This week’s challenge word on illustrationfriday.com is “garden”.
In the Garden of Eden (or as Iron Butterfly said “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”) story from Genesis, God molds Adam from the dust of the Earth, then forms Eve from Adam’s “side”, and places them both in the garden, eastward in Eden. “Male and female he created them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, … ” It may be allegorical, in as much as “Adam” may be a general term, like “Man” and refers to the whole of humankind.
God charges Adam and Eve to tend the garden in which they live, and specifically commands Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve is quizzed by the serpent why she avoids eating of this tree. In the dialogue between the two, Eve elaborates on the commandment not to eat of its fruit. She says that even if she touches the tree she will die. The serpent responds that she will not die, rather she would become like a god, knowing good and evil. Eve then eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and persuades Adam to eat from it too. God doesn’t take too kindly to being disobeyed. He finds them, confronts them, and judges them. God kicks them out of Eden, to keep Adam and Eve from partaking of the Tree of Life. At the gates of Eden, God places cherubim (angels) with an omnidirectional flaming swords to guard against any future entrance into the garden.
After they were removed from the garden, Adam was forced to work hard for his food. Eve went on to become the first CEO of Motts.
SFG: wicked
The challenge word on sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “wicked”.
“Wicked” Wilson Pickett was born March 18, 1941 in Prattville, Alabama, and grew up singing in Baptist church choirs. He was the youngest of 11 children. He made reference to his mother as “the baddest woman in my book.” He said, “I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood. One time I ran away and cried for a week. [I] stayed in the woods, me and my little dog.” Pickett eventually left to live with his father in Detroit in 1955.
He rose to stardom with such memorable hit songs as “In the Midnight Hour”, “Mustang Sally”, “634-5789”, “Land of 1000 Dances”, “Funky Broadway” and many, many more. Pickett was also a popular songwriter, as songs he wrote were recorded by such diverse artists as Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Booker T. & the MGs, Genesis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hootie & the Blowfish, Echo & The Bunnymen, Roxy Music, Bruce Springsteen, Los Lobos, The Jam, Ani DiFranco, among others.
Outside of music, Pickett’s personal life was troubled. Even in his 1960s heyday, Pickett’s friends found him to be temperamental and preoccupied with guns. In 1987, as his recording career was drying up, Pickett was given two years’ probation and fined $1,000 for carrying a loaded shotgun in his car. In 1991, he was arrested for allegedly yelling death threats while driving a car over the mayor’s front lawn in Englewood, New Jersey. The following year, he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend. In 1993, Pickett was involved in an accident where he struck an 86-year-old pedestrian with his car in Englewood. Pickett pled guilty to drunken driving charges and received a reduced sentence of one year in jail and five years probation. Pickett had also been previously convicted of various drug offenses.
Throughout the 1990s, despite his personal troubles, Pickett was continuously honored for his contributions to music, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Several years after his release from jail, Pickett returned to the studio and received a Grammy nomination for the 1999 album “It’s Harder Now”. The comeback also resulted in his being honored as Soul/Blues Male Artist of the Year by the Blues Foundation in Memphis.
Pickett died of a heart attack January 19, 2006 in the hospital near his Ashburn, Virginia home and, ironically, was buried next to his mother in Louisville, Kentucky.
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from my sketchbook: susan cabot
Born Harriet Shapiro on July 9, 1927 in Boston, Susan Cabot grew up shuffled between 8 foster homes. She developed an interest in acting and singing performing evenings at Manhattans Village Barn. A film career seemed destined when the nightclub singer appeared in the 1947 film Kiss of Death with Colleen Gray and Victor Mature. After the film she remained in New York for a bit and did some television work. She expanded her acting work into television and was seen by a Hollywood talent scout who took her to Hollywood to work for Columbia Pictures. This brief period was not successful, and she moved to Universal Studios where she was signed to an exclusive contract. After a series of roles which Cabot played mainly in “B” western films, she grew frustrated and asked to be released from her contract. Cabot moved back to New York and in 1957 she made a decision that would insure her screen immortality. She signed an exclusive contract with producer Roger Corman. First up, she was the villainous Enger in The Viking Women and The Sea Serpent. The same year she starred in Carnival Rock and Sorority Girl both costarring Dick Miller. She followed that with Machine Gun Kelly in 1958, co-starring a young Charles Bronson. However, Susan Cabots most famous role was also her final film. In 1960, she played cosmetics company president Janice Starlin in The Wasp Woman. During this time, Cabot had an affair with King Hussein of Jordan. He eventually dumped her when he discovered she was Jewish.
Cabot gave birth to a son, Timothy in 1963. Timothy suffered from dwarfism. Cabot was almost inseparable from Timothy. She devoted her life to him, insisting he take experimental growth hormones. She began to take her son’s hormones, too. The drugs affected their mental stability. Cabot became a recluse. Timothy found solace in weight-lifting equipment.
One night in December 1986, police responded to a call at the Cabot house. When they arrived, Timothy told them that “a tall Latino with curly hair, dressed like a Japanese Ninja warrior”, had attacked them both, making off with about $70,000 cash. He told the cops that he fought with the intruder, and was knocked out. According to the autopsy report, Susan Cabot was lying in bed, on her stomach. Her head was covered with a piece of bed linen. They noted blood spatters on the mirrored walls and ceiling and it appeared that she had the linen over her head during the attack. There were no defense wounds.
