Home sweet home… :)
For those who are interested in the “real” history, geography and structure of the beautiful Citadel of Masyaf, I found a really good guidebook by Haytham Hasan! You can download it here. :D
RIP NANCY WAKE (30 August 1912 – 7 August 2011)
Ms Wake, who has died in London just before her 99th birthday, was a New Zealander brought up in Australia. She became a nurse, a journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler, a wealthy French socialite, a British agent and a French resistance leader. She led 7,000 guerrilla fighters in battles against the Nazis in the northern Auvergne, just before the D-Day landings in 1944. On one occasion, she strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands. On another, she cycled 500 miles to replace lost codes. In June 1944, she led her fighters in an attack on the Gestapo headquarters at Montlucon in central France.
Work began earlier this month on a feature film about Nancy Wake’s life. Ms Wake, one of the models for Sebastian Faulks’ fictional heroine, Charlotte Gray, had mixed feelings about previous cinematic efforts to portray her wartime exploits, including a TV mini-series made in 1987.
“It was well-acted but in parts it was extremely stupid,” she said. “At one stage they had me cooking eggs and bacon to feed the men. For goodness’ sake, did the Allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men? There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money. Even if there had been why would I be frying it? I had men to do that sort of thing.”
Ms Wake was also furious the TV series suggested she had had a love affair with one of her fellow fighters. She was too busy killing Nazis for amorous entanglements, she said.
Even before she escaped to Britain, through Spain, in 1943 to train as a guerrilla leader, Nancy had been top of the Gestapo’s French “wanted” list. With her husband, she ran a resistance network which helped to smuggle Jews and allied airmen out of the country.
Nancy recalled later in life that her parachute had snagged in a tree. The French resistance fighter who freed her said he wished all trees bore “such beautiful fruit”. Nancy retorted: “Don’t give me that French shit.”
<3 what a bad ass <3
“Don’t give me that French shit.”
100 years ago - April 14th 1912: RMS Titanic hits an iceberg
On this day 100 years ago the largest passenger liner in the world, the RMS Titanic, hit an iceberg at 11.40pm and sank at 2.20am the next morning. As the opulent ship sank, its over two thousand passengers rushed to lifeboats; however there were not enough lifeboats on the ship so many were left behind and those who fell into the sea soon died of hypothermia. Over 1,500 people died in the tragedy, with around 700 survivors being rescued by the RMS Carpathia. The demise of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic shocked the world, and the story continues to captivate the world.
Today, 100 years after the Titanic’s fatal collision, the ship which was once a symbol of opulence and human power, lies at the bottom of the ocean.
life:
April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King is assassinated.
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the scene of the crime, and there — to their astonishment — found that they had unfettered access to the hotel’s grounds; to the abandoned buildings from which the rifle shot likely came; to Dr. King’s room; and to the bleak, blood-stained balcony where the civil rights leader had fallen, mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet, mere hours earlier.
Unpublished: Outside of room 306, Theatrice Bailey, the brother of the motel’s owner, sweeps blood from the balcony.
See more photos here.
(Henry Groskinsky—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
“A three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.”
I mean anytime, I see a beautiful abandon mansion, house, or factory, i always try to find the history of the place. When I hear a name of a deceased or celebrity president like Grant, Jefferson, Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt I try to see if they are some family members that are still alive.
London, 1940s, in hi-res color: These photographs were taken using Kodachrome film by Chalmers Butterfield, probably in 1949.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
We gotta kick these fucking nazis
And they say that it didn’t happen
What the nazis did to the jews
If they think they’ve a second coming
Then we got different views
We gotta kick these fucking nazis
They say now it didn’t happen
They say now it didn’t happen
They say now it didn’t happen
They say now it didn’t happen
We gotta kick those fucking nazis
What the world needs is more nazis
Like it needs a hole in the head
Your future is not safe at all
‘Til this disease is dead
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
They’re saying now it never happened
We gotta kick those fucking nazis
Everoyne knows that Hitler liked to draw. In my opinion, he had lots of potential and I liked his work, but THIS is by far my favourite doodle from him
You can take a wild guess which one of these doodles I’m talking about here. If you know me well enough, you’ll get it.
