The Monegasque town of La Almolda (Zaragoza, Spain) is an important gypsum rich area that covered the demand for this material throughout the region until the 1960s, as evidenced by the numerous hornets that are still preserved on the outskirts.
Some neighbors remembered this work to which they dedicated many hours of their lives, and in 2007 they gave a demonstration of how the plaster was obtained.
The ratchet is a traditional instrument used to drive out 'demons'.
The ratchet was used during Holy Week in churches in Spain to signify the earthquake at the end of darkness. The bells remained silent and the young people made rattles, simulating the sounds of thunder.
In 2002, Miguel Urroz from Oitz (Navarra) was one of the few artisan manufacturers of this once popular instrument.
Watch and enjoy this beautiful video of Pedro Tena from Iglesuela del Cid (Teruel, Spain).
Pedro Tena explains the artisan manufacturing process of a capolla flute, also known as shepherd's bagpipes, with a piece of pine wood and a bull's horn.The best posts on this Beret Project are the ones that come
to me, instead of me looking for them.
The boinero is named Gonzolo, his wife Marcella, from Chile. Unsure what boina it is, but it comes from Boinas Gorostiaga in Bilbao and Gonzolo never takes it off.
London-born Tom Derek Bowden, who died in 2019 at the age of 97, had fought in Palestine during World War II alongside Jewish soldiers before being captured in Europe by the Germans and forced to clear bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp — an experience that helped drive him to return after the war to fight for Israel.
As a British solider, Bowden participated in military campaigns in Palestine, fighting in the same unit as Israel’s famed Moshe Dayan, who went on to become the Israel Defense Forces commander and then defense minister. Bowden was seriously injured in the same battle in which Dayan lost his eye, but recovered and returned to action.
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| Machalniks at Ramat David Air Base (Bill Katz far left, Ben Gurion, Derek Bowden behind Ben Gurion, Chaim Laskov, Head of Training Command of Army, far right) |
When Bowden was captured by the Germans in 1944 after parachuting into Arnhem, he was found with diaries and letters from Jewish friends and girlfriends in Palestine. Bowden later admitted he shouldn’t have taken them with him, because when his SS interrogator saw the papers he told Bowden he “would show me how the Germans treated Jews, and he was sent for a month to Bergen-Belsen.”
Bowden was not Jewish, but the combination of fighting alongside Jews in Palestine and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was seared into his psyche. He returned to Palestine in 1948 to join thousands of other volunteers when Arab armies attacked following the UN declaration of the State of Israel.
In 1949, Chaim Laskov asked Captain Bowden to create a paratroop school, and to establish the predecessor of the Paratroopers Brigade. He did so, writing a training manual with the help of his Hebrew-speaking secretary, and later wife, Eva Heilbronner and training soldiers with British Army surplus equipment.
What kinds of things did you think about when you were 10 years old? Toys, food, and friends probably top the list for most kids. But what about philosophy?
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Bao Nakashima was only 10 years old, when he published his first book. He's done interviews and appeared on TV. Most impressive of all, he quit school to teach himself, taking initiative to learn on his own and seek out teachers he feels are worth learning from. In fact, quitting school is what set him on his new, extraordinary path.
Seeing, Knowing, Thinking is filled with 92 reflections by 10-year-old philosopher Bao Nakashima.
In the introduction, he says he's a "philosopher with a
small body and clear glasses" (a metaphor Bao uses to describe his open
perspective). He tells his stories
from the perspective of a boy, but each word is well thought out.
Jan Boersema got his academic training as a biologist, major ethology, at the University of Groningen and lectured on biology and environmental sciences at the same University. He graduated in theology at on a thesis titled: The Torah and the Stoics on Humankind and Nature.
His current research is focused on the relation between sustainability, nature, culture, worldviews and religion. Running title “How Green is Progress? His publications cover a wide range of subjects in the environmental field.
François Hertel (real name Rodolphe Dubé, 1905 –1985) was a Catholic priest, poet, philosopher, essayist, professor and memoirist from Quebec, Canada.
His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.
Eddie Lawrence (born Lawrence Eisler; 1919 –2014) was an
American monologist, actor, singer, lyricist, playwright, artist, director and
television personality, whose comic creation, the Old Philosopher, gained him a
devoted cult following for over five decades.
In September 1956, a single titled "The Old Philosopher" rose to the Billboard Top 40 chart, a rare distinction for a comedy record by a little-known performer. It turned out to be a one-hit wonder for Eddie Lawrence, and paved the way for his long comedy career. In a four-minute routine, a crotchety, ridiculous-sounding character recounts a litany of nonsensical calamities.
French President Emmanuel Macron surprised audiences by erupting in song while on official visit in the French Pyrénées.
Visibly uncomfortable, video shared by BFMTV shows a beret-wearing Macron hesitantly accompanying a choir of Pyrenean shepherds in Argelès-Gazost as they sing traditional songs.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874 –1948) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person.
Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered the Kiev University in 1894. It was a time of revolutionary fervor among the students and the intelligentsia. He became a Marxist for a period and was arrested in a student demonstration and expelled from the university. His involvement in illegal activities led in 1897 to three years of internal exile to Vologda in northern Russia.
A fiery 1913 article, entitled "Quenchers of the Spirit", criticising the rough purging of Imiaslavie Russian monks on Mount Athos by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church using tsarist troops, caused him to be charged with the crime of blasphemy, the punishment for which was exile to Siberia for life. The World War and the Bolshevik Revolution prevented the matter coming to trial.
In 1920, Berdiaev became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow. In the same year, he was accused of participating in a conspiracy against the government; he was arrested and jailed. The feared head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, came in person to interrogate him, and he gave his interrogator a solid dressing down on the problems with Bolshevism.
