Araros

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The Tam O’Shanter Jug


Image by antefixus21
Large fawn coloured jug decorated with relief moulding. Main body depicts scenes from a Burns’ poem. Handle represents an arm grasping Tam O’Shanter’s mare’s tail. Garland of thistles around the neck section. No lid. Makers mark on base.
the base of the jug carries and impressed mark which reads “Published by W. Ridgway & Co Hanley, October 1, 1835.

What makes this jug particularly interesting is that it is decorated with the famous story of Tam O’Shanter, based on scenes from the poem by Robert Burns (1759-96).

But first things first. The famous Ridgway family of potters have a complicated history. In simple terms, brothers John and William succeeded their father, Job, who trained at Swansea and Leeds before returning home to Hanley in 1781 to found a pottery company of his own.

He built the Cauldon Place Works in Shelton in 1802 and the two boys joined him in 1808. Job died in 1813 and the brothers continued trading as partners until 1830 when they went their separate ways.

John retained the factory where he produced porcelain fine enough to receive Royal assent as Potter to Queen Victoria.

William, meanwhile, concentrated on fine quality domestic earthenware and was clearly successful — he went on to own six factories in the Potteries.

How it got to Canada is unclear, but the fine relief moulded jug is a William Ridgway speciality, one of more than 25 with different designs, made over a period of almost 30 years at his Church Works in Hanley.

Fortunately for today’s collectors, the varying designs or either published or registered and many bear impressed marks,which means they can be dated with some certainty.

Interestingly, the Tam O’Shanter jug is the earliest Ridgeway jug to carry a date mark.

It tells the story based loosely on Douglas Graham of Shanter, Ayrshire (1739-1811), whose wife Helen was a superstitious shrew.

He was prone to drunkenness and womanising on market day and on one such occasion the local wags clipped his horse’s tail – a fact he explained away with a scary tale of witches which his wife was naive enough to believe.

On one side of the jug we can see Tam carousing away the evening of market day in the local hostelry:

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi reaming sAats, that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter Johnie,
His ancient, trusty, drougthy crony:

However, “the minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure”, the clock on a wall showing almost midnight, Tam must quickly make his way home.

But in his inebriated and confused state, he claims he is waylaid by a couple of warlocks and witches and is forced to run for his life.

Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin!
In hell, they’ll roast thee like a herrin!
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin!
Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman!

The witches give chase and Tam heads for the river, knowing that they are unable to cross running water.

But before his grey mare Meg, or Maggie, reaches the bridge:

For Nannie, far before the rest,
Hard upon noble Maggie prest,
And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle;
But little wist she Maggie’s mettle!

Ae spring brought off her master hale,
But left behind her ain grey tail:
The carlin claught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.

The other side of the jug shows the chase. One of the two witches in the seen is shown clinging on to the horse’s tail just as Tam reaches the bridge over the stream, while the jug handle is modelled with a hand clutching the tail.

The designs are almost certainly copies of contemporary prints taken from pictures in circulation at the time. Most notable among them are illustrations by the eminent engraver Thomas Landseer ARA (1795-1880) brother of the famous Sir Edwin Landseer, which were published in an edition of Burns’s poem by Marsh & Miller of London in 1830.
The email from Canada asking for information about Ridgway jugs in fact began: “Hello from the Moon”!
Its sender went on to explain that his home was situated where the Moon River flows into Lake Muskoka in Bala, Ontario. “We live on the Moon River. And so, we live on the Moon!”
Bala was founded in 1868 by Thomas Burgess, a settler born in Scotland who had visited North Wales prior to emigrating. On his arrival he said the area and its lake reminded him of Bala and he decided to adopt the name.
Burgess built a sawmill, opened a general store, bakeshop, blacksmith’s shop and post office and in 1917, the family helped establish a hydroelectric plant on the site of the original sawmill.
In 1922, Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, vacationed at Bala and was inspired to write The Blue Castle. The boarding house she stayed in is now home to the Bala Museum and has become a shrine to her.
The town is officially twinned with our own Bala in Gwynedd.
Interestingly, the scene inside the inn and the handle formed by a witch’s hand clutching the horse’s tail can also be seen on a Burns jug manufactured by another potter which appeared a year before the Ridgway version.

The coincidence is too great and it can be safely assumed that Ridgway copied the idea from the other potter. At the time, the laws of copyright were but a twinkle in a lawyer’s eye.

It was common practice in the middle of the 19th century for potters to take their inspiration for events going on around them. Modellers of Staffordshire flatback figures depicting famous politicians, soldiers and actors copied the illustrations in the broadsheets, penny dreadfuls and playbills and printers made a good living by publishing prints of engraved illustrations specifically for the pottery industry.

Another charming Ridgway jug is modelled with the story of John Gilpin’s ride, while others are similarly decorated in relief with classical motifs, arabesques, fruiting vines and other naturalistic elements.

Oddly, such crisply modelled examples of the potter’s skill, whilst becoming less common, remain surprisingly affordable. It is more than possible to pick up an extremely fine and undamaged example for under 200, while 80 to 120 is the going rate for most at auction. Of course, replacement value for insurance purposes is somewhat more.

As a result, it is eminently possible to build a collection of Ridgway jugs picking up an examples of the many different designs available without breaking the bank. They make a fascinating documentary of middle-class aspirations during the course of the Industrial Revolution that brought great wealth to a relative few.

steve jobs rip Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!


