Jules

Artist

[Titania @TitaniasRealm]

All I want is a Wind in the Willows kind of summer

🎨 Inga Moore

[Delphine @grandebougie]

Il vaut mieux rire dans une petite maison que de pleurer dans un château.

[.stuff @vintagestuff4]

Will Barnet
1970

[𝓐𝔂𝓸✯ @shefwayo]

when someone is laughing & socializing instead of taking their turn at the board game we're playing

[cow @cowincrisis]

touching the electric fence just to feel something again

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

Today in 1742 Handel’s Messiah, performed by George Frideric, had its world premiere on Fishamble Street in Dublin. We were a city clawing its way out of disaster. The venue was Neal’s Musick Hall, newly opened in October 1741. Ireland was reemerged from a devastating two-year famine. Between 13-20% of our island’s 2.4 million people had died, proportionally worse than the Great Famine a century later.

Disease followed hunger. Mercer’s Hospital on Stephen’s Street, and the Charitable Infirmary on Inns Quay were packed to bursting. In response, the Charitable Musical Society invited Handel, a German-born composer down on his luck, to perform a benefit gig.

Handel arrived in Dublin on the 17th of November 1741, and fell in love with the place. “The Politeness of this generous Nation cannot be unknown to you,” he wrote to his librettist Charles Jennens, who had assembled Messiah from scriptural passages.

Rehearsals began in February 1742. Handel personally secured permission from Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, to use its choir, alongside that of Christ Church. Uniting Anglican forces in a rare moment of cooperation.

The hype was real. Ladies were asked not to wear hoop skirts and men to leave their swords at home, to squeeze in more people! Over 700 packed into the hall on the 13th of April. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal called it “the Finest Composition of Musik that ever was heard,” and later gushed, “Words are wanting to express the exquisite delight it afforded.”

The concert raised £400, divided between Mercer’s, the Charitable Infirmary, and debt relief for prisoners. Handel himself took no fee.

[Una Kelly @UnaKelly3]

Game of football on O’Connell Bridge as it remains blocked to vehicles. This father and his two sons said they came from Donegal to support the protest @rtenews

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.”
-Charles Bukowski.

[Titania @TitaniasRealm]

The Swedish tradition of Easter witches, has its roots in the old folk belief that witches would fly on their brooms to the mountain Blåkulla on Maundy Thursday to celebrate sabbath with the Devil.

The Easter witches were known for their love of coffee and it was believed that they would stop by people's homes on their way to Blåkulla, come down the chimney and brew huge batches of black coffee to bring with them to the sabbath.

🎨 old Swedish Easter cards

[Covie @covie_93]

Low-key jealous of the four astronauts who left the planet today.

[Vicky ✨ @vickyinatutu]

It’s a shame this is an April Fools cos you actually couldn’t take my money fast enough.

[Mr Melancholy @chakravartiiin]

Trump realising he was talking to a pakistani scammer this whole time not an Iranian negotiator.

[Impressions @impression_ists]

Renoir, Julie Manet with Cat, 1887

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Went for a quick nap and ended up sleeping for 6 weeks. Sorry. Have I missed much?

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

Blessington Street Basin is a romantic oasis that opened in 1810. Originally a reservoir, this sanctuary of calm has evolved into one of Dublin's last secret gardens, just a short stagger from the chaos of Upper O'Connell Street.

Its first fresh water source was Lough Owel in Westmeath, the water was piped via the Royal Canal and supplied uisce to the north city until 1865, then continued supplying the distilleries until the 1970s, with Jameson stopping in 1970 and Powers in 1976.

Originally called the Royal George Reservoir, the basin contains about 15 million litres. Eventually, it proved too small for our growing city's requirements, so that's why itbwas used by the whiskey lads as a production source for decades.

It benefited from a refurbishment in 1994, after an unusual false start. A German environmental artist named Dieter Magnus was brought over, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, to propose a new design and locals exercised their people power and rejected it outright. Tut mir leid, Herr Magnus!

But the rejection had an unintended consequence, spurring residents and businesses into a fundraising drive that eventually got the job done themselves. The park was reopened on 4 November 1994 by President Mary Robinson and Lord Mayor John Gormley.