After being expelled from Russia, Berdyaev and other émigrés went to Berlin, where he founded an academy of philosophy and religion, but economic and political conditions in the Weimar Republic caused him and his wife to move to Paris in 1923. He transferred his academy there, and taught, lectured and wrote, working for an exchange of ideas with the French and European intellectual community, and participated in a number of international conferences.
Jay Lazar Garfield (1955) is an American professor of philosophy who specializes in Tibetan Buddhism.
He is currently Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities at Smith College, professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, visiting professor of philosophy and Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies.
Dutch NGO "Dikke Vinger" ("Fat Finger") is a team of unpaid volunteers who work together in their spare time to create a better world for fat people. Fat Finger stands for connection between fat people, a critical and nuanced attitude, independence, accessibility and inclusion.
Jenny Klijnsmit is a blogger, blogging about acceptance and weight discrimination. She blogs for fat people who are fed up with being ashamed of their bodies and weight and tired of feeling guilty about their eating habits. She mainly writes about her own experiences as a fat cis woman.
In the world of Orthodox Judaism, men may run the synagogues — but Lenora Garfinkel built them.
Lenora Garfinkel was born in the Bronx in 1930. Garfinkel was one of the first women to study architecture at the prestigious Cooper Union College in New York and went on to build Jewish community buildings across the New York metropolitan area over the course of a career spanning more than six decades. Her designs included the massive Viznitz Chasidic synagogue in Kaser, the Atrium wedding venue in Monsey, and multiple schools and ritual bath houses.
“There are very few frum architects with a sheitel with five kids that are specializing in frum buildings,” said Garfinkel’s daughter Letitia Dahan Forspan. “She was an expert in the halachot of building religious buildings, mikvahs and shuls based on halacha. That’s why they came to her. She sat with any rabbi making these plans like one of them.”
Garfinkel died of COVID-19 on April 29, 2020 at the age of 89.
The Utrecht painter Johannes Moreelse worked for a few years in Rome, where he was influenced by the paintings of Caravaggio. He painted scenes in the style of Caravaggio, with unidealised half-length figures and big contrasts between light and dark.
The grinning man in this painting (c. 1630) represents Democritus, the laughing philosopher. He is laughing at the vanity of mankind and the transience of the world. Democritus forms a pair with Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher. Moreelse made several versions of the two philosophers.
Reuben Sinclair was born on his family farm near Lipton, Saskatchewan, Canada. His birth certificate was registered on 5 December 1911, but according to his older brothers, he was born in the summer of 1911.
His parents and his oldest siblings Samuel and Saul were born in Ukraine and moved in the 1900s to Saskatchewan, where they were given land by de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association.
Sinclair joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War and was stationed in North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
In March 2021 at the age of 109, he received his COVID-19 vaccine, making him one of the oldest known people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
He became the oldest known living Canadian veteran of the Second World War, following the death of 109-year-old Tom Lumby on 19 June 2021. He later became the oldest known living man born in Canada on 18 September 2021.
He became the oldest known living veteran of the Second World War, following the death of 111-year-old Ezra Hill on 4 October 2022.
Ralph Alfonso has lived in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Oakville.
Ralph is a beatnik poet, musician, writer, designer, photographer, illustrator, record label owner and more.
For over 10 years, he lovingly hand printed a monthly zine (Ralph, Coffee, Jazz and Poetry) on a 1940s Gestetner Mimeograph machine.
Currently in Montreal, Ralph is still all over the pop culture map.
Kevin Rowland (1953) is a British singer and musician best
known as the frontman for the pop band Dexys Midnight Runners (currently called
Dexys).
Many of the group's songs were inspired by Rowland's Irish ancestry and were recognisable through Rowland's idiosyncratic vocal style.
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| Kevin Rowland & Madeleine Hyland |
Before his music career, Rowland worked as a hairdresser.
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878 –1947) was a French-speaking Swiss writer.
Ramuz was born and educated in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud. He taught briefly in nearby Aubonne, and then in Weimar, Germany. In 1903, he left for Paris and remained there until World War I. As part of his studies in Paris he wrote a thesis on the poet Maurice de Guérin. In 1903, he published Le petit village, a collection of poems.
In 1914, he returned to Switzerland. He wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat.
Xiang-Ping Li is a Professor at the ECNU School of Social Development, Head of the Department of Sociology, and Director of the Center on Religion and Society at East China Normal University.
Dr. Li also holds many academic and professional positions, including being a board member of the Society of Religion in China and Vice President of the Society of Religion in Shanghai, among others.
Wang Ruowang (1918 –2001) was a Chinese author and dissident who was imprisoned various times for political reasons by both the Kuomintang and the Communist government of China for advocating reform and liberalization.
He was most commonly known by his pen name,
"Ruowang", as a prolific essayist and literary critic.
Wang was a member of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1957, when he was expelled for holding "rightist views". He rejoined the Communist Party 1979, but in 1987 he was again expelled by Deng Xiaoping for promoting "bourgeois liberalization".
After his death in exile in New York City, he was widely eulogized as one of the Chinese government's most significant social and political critics.
Not much background on these dollar notes, or "Military Payment Certificate" as they were called.
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Only for use in United States military establishments - by United States authorized personnel in accordance with applicable rules and regulations.
Nice to see a beret on a dollar bill though!
Hillel (Harry) Furstenberg was born to German Jews in Nazi Germany, in 1935 (originally named "Fürstenberg").
In 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht, his family escaped to
the United States and settled in New York City, escaping the Holocaust.
Furstenberg is a mathematician and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Abel Prize and the
Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
Furstenberg gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers in 1955.
Thanks Frans
The secrets and history of field leveling.
Not just in beret, but a good sample of 'bleu de France' workwear.
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