Kattenstoet: The Cat Throwing Festival

Kattenstoet: The Cat Throwing Festival

Weird

For the last sixty years, the city of Ypres in Belgium has held a popular “Cat Parade” that draws visitors from around the country. Kattenstoet, or the “Festival of the Cats”, is held once every three years and consist chiefly of parades featuring giant cat effigies, brass bands, marchers and people riding on horseback. Revelers dress themselves as cats, witches or mice and march through the town to the cheer of large crowds of people who turn out on the streets. While it’s all gay and merry now, the origins of Kattenstoet is much darker.

Photo credit: Rostyslav Kudlak/Flickr
Back in medieval days, people were not very kind to animals and cats in particular. Many west European cities in those times held ritualistic cat tortures where people would gather dozens of cats in a net or wicker cage and hoist them high into the air over a bonfire. It was thought that cats harbored evils spirits and the Devil himself. So while the poor animals howled in pain, the crowd shrieked with laughter. After the animals were charred, the crowd collected the embers and ashes of the fire and took them home for good luck.
In the city of Ypres too cats were used as victims in numerous folkloristic games.
In those days, Ypres, like many towns in the Flanders region of Belgium, was renowned for its cloth industry. Wool was imported from England, and woven into fine garments by highly skilled craftsmen. Both the wool and the finished product were stored in the Cloth Hall, one of the largest commercial buildings of the time. But the cloth attracted mice, which gnawed at the cloth and procreated to unhealthy numbers.
To control the mice population, the cloth traders of Ypres brought in their natural predator, the cat. But cats procreate too and soon there were too many cats than the city could handle. And so the cat killing began. This being the age when cats were seen as harbinger of evil, nothing pleased the townsfolk more than throwing the animal off the bell tower of the local church. When business went bad, the people made sure that there was always a few extra cats tossed out off the window. With time, the killings became a ritual, taking place on ‘Cat’s Wednesday’, in the second week of Lent.
The barbaric practice continued until 1817 when the last killing took place. The last cat reportedly survived the fall and scampered off as fast as it could before it could be caught again. From then on until the First World War, Cats' Wednesday was celebrated simply by ringing of the church bells.
In 1938, a group of young altar boys organized a sort of cat parade. Each was carrying a toy cat. When they reached the church, they first had a feast and then one of the boys climbed up the bell tower and threw down the cat toys.
The ‘Festival of the Cats’ remained mostly a local festival until the 1950s when folkloristic parades became the new rage all over West Flanders. On the second Sunday of Lent in 1955, the first magnificent parade was organized with 1,500 extras, all dressed in gorgeous costumes. Since then, every three years the city has been celebrating Cat’s Festival.

The Cloth Hall is the most magnificent building of Ypres today. It was destroyed during World War I, but was meticulously reconstructed to its prewar condition. Photo credit: Steve Mullarkey/Flickr

Photo credit: Cedric Dubois/Flickr

Photo credit: Cedric Dubois/Flickr

Photo credit: Rostyslav Kudlak/Flickr

Photo credit: Rostyslav Kudlak/Flickr

Photo credit: Tim Dobbelaere/Flickr
Sources: www.kattenstoet.be / Wikipedia / www.knowyourcat.info
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photofun4ucom Pada August 12, 2017

Hamilton, The Waterfall Capital of The World

Hamilton, The Waterfall Capital of The World

Nature Travel

Hamilton, The Waterfall Capital of The World
Niagara Falls might be the most visited waterfalls in North America but the true ‘Waterfall Capital’ of the world lies 50 miles to the west, in the Canadian city of Hamilton. Situated in the heart of the most highly industrialized region of the country, Hamilton is also a place of great natural beauty. Its most famous natural feature are its waterfalls.
Hamilton is home to more than one hundred waterfalls—one of the highest in any urban area of its size. The abundance in waterfalls is due to the city’s location along the Niagara Escarpment, an arc-shaped ridge that passes through the middle of the city as it runs from New York, through Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Any river, creek or stream that flows towards the Great Lakes over the Niagara Escarpment results in one or more waterfalls.