The charming artificial island in the centre of the lake is home to ducks, swans, and the occasional heron. But a different type of wings lays claim to the large array of plant life, as there are beehives in the park too.

Local artist Austin McQuinn was commissioned to produce a series of bronze sculptures incorporated into the north boundary wall, entitled Natural Histories, drawing on natural forms and theyre deadly.

There are literary connections too, with a plaque unveiled by David Norris in 2018 carries a quote from Joyce's Ulysses referencing the Basin, and a second plaque commemorates Iris Murdoch. The Basin also features in Andrew Hughes's novel The Coroner's Daughter, the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature One City One Book selection for 2023.

Less expected is one of the park's other residents. Phibsboro Amateur Boxing Club calls the Basin home. A boxing club inside a walled Victorian reservoir is, in this time travellers humble opinion, a perfectly Dublin arrangement.

Buy the Dublin Time Machine a pint and support the DTM Book https://t.co/U7jtCrOTtb

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

"They told us the paint was safe enough to eat. So we put the brushes in our mouths hundreds of times a day. And now our bones are still radioactive a century after we died.' They were called the Radium Girls. Teenagers who painted watch dials with glowing paint, who danced in the dark covered in their own light, who were told they had nothing to fear. Their employer knew better. They just never told the girls."

Orange, New Jersey, 1917. Grace Fryer was eighteen when she walked through the doors of the U.S. Radium Corporation. The job seemed almost too good to be true: painting watch dials with luminous paint so soldiers could read their watches in the trenches of World War I. The pay was better than any factory work available to young women. The paint actually glowed. The girls painted their nails with it, their teeth, their faces—showing up to dances shimmering like something out of a fairy tale. They called themselves the Ghost Girls. Their supervisors told them the paint was perfectly safe. "You could eat it," one said with complete confidence.

So they did. Every day. The technique was called "lip-pointing"—put the brush between your lips to make a fine point, dip it in radium paint, paint the number, repeat. Hundreds of times a day. Thousands of times a week. Gram after gram of radium-laced paint passed through their lips, settled permanently in their bones. The male scientists and supervisors working with the exact same paint wore full protective gear behind lead shields. They already knew what radium could do. They simply never told the women.

By 1922, the sickness began. Teeth fell out. Jaws dissolved. Bones snapped from the smallest movements. And something else—something no one could explain. They glowed in the dark. At night, standing before their mirrors, their own bodies gave off pale greenish light. The radiation had buried itself so deep it was literally shining through their flesh. When Grace Fryer's symptoms appeared in 1923, she went to the company for help. U.S. Radium denied everything. Their hired doctors blamed syphilis—a deliberate, cruel strategy to label dying women as prostitutes.

Grace found a lawyer in 1927. By then she could barely walk, her spine collapsing, weighing under 90 pounds. Four other dying women joined her. The company's legal strategy was simple: delay until they died. But when the women appeared in court in 1928, the public saw with their own eyes what the company had done. Grace had to be carried in. Quinta McDonald's face had sunk where her jaw was eaten away. The outrage was unstoppable. U.S. Radium settled. Each woman got about $175,000 in today's money. Grace died in 1933 at 34. By 1937, all five were gone.

What they did can never be undone. Before the Radium Girls, companies faced almost no consequences for injuring workers. Their case changed everything—workers gained the right to sue for negligence, companies became legally required to warn about hazards, employers were held responsible for occupational injuries. Every warning label on a chemical container. Every required piece of protective equipment. Every workplace safety law. Five dying women built that. In 2014, researchers held a Geiger counter to Grace Fryer's grave. Ninety-one years after her death, her bones still registered radiation. They will glow for 1,600 years.

"She could barely stand when she brought her lawsuit. Her spine was giving way. She knew she wouldn't survive. She sued anyway—not to save herself, but to save people she would never meet. Her bones still glow beneath New Jersey soil. Her name is written into every workplace safety law in the country. The company that poisoned her is remembered only for what it did. Grace Fryer will never be forgotten."

© Tales Of Past

#archaeohistories

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

“Cow farts are destroying the planet.”