Barbra Walters

barbra walters, u sat there and let him giggle...
people are dieing, That was NOT okay

thanksgiving

i am thankful this thanksgiving for my loving family who are invited me to not one but TWO thanksgiving dinners tomorrow
the love and acceptance i have from my family is the complete contrast of this article...
http://www.indecisionforever.com/2011/11/23/are-you-eating-a-muslim-turkey-this-thanksgiving/

rose domes

I took a picture of a rose dome...

Damascus has hundreds of rose domes

which go back to the 13th 14th and 15th century

Between 250–1517 the mamluks who were slave soldiers from central Asia

took over Syria and Egypt

during this period they built many shrines

which are buildings over the tombs of important saints

and at times rulers

and these buildings were in the shape of domes

which were rose in color

Damascus has hundreds of rose domes

misrepresented

women misrepresented <-watch this movie

it's a sad situation...
you choose how you want to be perceived...how you present your-self to others ...what u want them to value in you...and if you always choose you waist line, your skin tone and your hairstyle and never choose your intelligence your mentality or your creativity...you are misrepresenting yourself...because you are much..much more the that

humam hoot

http://youtu.be/hX6zQSMrwnE

it's funny...a play made over 7 years ago predicted whats happening today..i guess its because dictators have no imagination and never come with new techniques

Julia Margaret Cameron-said to have invented the close-up

photography

HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON on the Victorian lady who invented the close-up

Short and plump, Julia Margaret Cameron was the ugly duckling of a famously good-looking brood of sisters, and spent her life in pursuit of Beauty. "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me," she is often quoted as saying. "And at length the longing has been satisfied."

Julia was born in colonial Calcutta in 1815. By the time photography was invented, she had already made a sensible marriage to Charles Hay Cameron, a barrister 20 years her senior. They set up home in India; it would be another two decades before she was to own a camera, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law to ward off solitude.

By the time she had created a portrait that satisfied her, Julia was a middle-aged mother of six. Gleefully entitled Annie, My First Success, the photograph is a three-quarter profile of a serious-looking child gazing into the distance. A wan January light fleshes out her round-cheeked prettiness and haloes her neatly parted mop of hair. Annie Wilhelmina Philpot's precocious poise betrays no hint of boredom, but Julia's triumph took seven hours to realise.

Over the decade or so that followed, Julia produced a prolific portfolio of portraits, transforming the greenhouse and coal shed of her home on the Isle of Wight into a studio and darkroom, and bridging the divide between amateur and professional, artist and technician. More than a century after her death, 120 of her most important images have been assembled by Colin Ford at the National Portrait Gallery for the first major retrospective.

Seven-year-old Annie was succeeded by subjects both starry and anonymous. The presence of her famous friend and neighbour, Lord Tennyson, drew troupes of sightseers to the island, many of whom were badgered into posing for portraits or standing alongside Julia's own reluctant family and staff in elaborate tableaux, dressed as madonnas, May queens, angels or nymphs.

Julia moved in a bohemian circle that anticipated the Bloomsbury set. Her pictures have become the definitive portraits of friends such as John Herschel, the photography buff credited with coining the word "snapshot"; Tennyson referred to her characterful portrait of him as "The Dirty Monk".

The "beauty" that her portraits capture is very particular, full of allusions to classical mythology and heavily indebted to the pre-Raphaelite movement. Her men are heroic, wild-eyed and regal, while her women are droopy, melancholic creatures, invariably draped in velvet.

Some of the haunting glory of these photographs results from the technology of the time. The long exposure meant that smiling was out of the question, and explains her sitters' dreamy, faraway expressions. Even so, Cameron's distinctive artistic characteristics are evident in her very first success.

Many claim that she invented the close-up, an extraordinary achievement, given the equipment. Annie's head and shoulders almost fill the frame, investing her child's personage with a dramatic air. You see the slightly softened focus that Julia claimed she hit upon by accident; the handling of light to mollify rather than sharpen the image; and the hair, already tousled. Peering out through her soft focus, and the odd ghostly streak of collodion, her subjects remind us of the magic of photography.

When Julia Margaret Cameron started out, photography was a fledgling art, hardly recognised at all in many quarters -- including the National Portrait Gallery. Early on, artists used it as a short cut, making a photograph instead of a sketch, and Julia herself deferred to this hierarchy, often echoing the composition of Renaissance paintings or portraits by contemporary artists. Ironically, in her more ambitious tableaux, it is the realness of her medium, that very attribute for which it was so celebrated, that lets her down.

In her unfinished autobiography, Annals of My Glass House, Julia describes how she would dash indoors to show her ever-supportive and invalid husband each new success, trailing her cocktail of lethal chemicals over the household furnishings. In many accounts, she cuts a faintly risible figure, ripe for sending up by her great-niece Virginia Woolf in a one-act play. And yet tempting though it is to view her as a dilettante and lady of leisure, or to sneer at her attempts to make her costly hobby pay, it is of such bourgeois vignettes that so much of women's history is made up.