Webster’s falls, Hamilton’s most popular waterfalls. Photo credit: paul blca/Flickr
Typical of a large industrial city focused on making steel, Hamilton’s waterfalls went largely unnoticed by its half million residents until 2008, when Chris Ecklund, a Hamilton native, founded the City of Waterfalls, a non-profit initiative aimed at promoting the city’s cascades. The locals knew about some of the city’s larger falls and visited them on the weekends as swimming holes and picnic sites, but nobody knew the true extent of Hamilton’s watery asset.
Even today, nobody can give a true count of Hamilton’s waterfalls. Chris Ecklund’s website mentions by name some 130 waterfalls, but some sources claim figures as high as 150-plus. The uncertainty could be due to the fact that only about 50-60 of the waterfalls flow year round, so the count could vary depending on the season of the year. Then, some waterfalls are on private property whose count might have or have not been accounted for. Furthermore, many waterfalls in central Hamilton has slowly been vanishing with the rise in population and construction.
Hamilton has no rivers, thus the size of the waterfalls are nowhere near the magnitude of Niagara Falls. Instead, Hamilton’s waterfalls are small, quite and serene, and there is a huge variety in them. There are cascades, ribbon-type (falls of great height and small width), the classical variety (where height and crest width are nearly equal), and curtain-like (falls of small height and very wide crest).
The most scenic waterfall in Hamilton is the Webster's Falls. The highest waterfall is Tew’s Falls at 41 meters, and the shortest, Little Davis Falls, is just 3 meters high.

Webster’s falls. Photo credit: Hamilton Conservation Authority/Flickr

Albion Falls. Photo credit: Tom Flemming/Flickr

Albion Falls. Photo credit: Joe deSousa/Flickr

Upper Princess Falls. Photo credit: Joe deSousa/Flickr

Sherman falls. Photo credit: Gregory Roberts/Flickr

Sherman falls. Photo credit: John Piercy/Flickr

Tews falls. Photo credit: John Piercy/Flickr

Tiffany Falls. Photo credit: John Piercy/Flickr
Sources: Wikipedia / Smithsonian / World of Waterfalls
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photofun4ucom Pada August 12, 2017

The Gastown Steam Clock

The Gastown Steam Clock

The Gastown Steam Clock
Not far from Vancouver’s waterfront, in the historic Gastown neighborhood, stands one of the city’s major crowd-drawer—a steam-powered clock. The 16-foot-tall clock displays the time on four faces, and every quarter hour it plays the Westminster chimes on four whistles with steam shooting out of the top just like in a locomotive.
Despite its antique look and archaic technology, the Gastown Steam Clock is of a much younger generation. It was built in 1977 by the renowned Canadian clockmaker Raymond Saunders as part of a rejuvenation of the Gastown area.

Photo credit: Michael Contreras/Flickr
Back in the 1960s, many North American cities such New York, Toronto and Seattle had freeways running right through town or along their waterfronts. Vancouver didn’t have any, and the municipal government wanted to fix that by constructing a giant freeway linking the Trans-Canada Highway with the Lions Gate Bridge, bulldozing its way through the historic, and marginalized, neighborhoods of Strathcona, Chinatown and Gastown. The communities that lay in the path of the proposed freeway protested and the plans for Vancouver's inner-city freeway were shelved. Efforts, instead, were turned towards refurbishing the historic buildings that had fallen into disrepair.
By 1977 the regeneration of Gastown was largely complete, but it still didn’t have a focal point—something to draw people in. So local merchants and property owners banded together and raised $58,000 for Saunders to build the antique-looking clock. The steam theme was chosen as a reference to the industrial past of the area, where steam pipes once ran underground powering machinery. The Gastown Steam Clock became only the second steam-powered clock ever constructed.

