PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries google plus problems - 2019-02-04 flirtatious birbs of the home - 2019-01-27 little redheads - 2019-01-21 eclipse night - 2019-01-20 the hummingbird report jan. 13, 2019 - 2019-01-13 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

my spooky tour of london and paris, three sites (skulls included free of charge) 2011-12-07 - 7:37 a.m. all photos © 2011 by elaine radford catacombes, paris My recent mileage run/city tour to London, Paris, and Vancouver took on an unexpected "eerie" theme when I learned that the day I would land in London was the fifteenth anniversary of the day that the first Winchester Goose material was channeled by John Constable/John Crow. I felt drawn to participate in this ceremony in honor of the outcast dead. To summarize the story--It happens that in the 1990s, the transit authorities were planning to extend the tube system, and they discovered the medieval Crossbones graveyard, where the Winchester Geese (prostitutes) and their unborn/very young children were buried, since they were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. A few (I have just read it was 148) skeletons were removed by the archeologists, but otherwise the outcast dead remain on the site. As people became aware of the site, they began to tie ribbons or other tokens to the gate, many of them in remembrance of sex workers, but also in memory of many other "outcast dead." For instance, on the day of my visit, we were asked to remember a young man, who worked in pirate radio, who had passed away the week before. Crossbones is near the London Bridge station, on transit authority property. You go down Borough High Street, and eventually you see multi-colored lights under a bridge. There is a small street between the banks of colored lights, where you can turn left in the direction away from the London Bridge station. That street is Redcross Way. You walk a very short distance, and on your right you will find the Boot and Flogger wine bar which, despite the intimidating name, is a friendly place to grab a glass of wine. On the left you will see the gates where people have tied their ribbons. By daylight, you can peer through the gate to a small, informal Mary shrine placed on the property, complete with a toy goose or two. A people's nod to goddess.... Despite the sad story behind Crossbones, I don't get a negative energy to this site at all. I think the spirits here are happy to finally get their recognition and to have their story told. A bit of ribbon appears to be the traditional token, but people tie whatever they like, everything from a postcard with a picture of a crow on it to a bit of bicycle wheel in memory of a local Pagan who used to ride his bike everywhere in London. I was in a fever to make braids from old fabric for a couple of days earlier in the year, and I was happy to add a couple of my braids to the gate. I don't think any sincere token would be scorned. Of course, we all think we are outcasts, but I do believe that the best honor anyone can pay to an outcast is respect. The next day, I decided to pay a visit to the famous cemetary at Kensal Green. It was a beautiful blue day, perfect for strolling the moss-covered grounds. It was quite a little history of the British empire here -- folks from all over the planet who ended up buried in London. It wasn't strictly a rich person's burial ground, as there were sites that appeared to be of well-to-do proletariat, "high prole," as Paul Fussell once called them, a class that probably doesn't exist any more. No paupers, no prostitutes, but you did have people from the middle class or the highest-earning working class as well as the snobs in high-toned mausoleums. I don't know what it costs to be buried at Kensal Green, but I have to think that some families got a certain smug satisfaction out of being "that neighbor" who climbed out of his social class, waltzed into the neighborhood, bought a prime location, and put a pink flamingo on it. Yes, the English do possess a peculiar sense of humor...but I also strongly suspect that "Mum" actually did have a fetish for Christmas elves. A surprising number of the eccentric dead go in for garden gnomes or near garden gnomes, pinwheels, and garishly dyed crushed rocks. I like this gentleman's hidden sense of spirit: See it? Yah, that's a Buddha hidden under the cross. But now that I squint, I do believe that's a tiny Jesus hidden under the Buddha. The canny dead, too smart to want to piss off anybody after he passes through the west gate. In a lovely leafy area, complete with a mausoleum with a couple of sphinxes on it, we have the J. G. Ballard resolutely un-adorned grave. I guess he's not the kind of guy who could bring himself to put a plastic pink flamingo on the lawn just to piss off the hoity toity neighbors. Can you see it? That almost flat plain white headstone? That's it. Of course a person could ignore the eccentric and plastic gnome covered graves and stick to photographing the highly atmospheric moss-covered stones for hours upon end. There were Crows loitering and trying to look sinister but there were also lovely green Rose-Ringed Parakeets, European Jays, and Eurasian Magpies. "Never two without three," and Priceline assigned me to a fine hotel which turned out to be within walking distance of the Paris Catacombes. This site was a former limestone quarry, which became an ossuary after the people of Paris began to complain about all the disease caused by overcrowded graveyards. The old bones were actually removed and placed in an ossuary here in the old quarry; today, there are said to be the remains of 6 million Parisians in the Catacombes. You are not allowed to take flash photographs, but in a couple of places they had bright lights set up. Those photographs came out "yellow." In most areas, there was very dim lighting, and I had to point a bright white flashlight at an area to see if my camera could figure out where to focus. It did OK, but of course the result was a small circle of bright white light, surrounded by eerie darkness. The old bones are very efficiently packed, with long bones stacked close to make walls and then the skulls added in rows (or sometimes decorative arches or crosses) for an eerie accent. Most of the time you don't know the cause of death, except for the area that is from the old consumptive's hospital, so that you may presume all the dead died of consumption (TB) but there were also quite a number of gunshot victims along the way. War dead, some of them, but this man was in an area where I didn't see any other gunshot victims, so I'm thinking he was actually killed by murder or in a duel. So here you have it -- the outcast dead, the respectable dead, the tacky dead, the piss-in-your-eye dead, the that's-just-plain-creepy dead, the artistically arranged dead. It's Halloween a month too late. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford