Poseidon Undersea Resort

YouTube Video: Poseidon undersea resort. NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN, but to grab a link of this video for your site or blog, click on the video and go to its YouTube page, or CLICK HERE.

The Poseidon Undersea Resorts, a proposed chain of underwater five-star resorts, will have first of the resorts on a private island in Fiji. It will be the first underwater hotel/ resort in the world once construction is completed. Poseidon was conceived and developed by L. Bruce Jones, president of U.S. Submarines, Inc. and financed by TOPA equities Corp.

The Poseidon underwater resort will be linked to land through two tunnels. The resort will feature an underwater restaurant, a lounge, 20 luxury suites, one themed suite, a grand suite, and an undersea bungalow accessible by submarine. It will also have an onshore facility with five-star hotel amenities.

Each of the rooms will have 270 degree view of the ocean. Each end of the resort will be composed of a 3,000-square-foot (280 sq meters), Frisbee shaped underwater pod. One of these pods will have an underwater restaurant and bar and the other will have a library, conference room, wedding chapel, spa and a 1,200-square-foot (110 sq meters) luxury suite. The resort will be accessed through elevators.

Reservations at the resort is expected to cost $30,000 per couple per week, and will include four nights in a luxury beach or over-water villa and two nights in the luxury underwater suite. The resort also offers a variety of land and sea activities such as golf and diving onboard a luxury expedition submarine.

Claude Monet: the biggest exhibition of the father of French impressionism opens in Paris

This is a video report of the biggest ever exhibition of the father of French impressionism, Claude Monet's, paintings is on in Paris. The organizers expect half a million visitors.

The French Impressionist master Claude Monet (14 Nov 1840 - 5 Dec 1926), who has long been ignored in what is described as ‘Gallic snobbishness’ in France, is getting a new recognition there with the opening of a new exhibition at the ‘Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais’ (Grand Palais National Galleries), which serve as home to major art exhibits and cultural events programmed by the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN).

The French attitude to Monet is better expressed in the words of Art Curator Guy Cogeval, who reportedly said, "Claude Monet - the most complete Monet exhibit in France since 1980, with paintings on loan from dozens of museums and collections from Cleveland, Ohio, to Canberra, Australia - is a bid to repatriate one of the great geniuses of French art… We (the French) have always said, 'Monet's for an exhibit in Japan, an exhibit in the United States, but not for one in France.' But why? He's one of our greatest painters."

According to Guy Cogeval, who also heads Paris' Musée d'Orsay, a museum dedicated largely to the Impressionists, the French largely dismissed Impressionism as ‘something for tourists’ and preferred Realism or Symbolism. He added that the lion's share of recent scholarship on the Monet was done by academics in USA and UK.

The term Impressionism is derived from the title of Monet’s painting ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (Impression, soleil levant), and with this Monet changed the whole concept of art with his short brush strokes, vibrant magical colors and a new vision about art.

Monet was very fond of painting controlled nature such as his own gardens in Giverny with its water lilies, pond and bridge, and scenes up and down the banks of River Seine, producing paintings such as Break-up of the ice on the Seine.

169 works of art by Monet from private collections from world over has been put together in this exhibition. In a career spanning over 60 years, the impressionist master has produced a huge body of artistic works. He experimented with colors, moods, seasons and brush strokes to give a new meaning to art.

The paintings of Monet’s iconic ‘Water Lilies’, which have launched a thousand Impressionist calendars the world over, were inspired by the water lilies in his garden pond at his house at Giverny, and he repeated them over and over again, but every time giving them a new expression of mood and beauty.

His painting the ‘Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies’ (1899, currently in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) were repeated at least 5 times, every time giving the vegetation around a new life, new meanings and mood swings.

Monet’s Westminster series depicting London’s Houses of Parliament (London, Parliament, Reflections on the Thames; in French: Londres, Le Parlement, Reflets sur la Tamise - 1905) were also repeatedly created as new works but in different light conditions and seasons.

Life and Works of Peter Paul Rubens

Here is a video clip that gives a short introduction to the Life and Works of Peter Paul Rubens.

Peter Paul Rubens brings together in one person singular artistic gifts, major humanistic knowledge, mastery of Latin and several modern languages and a knack for diplomacy, becoming an example for a handful of artists.

Rubens's family was originally from Antwerp. The serious political and religious living in the Netherlands in the 1560s lead the family into exile in 1568, moving first to Cologne and then to Siegen, where Peter Paul was born on 28 June 1577.

Soon Rubens began his career as a painter, with his master Tobias Verhaeght, a painter of landscapes. A year later moved to the studio of Adam van Noort, a ‘skilful painter of figures’ but that was for a very short time, and then he went to the studio of Otto van Veen. Much of his earliest training involved copying earlier artists' works, such as woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger and Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings after Raphael. Rubens completed his education in 1598, at which time he entered the Guild of St. Luke as an independent master.

Due to his mother's illness in 1608, Rubens planned his departure from Italy for Antwerp, but she died before he returned. His return coincided with a period of renewed prosperity in the city with the signing of Treaty of Antwerp in April 1609, initiating the Twelve Years' Truce. In September 1609, Rubens was appointed court painter by Albert VII, Archduke of Austria and Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain, the governors of the Low Countries. He remained close to the Archduchess Isabella until her death in 1633. Rubens cemented his ties to the city when, on October 3, 1609, he married Isabella Brant, the daughter of a leading Antwerp citizen and humanist, Jan Brant.

