyschooltoronto]

Dr. Franklin McCoy, a homeopath who passed away in 2015, recounts in this 2014 Epoch Times article how he achieved a quick response to homeopathy used post-surgery: "Nux vomica, a homeopathic remedy made from the poison-nut tree, has been used for more than 200 years as a homeopathic remedy. It was used by the founder of the homeopathic school of medicine, Samuel Hahnemann, M.D., who described the remedy in his work 'Materia Medica Pura' in 1811. A patient of mine was in his hospital room following surgery. He asked why he was in the hospital, didn't want to be there, and attempted to get up to leave. On experiencing pain in the leg that was just operated on, he winced and lay back down. 'Open your mouth,' I said. He did, and I put a dose of Nux on this tongue. Within 30 seconds, the patient was sleeping peacefully. What happened? He had had general anesthesia for his operation. General anesthesia, one of the great contributions of modern medicine, has a side effect — liver toxicity. In this case, the patient was demonstrating liver toxicity by an irritable mood, which was quite uncharacteristic. Nux antidoted this toxicity, and the patient went to sleep. On waking up later, his mellow demeanor returned." . @homeopathy_school_in_toronto . #recovery #recover #recoverywin #recovered #recoveryrocks #homeopathy #homeopathic #homeopati #homeopathie #homeopatia #homeopatia #homeopath #homeopathicmedicine #homeopata #homeopathicremedy #homeopathichealth #homeopathicremedies #ilovehomeopathy #homeopathyworks #homeopathyheals #homeopathyrocks #homeopathyforall #homeopathyworksforme #naturalmedicine #natureheals #alternativehealing #holistichealth #holistichealing #wellnessblogger #wellnessandfitness (at Toronto, Ontario) https://www.instagram.com/p/By-Ap2HF2oa/?igshid=1s975zrp2s973