The Friday Post ~ 8th September 2017

Happy Friday!  This week has flown by in one way, and yet it’s dragged it’s feet in another.

Something was missing in my life.  It’s seemed to be a long stretch of a week.  Then I realised what it was.  It was Little Cobs.  He went back to school on Tuesday so I haven’t seen him since last Saturday.  He’s a joyous handful when he’s here, but when he goes home my heart goes with him.   He’ll be here again on Saturday, and no doubt drag his  HUGE bag of cars out of his bedroom here, then he’ll search for the length of black drain pipe which I got Grandad to rub the ends of so that it wasn’t sharp, and he’ll prop the one end up on the footstool, and his cars will zoooom down the tube and we’ll find out who’s the winner!  It’s kind of his early introduction to betting.  LOL.  (No, we don’t use money or anything else.  We just use our eyes and guess which one will go the furthest)

Oh anyhoo …  look at me chatting away when what you’ve come for is some edumacation.  So let’s get going shall we?

On this Day in History

1504 – Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Florence. Michelangelo’s David, sculpted from 1501 to 1504, is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture and one of Michelangelo’s two greatest works of sculpture, along with the Pietà. It is the statue of the young Israelite king David alone that almost certainly is one of the most recognizable stone sculptures in the history of art. It is regarded as a symbol both of strength and youthful human beauty.

Michelangelo’s David

The 5.17 meter (17 ft) marble statue portrays the Biblical King David in the nude, at the moment that he decides to battle with Goliath.

However; the proportions are not quite true to the human form; the head and upper body are somewhat larger than the proportions of the lower body. The hands are also larger than would be in regular proportions. While some have suggested that this is of the mannerist style, another explanation is that the statue was originally intended to be placed on a church façade or high pedestal, and that the proportions would appear correct when the statue was viewed from some distance below.

The apparently uncircumcised form would be at odds with Judaic practice, but would be consistent with the conventions of Renaissance art.

To protect it from damage, the sculpture was moved in 1873 to the Accademia Gallery in Florence, where it attracts many visitors. A replica was placed in the Piazza della Signoria in 1910.

The cast of David at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), had a detachable plaster fig leaf, added for visits by Queen Victoria and other important ladies, when it was hung on the figure using two strategically placed hooks; it is now displayed nearby.

In 1991, a deranged man attacked the statue with a hammer he had concealed beneath his jacket, in the process damaging the toes of the left foot before being restrained. The samples obtained from that incident allowed scientists to determine that the marble used was obtained from the Fantiscritti quarries in Miseglia, the central of three small valleys in Carrara. The marble in question contains many microscopic holes that cause it to deteriorate faster than other marbles. Because of the marble’s degradation, a controversy occurred in 2003, when the statue underwent its first major cleaning since 1843. Some experts opposed the use of water to clean the statue, fearing further deterioration. Under the direction of Dr. Franca Falleti, senior restorers Monica Eichmann and Cinzia Pamigoni began the job of restoring the statue. The restoration work was completed in 2004.

By the 20th century, Michelangelo’s David had become iconic shorthand for “culture” David has been endlessly reproduced, in plaster, imitation marble fibreglass, and lends an atmosphere of culture even in some unlikely settings, such as beach resorts, gambling casinos and model railroads.

1888 – In London, the body of murder victim, Annie Chapman, is found, disembowelled in an East London street, the second victim of ‘Jack the Ripper’.

1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited.

1900 – Galveston Hurricane of 1900: a powerful hurricane hits Galveston, Texas killing about 8,000 people.

1921 – 16-year-old Margaret Gorman won the Atlantic City Pageant’s Golden Mermaid trophy;  pageant officials later dubbed her the first Miss America.

1930 – 3M begins marketing Scotch transparent tape.

1943 – World War II: United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly announces the Allied armistice with Italy.
1944 – World War II: London is hit by a V2 rocket as the first German V2 flying bombs fell on Britain, exploding at Chiswick in London, killing 3 people.

1960 – Publishers Penguin Books were charged with public obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s controversial book – ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.
1960 – In Huntsville, Alabama, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally dedicates the Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA had already activated the facility on July 1).

1966 – In England, the Severn Bridge was officially opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, linking south Wales with south west England.
1966 – The first Star Trek,  the landmark American science fiction television series, premieres with the first-aired episode, “The Man Trap”, on NBC.

1968 – The Beatles perform their last live TV performance on the David Frost show. They perform their new hit Hey Jude.
1968 – British tennis player Virginia Wade beat American Billie Jean King to win the US Open.

1974 – Watergate Scandal: US President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office.

1975 – Gays in the military: US Air Force Tech Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, appears in his Air Force uniform on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “I Am A Homosexual”.  He is given a general discharge, which was later upgraded to honorable.

2004 – The NASA unmanned spacecraft Genesis crash-lands when its parachute fails to open. The Genesis spacecraft was the first ever attempt to collect a sample of solar wind, and the first “sample return mission” to return from beyond the orbit of the Moon. It was launched on August 8, 2001, and crash-landed on September 8, 2004 after a design flaw prevented the deployment of its drogue parachute. The crash contaminated many of the sample collectors, but subsequent processing was able to isolate useful samples, and as of March 2008 all of the mission’s major science objectives are expected to be achieved successfully.

Born on this Day

1921 – Harry Secombe, Welsh entertainer (d. 2001)
1922 – Sid Caesar, American comedian (d. 2014)
1925 – Peter Sellers, English actor (d. 1980)
1932 – Patsy Cline, American singer (d. 1963)

1979 – Pink, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress

  🌷  🌷  🌷

OK… now it’s playtime.  (All schools have a playtime, and this one is no different) …

I will only give you links to click on that I’ve tried and tested and know for sure that there is nothing bad hiding in them.  So please rest assured that any link you find on this blog has been tested before I load it here.  I’ve been playing around with most of these links for … oh my goodness, around ten years, so I know for sure that they’re safe.

Today …  instead of a game, I share with you something that I have tons of fun on every now and again.

If you don’t have a Gravatar picture of yourself,  or a photo of yourself on your blog – in your sidebar – then you can ‘build’ yourself on this website!  It’s not really you as such, but it’s ‘you’ in a cartoony sort of way.

You can build a body, a skin tone, hair, lips, teeth, eyes, glasses, facial hair,  even tattoos!  You can make it look like you … but if you were stood in a line up, no one would be able to pick you out based on that image.  lol.  Aww … look, I’ll give you the link so that you can have a play with it yourself.  It’s lots of fun… BUT …  have a look around first, and click on the things so that you know what they look like… because once you have chosen some of the things there, you can’t undo them  (some you can change – but not all of them). . . and you’ll have to start from the beginning.  Other than that, it’s a great little time waster.

click —> http://www.sp-studio.de/  …  it will open in a new window for you.

Well we’ve come to the end of the school day, here in Cobweborium Land.  Don’t you wish all your school/work days were as short as this?  A bit of fun, over a cup of coffee and time to go off and relax!  lol

Wishing you all a truly wonderful weekend.  Thank you so much for coming and spending a little time with me.  I love seeing you here.

May your weekend be everything you want it to be.  🌹