Julia Margaret Cameron set out to "arrest all beauty", but what she achieved, instead, was portraits of arrested beauty. In our own age of instant picture messaging and photo finishes, it seems strange to think of her arranging lissom young girls, fidgety toddlers and crotchety old men, stilling them for the ten minutes it took her to preserve their images. All that hair -- the men's prophetic beards, the girls' pre-Raphaelite tresses -- might almost have grown while they sat there before stout Mrs Cameron and her hulking camera, waiting on posterity.

"Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th-century photographer of genius" is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020 7306 0055) until 26 May

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A dramatic air: Annie, My First Success (1864)

~~~~~~~~

By Hephzibah Anderson and Lisa Allardice, Arts Editor

المغامرون الخمسة

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kids-Adventure-Police-Mystery-Stories-Arabic-Book-80s-/270758571906?pt=US_Fiction_Books&hash=item3f0a77ef82
My childhood heros :D
فرقع أنت و هو!!!!!ا

cheese covered fried twinkies :D

I WANT CHEESE COVERED FRIED TWINKIES!!!!

ribbit

:O

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/SelectTeacher.jsp?sid=833

according to this most of my professors are very hard graders ... this does not bode well

so damn unpretty

http://youtu.be/7-RbPVUzDlU

artists block

our new project is dreams...
i got a 92 on my last project which is AWESOME :D
but less awesome when u know that that's what most of the class got -_-
so i have to think of something AMAZING for my next project
but my brain has ((artists block)) is there such a thing?
a dream shouldn't be so hard i mean i should just go to sleep dream of smth then draw itbut of course conveniently after we got this assignment I stopped dreaming ...*great*
so now im stuck...and i have to give it in by Monday...so i thought i would ramble on and on about it on my blog and maybe that will help :D

i heart kermit

the song i live by :)
song

Amazing

the best ink drawings i have ever seen

a hat is not a scarf

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/new-york/muslims-police-scuffle-rye-playland-over-amusement-park-123309825.html
A hat is not a scarf...I have been on every kind of roller coaster there is...and my scarf has never even moved....my favorit part about it is the policemens statment (it's a safty issue for us on rides, it could become a projectile) ridiculise! a peice of clothe!!! come on...with such logic one should remove shoes-they are even scarier projectile and if clothe is so scary maybe people should start going on these rides with there underwear....my secound favorit part about the police mens statment is the word-for us ... so um who are you talking about exactly? the police force ,but they didnt come up with this law..so who are you talking about sir? everyone else except for the headscarf wearing folk i guess... these laws only encourge hate...is that what policemens jod is? to promote hate?

Fear....

The most afraid I have ever been

A weird phenomena I have observed being far away from Damascus is that somehow the news seems more real.. Back in the beginning when I would watch the news and they would mention something happing a few blocks from my home, I wouldn’t really get that nervous and when men with guns started popping up on the road to my college and the mobile network was shut off there..it was somehow surreal, the only strong emotion I had was annoyance at the fact that I couldn’t call anyone, and amusement that the men with guns were butt ugly ( I am not kidding people)

But watching the news has become a whole different experience for me now, my imagination takes me to the most horrible place I always assume they are understating on the news, and that the worse has happen…so on Friday the 26^th when my best friend sent me a message-have you seen the news? Something bad has happened pray for us, my heart stopped, In two seconds I was on the net to find out what had happened, they had attacked a mosque…a mosque that me and my friends have prayed in many times , one dead the report said many injured…one dead…the weight of that word out weighed every statistic I have ever heard …and I realized sometimes numbers where people…people you love, people you grew up with..I sent my friend a text…go on-line NOW, she did,

What happened

They attacked the mosque my brother was there…

(I swore) is he alright!?!?

Yes he escaped and hid in some random strangers house….she then told me the rest of the horrible story, how they had beaten the over sixty year old imam of the mosque –how there was blood caking the floor when they finally left, and how the Syrian national television went on the air to say basically (nothing happened)

Let me tell you- the time between the sentence my brother was there and the word yes was the longest scariest second I have ever experienced. Ever. By now I was sobbing and shaking…I told my friend I had to go to the bathroom but what I needed was to go tell my husband what just happened and let him hug me untill my heart remembered how to beat again..

Tolerance st.cloud style

In Damascus when people stared at me(and they rarely did) it usually meant a good thing, staring usually just meant (your pretty) or (have I seen you somewhere) …

In my damascene university (AIU) there was girls with stripes in their hair, girls who wore headscarves, girls who wore crosses, girls who wore the newest cutest jeans , girls who didn’t give a damn what they wore, and I never once felt out of place or like I didn’t belong

However St.cloud Minnesota is a completely different story…here they have mastered the art of staring …I dress weird so the st.cloudians stare… I look weird so the Somalians stare, and I don’t belong anywhere…

This kind of staring is new to me, it makes me want to disappear ..to shrink down…to hide, my little sister would have dealt with this much better I can just see her buying a red top-hat and wearing it around on top of her headscarf so that she would give them something to stare at.. but me? I have always done my best to blend in , while remaining unique, In my own subtle way…of course now I stand out like a sore thumb, and I feel the eyes on me boring holes into me, sticking to me so that no shower can wash them off.

In Damascus, we had a day off on Christmas and a day off on Eid (the Muslim- Christmas for lack of a better description) but in good old st.cloud I have three classes on Eid…how would any of them feel if they had three classes on Christmas? Probably just as crappy as I do.. as homesick as I am …