Think Draw - Picture

Title: Queue
created on 28 Mar 14

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Comments on this picture (41):
1. chelydra wrote: Having sat on all my eyeglasses, and with big screen gone blank, I've left some sloppy bits. Squint if they bother you.
2. marg wrote: well.. it's great - do we have to describe what we see ? - I'd end up in conscious dreaming..
3. Login wrote: Lawks-a-lummy! Is this a follow-up to the 'Breadline'? Desperate times - desperate measures! Or have I got it all wrong ... they're not throwing themselves off the cliff ... and the flying objects are seagulls, not vultures.
4. chelydra wrote: Lawks-a-lummy? Guess until I get glasses and/r screen replaced, I'd better include footnotes explaining what's what. That's a hip on right, and a cloud above. The rest just shows folks arriving at the end of the queue we all enter at birth.
5. chelydra wrote: not a hip. Ship. An earship to be precise,
6. clorophilla wrote: mmmhmmm... the human version of lemmings?
7. indigo wrote: Love it! The pic, the comments. I always enjoy your pictures, information and comments chelydra. Thank YOU! J
8. chelydra wrote: This was intended to be a small artistic remark on the human condition in all times and places However on further research, it turns out that it can also serves as a literal rendering of a custom that prevailed during the Age of the...
9. chelydra wrote: ...Earship, which fell between the Age of Worship and the Age of the Airship. Corruption in the Church, then the Reformation, religious wars, and the splintering of the...
10. chelydra wrote: Protestant movement into hundreds of sects and cults, each claiming to have a monopoly on The Truth brought on a mood of mass disillusionment. At the same time, because neither the Industrial Revolution, nor the lesser-known Agricultural Revolution had ye
11. chelydra wrote: ...had yet taken effect, the explosive growth in global commerce (as Europe conquered the world) came as materials traditionally used for sails (hemp, cotton, linen, even wool) were all in short supply.
12. chelydra wrote: Yet the mad scramble to build more and more ocean-going vessels couldn't stop, so many shipwrights turns to their local butchers and game wardens for animal ears, sewn together into a sloppy, gruesome approximation of sailcloth.
13. chelydra wrote: (turns>turned)
14. chelydra wrote: A set of such sails can be seen above in the picture â€” as you can see, they're quite a mess. The once-uplifting sight of passing ships just added to the grim sense of loss and depression.
15. mum23 wrote: It may be just earsay, but I believe they were widely used to go around Cape Horn...
16. chelydra wrote: Especially around Dover, England (for a more accurate rendering of the cliffs there, see page 5 of Login's archives), people had the habit of looking out to sea for a glimpse of His Majesty's navy and merchant fleet, but then they saw earships as often as
17. chelydra wrote: ... not, and fell into deep despair. (Hence the Queue.) The dismal mood of the Age of the Earship (and the Queue) dragged on and on â€” about 150 years longer than the brief period when animal ears were used for sails. The Agricultural Revolution res
18. chelydra wrote: ... the supply of raw materials for canvas, but with it came the Enclosures (worth looking up if you don't know what they were; and look up John Clare to get a sense of the dire effect they had on mental health). The Industrial Revolution vastly increased
19. chelydra wrote: ... sail production, and then replaced sails with steam and iron, but with it came a factory system nearly as brutal and dehumanizing as slavery. (If the Queue was sparser in the late 19th Century, it was only because everyone was virtually imprisoned in
20. chelydra wrote: ... horrific industrial slums and never got to the seaside except in their dreams.) But around 1900, everything changed. Labour unions fought for a better life, and the superprofits from imperial plunder finally started to trickle down into the masses.
21. chelydra wrote: As the 20th Century dawned a new sense of hope and empowerment arrived with it. And just at that moment, as if my magic, the skies of Europe were suddenly filled with the glorious sight of Count von Zeppelin's gleaming airships!
22. chelydra wrote: In a sense the Age of the Airship ushered in a new Age of Worship, but instead of seeing gods and angels flying through the heavens, people saw Technology, the fruits of the labour made manifest in the sky.
23. chelydra wrote: As the century rolled on, right on cue the airships started crashing and exploding all over the world, the most spectacular catastrophe coming on the eve of World War Two.
24. chelydra wrote: But still, the Age of the Airship did permanently erase from memory all traces of the Age of the Earship (until now).
25. chelydra wrote: (In #22 above, that should be their labour (or labor), not the labor.)
26. chelydra wrote: (In #21, my>by.)
27. chelydra wrote: And now the Queue goes on only in the metaphorical sense that we all return to the cosmic ocean from whence we came.
28. chelydra wrote: And the moment you were born, you took your place in line.
29. chelydra wrote: One further minor footnotes, to explain comment 15: the ear supply was generally embedded in with horns, as you already know if you've been spending time with Animals. Navigators often had to stop in remote places to patch or replace the ear-sails.
30. chelydra wrote: At the bleak southern tip of South America, however, the Fuegan Alpaca is the only available creature, with its colossal antlers and useless tiny fragile ears. The cape was named to warn off other earship captains.
31. chelydra wrote: But this last bit is probably just an old wive's tale.
32. Login wrote: :D Thanks for the condensed history of the modern world (my favourite subject), made even more bearable when wrapped in humour ... even the sad bits. Slavery and (to a lesser extent)the Enclosures were among the saddest and most damaging to civil liberty.
33. Login wrote: ... but back to the picture, I think I understand it now. The hip is a ship with sails made from animals ears, torn by the bits of horns that come with them (actually, they look superb), the queue to jump off the cliff is because we are now civilised and
34. Login wrote: ... don't push each other out of the way to be first at everything, including returning to the place from whence we all came (must remember to check out what my mum told me about gooseberry bushes); and the cloud is holding out it's hands to catch a meteo
35. Login wrote: ... meteorite, to prevent it from messing up the plans of a queue of creatures below.
36. chelydra wrote: The gooseberry bushes are on our left, just past the border of the picture.
37. chelydra wrote: One last note (quote) . . . . The sun is not yellow, it's chicken. â€” Robert ne Zimmerman
38. marg wrote: wait a sec.. I just checked and can't see my question about why the cloud is playing with a ball (or possibly meteorite) (or possibly a chicken) ?
39. chelydra wrote: you probably dreamt it
40. Normal wrote: Line of lemmings!
41. Qsilv wrote: Q, squinting confusedly at all the little merchant feet now, HAD been blissfully enthralled at a light hearted queue each leaping in turn into the Mosh Pit after their practice go at the Golden Snitch...