Image by safoocat
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
By MONA SIMPSON
Published: October 30, 2011
SHAREI grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor
and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked
like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our
lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d
met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no
forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a
new world for the Arab people.
Related
Opinion: The Genius of Jobs(October 30, 2011)Even as a feminist, my whole
life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d
thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he
was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I
had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three
other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the
middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health
insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost
brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a
cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens
novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my
brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading
candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of
Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even
trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and
handsomer than Omar Sharif.
We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I
don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like
someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti
typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer:
something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making
something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct
periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of
states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.
That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were
failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe
I didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a
dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president.
Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d
order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough
black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like
this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be
ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same
black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the
platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide
Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love.
Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about
the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out,
“Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”
I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful
woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her
”
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical
dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s
travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene
of Reed and Steve slow dancing.
His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened
all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic
never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him.
Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to
dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in
love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of
them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their
house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first
years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and
sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But
one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently
snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d
be standing there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered,
“Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene
Erin and Eve all went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a
hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the
same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto
house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction —
it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success
a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the
Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best
bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a
mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around
the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of
paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking
of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and
Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will
discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer —
even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every
other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on
the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch
for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of
fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller
circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small
handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country
skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed
to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was
still left after so much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver
transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear
him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis
hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the
chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each
day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into
each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that
effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain
for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school
his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building
on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped
he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went
through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely
trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid
everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who
generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that
this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched
devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors
and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit.
And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake
itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his
sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of
ice.
None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days,
even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from
his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands
have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing
wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls,
and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my
wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many
stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived
with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.
What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What
he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone
was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already
strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey,
even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in
a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d
lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his
children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his
friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could
feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to
Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry
we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was
going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes
jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I
looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the
profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous
journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet
Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still
more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at
his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their
shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW. "So as the clock ticked and the day passed, opportunity met preparation, and luck happened." – Maurice Clarett

Temple of the Tigers


Image by garlandcannon
I like how the colors and lighting are in surreal harmony with the tiger. The mystery aspect of this picture worked well with the enhancement I accomplished with PaintShop Pro.
&&&

In tribute to Wzui. Wzui crossed the Rainbow Bridge on 9-8-2011, killed by jealous Seri, one of his harem. Clytemnestra, black widow, Seri . . .

From the El Paso Times: "By Lindsey Reiser – Multimedia Journalist
Thursday, July 21, 2011 – 5:26pm
EL PASO – It’s a love story straight out of a soap opera. Two female tigers at the El Paso Zoo are competing for the attention of the male hunk.
If you think jealousy and backstabbing are traits reserved for humans, you’ll be shocked at how far these felines will go.

"We have Wzui, he’s 5 years years old, we have Seri, she’s 3 years old, and we have Melor, she is 15 years old," said caretaker Griselda Martinez.

Like most love triangles, Martinez says this twisted tale started in the bedroom.

"Wzui actually gets to live in between both females, so that’s where the triangle begins," Martinez said. Each female brings something unique to the table. Melor is the more mature feline and Seri is the playful flirt. But Wzui is the raw-meat-covered apple of their eye.

"He’s a cool cat, he’s very mellow, he’s very sweet," Martinez said.

Melor has been at the zoo for some time. Seri was brought in January and Wzui joined the pack a month later. When they first met, Martinez says it was love at first sight. In hopes of breeding the endangered Malayans here in El Paso, a group called the Species Survival Plan decided Seri was the better match for Wzui. But Wzui seems to think one is not enough.

"He seems to spend a lot of time with both of them," Martinez said. "If Wzui pays too much attention to Melor, which he usually goes and sits right by her, then Seri will start calling to him, like ‘come to me, come to me.’ And he’ll ignore her for a while and then he’ll go over to her. That’s when Meli will come around."

Now the females have turned catty, which, behind these walls, means you could get an eye clawed out.

"The girls will not get along, they will fight, so that’s a pretty dangerous situation," Martinez said.

So will Wzui and Seri successfully bring a beautiful tiger cub into this world? Or will Melor’s appeal distract Wzui from the task at paw? Tune in next time, for the Days of Our 9 Lives."

From the New York Times"
Texas: Tiger Kills Her Mate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 9, 2011

A rare Malayan tiger was killed by his mate at the El Paso Zoo on Thursday, and zoo officials said they were taken by surprise because the two were playing together hours earlier. Seri, a 3-year-old female who came from the San Diego Zoo 15 months ago, seemed to have bonded with 6-year-old Wzui during the two and a half months they were together, said Steve Marshall, the zoo director. A visitor said Seri chomped down on the side of Wzui’s neck and choked him, Mr. Marshall said. Tara Harris, the conservation director at the Minnesota Zoo, said that tigers do fight with one another. “But it is very rare that one would kill another, especially a female killing a male,” she said."

"
When an animal dies that has been especially close to
someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are
meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they
can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water
and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to
health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made
whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our
dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and
content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone
very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one
suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes
are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to
run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs
carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend
finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to
be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your
hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more
into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your
life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together…
Author unknown"

9-13-2011 I just cme across this poem by Emily Dickinson:

A Dying Tiger — moaned for Drink — by Emily Dickinson
A Dying Tiger — moaned for Drink –
I hunted all the Sand –
I caught the Dripping of a Rock
And bore it in my Hand –

His Mighty Balls — in death were thick –
But searching — I could see
A Vision on the Retina
Of Water — and of me –

‘Twas not my blame — who sped too slow –
‘Twas not his blame — who died
While I was reaching him –
But ’twas — the fact that He was dead –