J. I. Rodale

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Jerome Irving Rodale, was a playwright, editor, author, and founder of Rodale, Inc. He was one of the first advocates of a return to sustainable agriculture and organic farming in the United States. He founded a publishing empire, founded several magazines, and published many books on health. He also published works on a wide variety of other topics, including The Synonym Finder. Rodale popularized the term “organic” to mean grown without pesticides.

Rodale had an interest in promoting a healthy and active lifestyle that emphasized organically grown foods. He was the founder of Rodale Press and publisher of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine starting in 1942.

One of Rodale’s most successful projects was Prevention Magazine, founded in 1950, which promotes preventing disease rather than trying to cure it later. It pioneered the return to whole grains, unrefined sweets, using little fat in food preparation, seldom eating animal products, herbal medicines, and breastfeeding. It also promoted consuming more than typical amounts of nutritional supplements and forgoing nicotine and caffeine.

Rodale, at the age of 72, had bragged during his just-completed interview on The Dick Cavett Show that “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way”, “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred”, and “I never felt better in my life!”; and still on stage seated next to the active interviewee, New York Post columnist Pete Hamill. According to Cavett, Hamill noticed something was wrong with Rodale, leaned over to Cavett, and said, “This looks bad.” According to others, Cavett asked, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”

Rodale had died of a heart attack on stage and in front of the live audience. The show was never broadcast to the public.

Mausolus

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Mausolus was the eldest son of Hecatomnus, a native Carian who became the satrap ofCariawhen Tissaphernes died, around 395 BC. He is best known for the monumental shrine, the Tomb of Mausolus, erected for him by order of his sister and widow Artemisia.

Artemisia and Mausolus spent huge amounts of tax money to embellish their city. They commissioned statues, temples and buildings of gleaming marble. On a hill overlooking the city Artemisia planned to place a resting place for her body, and her husband’s, after their death. It would be a tomb that would forever show how rich they were.

Artemisia lived for only two years after the death of her husband. The urns with their ashes were placed in the yet unfinished tomb. As a form of sacrifice ritual the bodies of a large number of dead animals were placed on the stairs leading to the tomb, and then the stairs were filled with stones and rubble, sealing the access. According to the historian Pliny the Elder, the craftsmen decided to stay and finish the work after the death of their patron “considering that it was at once a memorial of his own fame and of the sculptor’s art.”

Artemisia spared no expense in building the tomb. She sent messengers toGreeceto find the most talented artists of the time. These included Scopas, the man who had supervised the rebuilding of thetempleofArtemisatEphesus. The famous sculptors were Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas and Timotheus, as well as hundreds of other craftsmen.

The tomb was erected on a hill overlooking the city. The whole structure sat in an enclosed courtyard. At the center of the courtyard was a stone platform on which the tomb sat. A stairway flanked by stone lions led to the top of the platform, which bore along its outer walls many statues of gods and goddess. At each corner, stone warriors mounted on horseback guarded the tomb. At the center of the platform, the marble tomb rose as a square tapering block to one-third of the Mausoleum’s 45 m (148 ft) height. This section was covered with bas-reliefs showing action scenes, including the battle of the centaurs with the lapiths and Greeks in combat with the Amazons, a race of warrior women.

On the top of this section of the tomb thirty-six slim columns, ten per side, with each corner sharing one column between two sides; rose for another third of the height. Standing between each pair of columns was a statue. Behind the columns was a solid block that carried the weight of the tomb’s massive roof. The roof, which comprised most of the final third of the height, was pyramidal. Perched on the top was a quadriga: four massive horses pulling a chariot in which rode images of Mausolus and Artemisia.

The Mausoleum overlooked the city ofHalicarnassusfor many years. It was untouched when the city fell to Alexander the Great in 334 BC and still undamaged after attacks by pirates in 62 and 58 BC. It stood above the city’s ruins for sixteen centuries. Then a series of earthquakes shattered the columns and sent the bronze chariot crashing to the ground. By 1404 AD only the very base of the Mausoleum was still recognizable.

The site and a few remains can still be seen in the Turkish town ofBodrum.

“Mausoleion” translates as “dedicated to Mausolus,” and Mausolus’s name is now the eponym for all stately tombs, in the word mausoleum.

Dead Decor

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A few decades ago, Halloween decor amounted to a lone jack-o-lantern left grinning in a home’s window as a welcome to trick-or-treaters. More recently, that aspect of the annual event has been elevated to dizzying displays of orchestrated spectacle even as trick or treating has dwindled to the merest trickle in some areas.   Having become accustomed to over-the-top Halloween ornamentation and even inured to it, in October 2005, passersby mistook a suicide by hanging for a prop.

On 26 October 2005, the corpse of a 42-year-old woman was left suspended in public view for hours inFrederica,Delaware, because her lifeless body was assumed to be yet another Halloween display. The unnamed woman hung herself from a tree located across a moderately busy road from some homes. Her body, suspended about 15 feet above the ground, could easily be seen from passing vehicles.

State police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham and neighbors said people noticed the body around7:30that morning but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities arrived at the scene at11:00to begin the process of examining the scene and removing the body. The deceased lived about a quarter-mile from where her body was discovered.

 

Similarly, in mid-October 2009 the decomposing body of a 75-year-old suicide victim sat undisturbed on the balcony of the deceased’s home in Marina del Rey, California, for several days because neighbors assumed it was merely part of a Halloween display:

Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead for three days with a single gunshot wound to one eye. He was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment onBora Bora Way, said cameraman Austin Raishbrook, who was on the scene when authorities were alerted to the body.

Neighbors told Raishbrook that they noticed the body but didn’t bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy. “The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex and they all didn’t do anything,” Raishbrook said. “It’s very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest.”

An investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the case is an “apparent suicide,” and declined to comment further.

Hello world!

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The old site is gone.

The original owner lost interest and rather than paying for the work I had put in, he gave me control of the site.

I have removed the old content and am publishing this as a WordPress site.  Anyone interested in posting stories/blogging, reply to this post with your preferred user name, password, and email address.  I will not post the comments, but will set you up with a contributor account.  As you contribute more, you will move up the chain to author (can post without admin approval) then to editor (posts and static pages).