Video: Alyssa Milano as Lady Godiva

In this video the American actress Alyssa Milano enacts the role of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Lady Godiva, the legendary fighter who rode horseback naked through the streets of Coventry, in England, to fight against the oppressive taxes imposed by her husband on his tenants.

Susanna and the elders - video

The story of Susanna (also spelled as Susannah or Shoshanna) is in Book of Daniel (chapter 13), a later addition, considered apocryphal by some churches. The story is also engraved on a rock crystal, the Lothair Crystal, made in the Lotharingia region of northwest Europe in the mid 9th century, now in the British Museum.

The story, frequently titled as Susanna and the Elders, became a very popular theme with artists and art connoisseurs from about 1500, seemingly because of the possibilities it offered for a prominent nude female in a historical or biblical painting, like the paintings of Bathsheba bathing. Susannah was the subject of paintings by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Anthony Van Dyck, Tintoretto, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Guido Cagnacci, among many others. This video contains some of the best works by over two dozen selected artists.

The works of William Adolphe Bouguereau

This video clip from YouTube shows the major works of William Adolphe Bouguereau.

The French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), known as William Bouguereau, as he used to sign, or simply as Bouguereau, was a traditionalist known for his realistic genre of paintings. He painted mostly mythological themes with a special emphasis on the female human body.

His almost photo-realistic style was popular with rich art patrons of his time but his technique and style seems to have lost out to the popularity of the Impressionists. Bouguereau's graceful portraits of women were very charming, partly because he could alter and beautify an artist’s model while retaining her likeness.

Bouguereau was a traditionalist whose realistic genre and mythological themes were modern interpretations of classical subjects, mythological, pagan and Christian themes. He brought to life goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses, and Madonna’s in a way that appealed to the wealthy art patrons of his era. Bouguereau’s works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who rated him the most important French artist of his times. He was also a sought after portrait painter and many of his paintings of wealthy patrons remain in private hands. He was quite prolific and art connoisseurs identify 826 paintings to his credit.

William Bouguereau’s major works include: Alone in the World (1867), Chapel of the Virgin, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul church, Paris (1885-89), Cupidon (1875), Evening Mood (1882), La Danse (1850), L'Amour et Psyché, enfants (1890), Le Printemps (The Return of Spring) (1886), Nymphs and Satyr (1873), Premier Deuil (The First Mourning) (1888), The Birth of Venus (1879), The Bohemian (1890), The Knitting Girl (1869), The Nut Gatherers (1882), The Shepherdess (1889), and The Young Shepherdess (1885).

On 19 August 1905, Bouguereau died of heart disease in La Rochelle at the age of 79.

Camel Spider eating a lizard in Iraq

Video: Marines and Camel Spiders

Do Camel Spiders attack US marines in Iraq, or Afghanistan? Well, judging from the frequency of stories of Camel Spider attacks on humans deployed by American and Coalition forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan, first I thought that they are well-trained by Taliban or Al-Qaeda, or both, or they are themselves hardcore terrorists bent upon attacking the western forces.

While hunting for public domain photos for posting in this blog, I came across the photo of a very nice F-16 fighter aircraft, and while looking for details it, I came to a report that said, on 31 August 2006 a Dutch F-16AM crashed in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan and the pilot Captain Michael Donkervoort was killed. The investigations to find out the cause of the crash could not blame the crash on any technical or human errors, as if it was a mystery. But the investigation report referenced to the fact that a Camel Spider and other creatures had been found recently in the cockpits of Dutch fighter aircraft in Afghanistan. Indirectly, it seemed to allude that the Camel Spider had bitten the pilot who was paralyzed and lost control of the F-16, eventually crashing it.

My further efforts to find out more about these scary, bizarre, vampire-like creatures brought me to this video on YouTube. And I found much more videos and blogs that showed how the foreign soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are scared about these vampire Spiders. (In fact, biologically, they are not spiders but they belong to another family like that of the scorpions with more than 1000 identified species in their family).

Here is, in a nutshell, what the author of this video posted in YouTube (click on the video to go to his page), summarized as, “I made this video in Iraq. When stress comes calling... it has been a little busier and we're at the 1/3 mark in the deployment.”

That night the marine walked outside his office and saw the dead Camel Spider. A devilish idea struck him, as he was always talking about Marines screaming like little girls on the sight of these creatures. So he picked it up, pulled out his digital camera… He would walk up to people filming and telling them he was making a video to send home about Iraq, and what they thought of Camel Spiders... He would then toss the carcass onto their laps. He wrote, “Out of 15 subjects tested, 5 did indeed squeal like little girls, one was female though.” Any way, he has shot the Camel Spider comedy surprisingly well as you can see from this video.

Under the comments, I found myths surrounding camel spiders, like ‘Camel Spiders can move at speeds over 30 MPH screaming while they run, they can be as large as a Frisbee, their venom is an anesthetic that numbs their prey, they can jump three feet high, they got their name because they eat the stomachs of camels, they eat or gnaw on people while they sleep, due to the numbing effect of their venom the victim is unaware until they wake up.’

Any way the Camel Spider in this video is dead, not a living one! I have posted another video that shows a Camel Spider eating up a lizard in Iraq.