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[edit] King Lear

[edit] Noteworthy Innovations

[edit] Confusing Opening

The modern reader of King Lear could benefit from the demystification of some subtlties in the text, as Shakespeare often brushes over details that are made clearer in his sources. This is where a few of the incongruous elements of the plot can be explained.

Scene one features King Lear testing the extent of his daughters' loyalty and love for him. He is preparing to abdicate. Lacking male heir, he decides to divide his land between the sisters and, for two of them, their husbands. He devises a test for them, asking "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (Act I scene i line 50) This may strike us as somewhat senile, because if he has already made up his mind as to how the land is shared, the trial appears pointless. Shakespeare has overlooked (purposely or absent mindedly) the crux of the situation, which is that in another version (The True Chronicle History of King Lear - anonymous) Cordelia has already vowed to marry for love, not whomsoever her father should choose. Lear assumes that his youngest daughter will play along with his game. On receiving her proclamations of devout love and loyalty, he plans to force her into a marriage which she couldn't possibly object to after claiming such stolid obedience. Of course, the trap fails disastrously for all parties.

[edit] Tragic Ending

The adaptations that William Shakespeare made to the legend of King Lear to produce his tragic version are quite telling of the effect they would have had on his contemporary audience. The story of King Lear (or Leir) was familiar to the average Elizabethan theatre goer (as were many of Shakespeare's sources) and any discrepancies between versions would have been immediately apparent.

Shakespeare's tragic conclusion gains its sting from such a discrepancy. The traditional legend and all adaptations preceding Shakespeare's have it that after Lear is restored to the throne, he remains there until "made ripe for death" (Edmund Spencer). Cordelia, her sisters also deceased, takes the throne as rightful heir, but after a few years is overthrown and imprisoned by nephews, leading to her suicide.

Shakespeare shocks his audience by bringing the worn and haggard Lear onto the stage, carrying his dead youngest daughter. He taunts them with the possibility that she may live yet with Lear saying, "This feather stirs; she lives!" (Act V, scene iii, line 265). We then have the most devestating line ever written by The Bard: "Never, never, never, never, never!" (Act V, scene iii, line 308)

This was indeed too bleak for some to take, even many years later. Samuel Johnson wrote in his The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) that, "Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate , that I was many years ago shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor." Later yet, Charles Lamb wrote, "To see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting."

--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo (Talk)]] 18:40, Jun 1, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] bob hund

bob hund is a six-piece rock band from Sweden. Swedish for "bob the dog", their name was borrowed from a television cartoon character. Their music, hard to classify, is a frantic celebration of the power of music to invigorate and give life.

The band started in autumn 1991 and the group as it is known today was formed within about half a year. Rehearsing hard and performing at every opportunity, by now they've played live over 300 times all over Scandinavia, most notably at the Roskilde, Hultsfred, Ruisrock and Quart festivals.

Bergman Rock is the band's English language side project, which has recently released its first self titled album.

[edit] Selected Discography

  • bob hund (1) (1993)
  • bob hund (2) (1994)
  • Omslag: Martin Kann (1996)
  • Jag rear ut min själ! Allt skall bort!!! (1998)
  • bob hund sover aldrig (1999)
  • Stenåldern kan börja (2001)
  • Ingenting (2002)
  • 10 år bakåt & 100 år framåt (2002)

[edit] Awards

  • 1994 - Swedish Grammy "Best Live Band"
  • 1996 - Swedish Grammy "Best Lyrics"
  • 1999 - Guldägget (The Golden Egg) for "Best Packaging" on Jag rear ut min själ! Allt skall bort!!!

[edit] External Links

--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo (Talk)]] 12:31, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Sleazenation

Sleazenation is a monthly London based fashion and lifestyle magazine printed by Swinstead Publishing. Its slogan is, "An ideal for living through fashion, art, music and design" with an occasional variation depending on the issue. It is known for its somewhat self-depreciatively humourous attitude towards vanity, with cover headlines varying from, "Now even more superficial/Over 100 pages of hype & lies" to, "Absolute sell out".

--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo|TALK]] 16:02, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Thinker's Library

The Thinker's Library was a series of 140 small hardcover books published by Watts & Co., London between 1929 and 1950. They consisted of a selection of essays, literature, and extracts from greater works by various classical and contemporary humanists and rationalists, continuing in the tradition of the Renaissance.

[edit] Catalogue of titles

Each volume consists of an eponymous essay sometimes followed by a collection of related essays by the same author, or an introductory extract from a greater work by that author. Any deviation from this format will be self-explanatory from the title. All foreign language texts were published in the English language.