After becoming suspicious of her son, police questioned him further. Timothy cracked and directed them to the murder weapon. A weight lifting bar, probably from a dumbbell. It was hidden in a box of Bold 3 laundry detergent, in his hamper.
Timothy received a three-year suspended sentence and was placed on probation.
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Monday Artday: change
The Monday Artday challenge this week is “change”.
“Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”
This quote has been listed in some sources as an authentic Gypsy or Eastern European folk saying. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak admits that he simply made it up for 1941’s The Wolf Man. However, the rhyme would be recited in every future Universal film appearance of the Wolf Man, and would also be quoted in Van Helsing (2004).
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IF: leap
The challenge at illustrationfriday.com this week is “leap”.
faster than a speeding bullet
more powerful than a locomotive
and able to blah blah blah…
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SFG: mechanical
The weekly challenge word on sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “mechanical”.
It’s always tough finding a spot at the bar at the Piston My Brake Shoes Pub.
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from my sketchbook: brimful of Asha
Asha Bhosle is an Indian singer, best known as a Bollywood playback singer. A playback singer is a singer whose singing is prerecorded for use in movies. Playback singers record songs on soundtracks, and actors or actresses lip-sync the songs for cameras.
Her career started in 1943 and has spanned over six decades. She has done playback singing for over 950 Bollywood movies. She is the sister of the equally accomplished Lata Mangeshkar.
Bhosle is considered one of the most versatile South Asian singers her range of songs includes film music, pop, ghazals, bhajans, traditional Indian Classical music, folk songs, qawwalis, Rabindra Sangeets and Nazrul Geetis. She has sung in over 14 languages including Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, English, Russian, Czech, Nepali, Malay and Malayalam.
Asha Bhosle is believed to have sung over 12,000 songs. Though her sister, Lata Mangeshkar was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records during 1974-1991, for having sung the most songs in the world, reputed sources have introduced concerns to its veracity, claiming that the Guinness counts were exaggerated and Bhosle has recorded more songs than Mangeshkar.
CLICK HERE to hear the Cornershop song that was inspired by Asha Bhosle.
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Monday Artday: underground
The challenge this week at Monday Artday is “underground”.
Vance Palmer was born September 16, 1893. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of boys like Vance worked as “door boys” or “nippers” in coal mines. Door boys were never over fourteen years of age and sometimes as young as ten. The work of the door boy was monotonous. He had to wake early, dress in clothes that were usually dirty with soot, and be in the mine when the first trip of coal cars entered in the morning. He would need to remain in the mine until the last car came out at night. The door boys’ duty was to open and shut the door as men and coal cars pass through the door, which controls and regulates the ventilation of the mine. That meant sitting alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living creature except the mules as they passed with their loads, or a rat or two seeking to share his meal. It meant standing in water or mud that covered the ankles, chilled to the bone by the cold drafts that rushed in when the trap door was opened for the mules to pass through. It meant working for fourteen hourswaitingopening and shutting a doorthen waiting again. Passing the time by reading was not an option for door boys, as the only light came from their helmet candle. Whittling and whistling were the boy’s chief recreations. Door boys would sometimes fall asleep at their post and fail to open their assigned door. In the darkness, a coal car would crash into the closed door, thus slowing down the mining process. And sometimes, a door boy would be killed by a speeding coal car, while attempting to cross the tracks in the darkness.
The door boy’s wages would vary from sixty five to seventy five cents a day, and from this he provided his own lamp, cotton and oil or candle.
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IF: multiple
The illustrationfriday.com challenge this week is “multiple”.
One of the most famous and interesting medical anomalies is the world’s only conjoined triplets, Chang and Eng and Archie Bunker. Conjoined twins are a rare phenomenon. It is estimated to occur from 1 in 50,000 births to 1 in 200,000 births. However, there is only one case of conjoined triplets on record.
Chang and Eng were born in May 1811 in the province of Samutsongkram in Siam (now Thailand). Archie, curiously, was born in the Queens borough of New York City in January 1971, nearly 160 years later. Chang and Eng were joined at the sternum by a small piece of cartilage. Their livers were fused but independently complete. Although 19th century medicine did not have the means to do so, modern surgical techniques would have easily allowed them to be separated today. Archie was attached to Eng by a cathode ray tube (CRT).
Chang and Eng and Archie lived productive lives. Chang and Eng, after touring the world with P.T. Barnum, retired and settled in White Plain, North Carolina, near Mount Airy. Chang and Eng married sisters Adelaide and Sarah Anne Yates. Chang and his wife had ten children; Eng and his wife had twelve. During the American Civil War Chang’s son Christopher and Eng’s son Stephen both fought for the Confederacy. Many of their descendants still live in the Mount Airy area.
Archie took a different course than his conjoined brothers. He grew up during the depression. He served with the United States Army Air Corp in Foggia, Italy in World War II (The Big One). He married the former Edith Baines and they had one child, Gloria, who much to Archie’s chagrin, married a meathead. Unlike his brothers, Archie held many jobs, including Loading Dock Foreman, Janitor, Taxi Driver and finally, Bar Owner.
Eng and Chang died in January 1874, at the age of 63. Chang preceded Eng in death by about two and a half hours. An autopsy indicated that Chang died of a blood clot in the brain; and at the time Eng’s demise was attributed, understandably, to shock.
In 1983, Archie didn’t die, so much as he was canceled.