Photo credit: Wendy/Flickr
The world’s first steam clock was built by an Englishman named John Inshaw in 1859 to draw customers to his newly acquired public house in Ladywood, Birmingham. John Inshaw, who had previously built steam-powered machinery for the railway and shipping industries, devised a clock where steam from a small boiler condensed into droplets of water and fell on a plate at regular intervals. Somehow, the plate then drove the mechanism. The clock was installed above the door, and the pub became known as the Steam Clock Tavern. Inshaw’s establishment did such a roaring trade that the tavern eventually became a music hall in the early 1880s.
Raymond Saunders’s clock in Gastown works differently, and it isn’t actually powered by steam; it’s powered by gravity. The clock consists a number of steel balls that descend by weight, driving a chain that moves the hands of the clock. The small steam engine at the base drives the chain lift delivering the balls to the top of the chain drive. The steam engine is also responsible for the whistles and, of course, the escaping steam.
Raymond Saunders has since built several public steam clocks for cities such as Otaru in Japan, Indianapolis in the United States, and the Canadian cities of Whistler and Port Coquitlam. Other steam clocks made by different makers can be found St Helier, in Jersey, an island off the coast of Normandy, France ,and at the Chelsea Farmers' Market in London, England.

Photo credit: karmacamilleeon/Flickr

Photo credit: GoToVan/Flickr

Photo credit: qasic/Flickr
Sources: Wikipedia / www.cbcmusic.ca / Inside Vancouver / Wikipedia / www.vancouversun.com
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photofun4ucom Pada August 11, 2017

My Favorite Art Masterpieces Of All Time

My Favorite Art Masterpieces Of All Time

Art

When it comes to art, we all have our own preferences with each person’s opinion clear and distinctive, which is not wrong at all. Having said that, we also feel that if you are immersing yourself in the world of art, then it is best to get acquainted with all those works of art that are considered our favorite masterpieces of all time so that you can learn about their techniques and try to glean what makes them so great. This besides the underlying principles that one needs to know about art and design will help you learn about art and take a step further towards appreciation of art and a better understanding of this media. You also need to look at many aspects like oil pastels – know more about this medium among others.
While we are on the subject of our 20 favorite masterpieces of all time, we also feel that you should broaden your knowledge on this subject. If you cannot tour the top art museums of the world, read on to know more so that your knowledge base for art grows.


Number 20: Café Terrace at Night by Vincent Van Gogh shows a simple scene of tables on roadside café by night. Something simple yet done so well.

Number 19: Composition 8 by Kandinsky who is believed to be the founder of abstract art has used symbols and shapes to good effect here.

Number 18: The Kiss by Gustav Klint is in Noveau style with gold leaf in the background and is a colorful one to feast your eyes on.

Number 17: The La Moulin de La Galette by Renoir which actually means pastry chef is the depiction of urban life and is considered to be one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

Number 16: Olympia by Edouard Manet is a controversial one that shows a woman who is nude indicating that the painting is of a woman who is a mistress to someone.

Number 15: The Third of May by Francisco Goya shows the attack of Napoleon on the Spaniards.

Number 14: Las Meninas by Diego Valazquez shows Margarita Teresa of Spain as a child alongside the Queen and King of Spain.

Number 13: The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan Van Eyck shows the businessman Giovanni Arnolfini and his pregnant wife is known to be the oldest preserved paintings.

Number 12: The Scream by Edvard Munch shows the distorted face against a red sky with the landscape in the background adds to the overall charm of the painting.

Number 11: The Water Lilies by Claude Monet is based on his own flower garden and is part of a huge collection.

Number 10: The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh and shows Saint-Remy under the swirling sun.

Number 9: The Landscape with the fall of Icarus by Pieter Brugel show the indifference of people to the suffering of others. It shows something powerful in a simple way.

Number 8: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo is about the almighty created the first man, to be precise Adam.

Number 7: The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci has a lot of stories and controversies around it and created a lot of furore around the world.

Number 6: Guernica by Picasso shows the bombing of the Guernica, a Spanish city and is in black and white and shows the role that Germans and Italians played in the bombing.

Number 5: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer is often called the Dutch version of Monalisa.

Number 4: The beheading of Saint John the Baptist by Carvaggio is a brutal depiction of a murder happening in a prison. The expressions of the people looking on adds to the mystique of this painting.

Number 3: The Night Watch by Rembrandt shows the entire city being led by the Captain in their act of moving out.

Number 2: The School of Athens by Raphael shows philosophers like Plato and Aristotle along with others on the side.

Number 1: The Monalisa by Leonardo da Vinci shows a woman who has a mysterious expression on her face. People have spent ages trying to come up with theories around this.
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photofun4ucom Pada August 11, 2017