  1. "First and Last Things" by H.G. Wells
  2. "Education" by Herbert Spencer
  3. "The Riddle of the Universe" by Ernst Haeckel
  4. "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief, and Other Selections from the Works of Charles Bradlaugh"
  5. "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill
  6. "A Short History of the World" by H.G. Wells
  7. "Autobiography of Charles Darwin"
  8. "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin
  9. "Twelve Years in a Monastery" by Joseph McCabe
  10. "History of Modern Philosophy" by A.W. Benn (1930)
  11. "Gibbon on Christianity" - chapters 15 and 16 of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1930)
  12. "The Descent of Man" - Part 1 and the concluding chapter of Part 3, by Charles Darwin (1930)
  13. "History of Civilization in England" - Volume 1, by Henry Thomas Buckle
  14. "Anthropology" - Vol. 1, by Sir Edward B. Tylor
  15. Ditto - Vol. 2
  16. "Iphigenia" - Two plays, by Euripides
  17. "Lectures and Essays" by Thomas Henry Huxley
  18. "The Evolution of the Idea of God" by Grant Allen
  19. "An Agnostic's Apology, and Other Essays" by Sir Leslie Stephen (March, 1931)
  20. "The Churches and Modern Thought" by Vivian Phelips
  21. X
  22. X
  23. X
  24. X
  25. X
  26. "Head-hunters, Black, White, and Brown" by Alfred C. Haddon (1932)
  27. X
  28. "The city of dreadful night and other poems" - A selection from the poetical works of James Thomson (1932)
  29. X
  30. "Adonis: a Study in the History of Oriental Religion" - from The Golden Bough by Sir James G. Frazer (1932)
  31. X
  32. X
  33. X
  34. X
  35. X
  36. X
  37. X
  38. X
  39. X
  40. X
  41. X
  42. "History of Anthropology" by Alfred C. Hadden (1934)
  43. "The World's Earliest Laws" by Chilperic Edwards (1934)
  44. X
  45. "The Men of the Dawn" by Dorothy Davison
  46. "The Mind in the Making" by James Harvey Robinson
  47. X
  48. X
  49. X
  50. X
  51. X
  52. "Five Stages of Greek Religion: Studies Based on a Course of Lectures Delivered in April 1912 at Columbia University" by Gilbert Murray (1935)
  53. "The Life of Jesus" by Ernest Renan (1935)
  54. X
  55. X
  56. "Do What You Will" by Aldous Huxley (1936)
  57. X
  58. X
  59. X
  60. X
  61. X
  62. X
  63. X
  64. X
  65. "Dictionary of Scientific Terms as Used in the Various Sciences" by C.M. Beadnell
  66. X
  67. X
  68. X
  69. X
  70. "The Fair Haven" by Samuel Butler (1938)
  71. "A Candidate for Truth: Passages from Emerson" (1938)
  72. X
  73. X
  74. "Morals, Manners, and Men" by Havelock Ellis (1939)
  75. X
  76. "An Architect of Nature" - The autobiography of Luther Burbank (1939)
  77. X
  78. X
  79. "The World As I See It" by Albert Einstein (1940)
  80. X
  81. X
  82. X
  83. X
  84. X
  85. X
  86. X
  87. X
  88. "World Revolution and the Future of the West" by W. Friedmann (1942)
  89. X
  90. X
  91. X
  92. "The Conquest of Time" by H.G. Wells (1942)
  93. X
  94. "Life's Unfolding" by Sir Charles Sherrington (1944)
  95. X
  96. X
  97. X
  98. X
  99. X
  100. X
  101. X
  102. "Progress and Archaeology" by V. Gordon Childe (1944)
  103. X
  104. X
  105. X
  106. X
  107. X
  108. X
  109. X
  110. X
  111. X
  112. X
  113. X
  114. X
  115. "The Ilusion of National Character" by Hamilton Fyfe (1946)
  116. X
  117. X
  118. X
  119. X
  120. X
  121. "Head and Hand in Ancient Greece: Four Studies in the Social Relations of Thought" by Benjamin Farrington (1947)
  122. X
  123. X
  124. X
  125. X
  126. X
  127. X
  128. X
  129. X
  130. X
  131. X
  132. X
  133. "The Hero: A Study in Traditon, Myth, and Drama" by Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan
  134. X
  135. X
  136. X
  137. X
  138. X
  139. X
  140. X

[edit] External link

Category:Philosophy

--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo|TALK]] 17:50, Jul 3, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Finnish sauna

