I’ve been meaning to tell you, gentle reader, that your manner of dress could be described by this word.

bedizen • \bih-DYE-zen\ • verb
: to dress or adorn gaudily

Example sentence:
“Adorned by minarets and spires and bedizened by more than a million lights, Coney Island embodied what has been called the ‘architecture of exhilaration.’” (Blaine Harden, New York Times, August 28, 1999

Did you know?
“Bedizen” doesn’t have the flashy history you might expect—its roots lie in the rather quiet art of spinning thread. In times past, the spinning process began with the placement of fibers (such as flax) on an implement called a “distaff”; the fibers were then drawn out from the distaff and twisted into thread. “Bedizen” descends from the verb “disen,” which meant “to dress a distaff with flax” and which came to English by way of Middle Dutch. The spelling of “disen” eventually became “dizen,” and its meaning expanded to cover the “dressing up” of things other than distaffs. In the mid-17th century, English speakers began using “bedizen” with the same meaning.

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- W.B. Yeats

This latest CD has cemented my love for Toby Marks. I’ve never met the man but musically he creates stuff that is more potent to me than any sonnet or poem done by old Will.

I’m still processing all that I hear and till I can collect my thoughts I’ve borrowed the official press release from Six Degrees Records for you to peruse. I’ll be back later with my own two cents.

Banco de Gaia

Toby Marks under the pseudonym Banco De Gaia has spent most of his career focusing on issues that he finds bewildering by expressing his thoughts and observations through music. The electronic musings of an ‘abstract techno/dance’ composer are not traditionally associated with an impassioned political polemic or works of merit and depth. However, his critically acclaimed 1995 album Last Train To Lhasa was written to highlight the plight of the Tibetan people and successfully mixed electronica with a braver vision, although Banco de Gaia himself has lost count of the number of times people have told him that ‘dance and politics’ just don’t mix. There are no ‘themes’ in dance music, just beats and hooks etc.

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From zeenews.com:

Discovery of vertical wall boosts hopes of existence of Bosnian pyramid

Belgrade, June 27: Archaeologists working on an excavation site in Bosnia say there is increasing evidence of the existence of a man-made pyramid at the site.

“The people living in this area discovered the walls a few days ago. The team in charge of pyramids here took over the project and brought in historians and geologists to study the situation. The first thing that was discovered was this area and then, the wall at the back was found. This proved that people were here and interfered in the nature of the mountain here,” said Egyptian archaeologist Lamia El Hadidy sitting in front of a stone construction on Sunday (June 18).

It is still impossible to conduct a scientific dating of the find because no artefacts have been found so far.

“We still don’t know about the date, we don’t have any artefacts, we don’t know who and why built up this construction. We don’t know what kind of construction it is,” said Silvana Cobanov from Slovenia and Nancy Gallou from Greece, both archaeologists who volunteer on the project.

Bosnian-born amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic claims that there are three 12,000-year-old pyramids — the Bosnian Pyramids of Sun, Moon and Dragon - near the Bosnian town of Visoko.

Osmanagic’s theory about pyramids in Bosnia has been denounced by local and European archaeologists, who say that ancient civilizations in Europe lived in caves and could not build such structures.

“We have some very exciting results,” said Osmanagic.

“Behind me are the terraces which were clearly man-made. We can see the stone plates and stone blocks cut by men, transported here and installed here into the pyramid’s walls. These are the terraces I’m standing on. Today, we have just found one vertical wall which might represent an entrance to the pyramid, or maybe a tomb. We will know more a couple of weeks from now, but I would say the results are so exciting and all our thesis have been confirmed every day.”

UNESCO Secretary General Koichiro Matsuura recently said that he would send a UNESCO expert team to Visoko to determine exactly what it is all about.

Bureau Report

Got this off the wire…thanks goes to Reuters:

Rowling to kill two in final Potter book

Mon Jun 26, 3:52 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Children’s author J.K. Rowling has revealed that at least two characters will die in the seventh and final installment of her bestselling Harry Potter series, but was careful not to say who.

Children and adults are expected to rush and buy the final Harry Potter novel in their tens of millions when it is complete, and if the publication of the sixth book is anything to go by, secrecy surrounding the plot will be tight.

Rowling has already said that the final chapter of the seventh book was written long ago.

“The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly,” she said in an interview broadcast on Monday on Britain’s Channel 4. “One character got a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die.”

When asked to be more specific, she added: “No, I’m not going to commit myself, because I don’t want the hate mail or anything else.”

She did explain that she understood an author’s desire to kill off the main character of a successful series.

“I’ve never been tempted to kill him (Harry) off before the end of book seven, because I always planned seven books and that’s where I want to go.

“I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks ‘Well, I’m going to kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels … so it will end with me, and after I’m dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character’.”

Rowling, 40, wrote the first Harry Potter adventure when she was an unemployed single mother, but has gone on to become one of the richest authors in history with a personal fortune estimated at more than $1 billion.

The Harry Potter series has sold an estimated 300 million copies worldwide.