The Finnish sauna is a type of communal bath that makes up a substantial part of Finnish culture. Although rough equivalents from other cultures may be casually called saunas, this is technically a misnomer as sauna is strictly a Finnish word, originiating from the word savuna, meaning roughly, "in a state of smoke". Prounounced slightly differently by Finns as "sow-na" rather than the anglicized "saw-na", it is a noun in its own right as even natives are for the most part unaware of its etymology. It makes little sense to give the same name to a predecessor of the sauna (as many alternate versions are), but the frequency of this usage is an indicator of the huge popularity of the Finnish one in cultures where communal baths have been adopted. The sauna has been enjoying a come-back not only in Finland, but all over the western world, as its therapeutic properties have been recognised, and new uses for them are found. However, the role it plays amongst [[Finn]s remains very different from the one it plays in other nations, and in Finland sauna culture is not only fairly standardised, but highly respected and adhered to.

[edit] The modern sauna

In Finland virtually every free standing private house has a sauna of its own on the plot in some shape or form. The approximate figure of total saunas in the nation is 1.7 million, which are used by only 5.1 million Finns. In the case of older houses from a time when the sauna was built before the main house, the sauna is a free standing construction located elsewhere in the garden. In modern houses the sauna is on the ground floor, often annexed from the shower and toilet room. Rarely will a bath be found in a Finnish house, as the concept of lying in stagnant water for half an hour does not appeal much when there is the option of a sauna. In appartment blocks a shared sauna is situated in the basement and residents must book their use of it in advance. All swimming pools, but not necessarily other sports facilities, are equipped with saunas, which it is the norm to attend prior to using the pool.

Originally the sauna building consisted of only the detached löyly huone (steaming room), which one accessed directly from outside. Nowadays one must usually pass through the pukuhuone (changing room) and pesuhuone (wash room) first, as suburban Finns have perhaps grown more modest and no longer change and wash outdoors on a regular basis. The pukuhuone and pesuhuone are no different from the changing and wash rooms one can find accompanying the average gymnasium or swimming pool. There are only a couple of points of interest here, which are that one may find firewood stored under the benches of the pukuhuone and a pair of hot and cold water tanks in the pesuhuone.

In addition to the now standard pukuhuone and pesuhuone, a private sauna may have a takkahuone (fire-place room), or if there is no fire-place, simply a saunalämpiö (sauna lobby). The furnishings of this room depend on the host, but comfortable, versatile furniture and a refridgerator can be expected. There may even be a games-cupboard, guitar, or storage for fishing rods and other outdoor equipment.

Moving on to the sauna proper, the löyly huone consists of numerous quintessential elements that have changed little over time. It can be entered through only one lock-free, 60 centimetre wide door, which often has a gap at the bottom of at least 5 centimetres for ventilation and stable air pressure. If the door is wooden it may have a small double glazed window, otherwise it is made of a strong fiberglass and no window is needed. The room is built from a frame of well dried pine and the walls are boarded with planks of the same wood. The floor is left bare or covered with ceramic tiling and the ceiling is made of two layers of wood with extra insulating material in between them.

At the heart of the sauna is the kiuas (stove). This comprises a small contained oven at the bottom, which heats large metal box above it filled with fist-sized stones. The wood oven is filled from the front, closed by a right-hinged door, and the metal box is open at the top from which the stones are visible. A modern kiuas may be heated electrically, in which case in the place of the oven door is a dial that controls the thermostat. In this model the heating coils surround a hollow space through which air can pass by convection. The advantage of electricity over wood is that it heats the room more quickly and does not require the gathering of fire wood, which is an adaption to the more hectic modern urban lifestyle. However, 90% of homes still opt for wood sauna for its traditional qualities. There is also a long-term practical advantage: its slow action means that the sauna walls and furniture can be properly dried out by leaving the door open when the kiuas is still hot to prevent rotting after use.

The kiuas is usually located in a corner, with easy access from the door, for safety reasons. Some larger saunas may have it located against the central point of a wall for easier access to it for all occupants. The size of such a sauna would mean it could also have space for an assortment of safety barriers to prevent anyone coming into contact with the kiuas.

Around the kiuas are arranged two or three levels of tiered benches, made of knot-free pine, facing the center or door of the room. Each bench is about 45 centimetres high and 45-75 cm wide. Only a meter of head room is allowed above the top bench; a room with a high ceiling takes longer to heat up. Two adjustable vents are required; one just above the level of the top of the stove and one in the ceiling. The former is especially important in wood saunas to prevent toxic carbon monoxide gas from accumulating. The white lighting is dim and ambient, often situated below the level of the higher benches. Small discreet windows may be built into the walls bringing in light from outside, but these are never opened.

[edit] Untitled wiki project

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