Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Spartacus by Vinnie Ream

The hero of this blog is the freedom-loving Spartacus and we have found a public domain photograph of Spartacus by sculptor Vinnie Ream (1847-1914) at the Library of Congress Multiple Prints and Photographs Collections:


Spartacus is a sculpture done by Vinnie Ream (Hoxie) [Lavinia Ellen Ream] in HER student days. She became famous as the sculptor of the Abraham Lincoln statue in the U. S. Capitol Building:



"Vinnie Ream was the first woman and the youngest artist to ever receive a commission from the United States Government for a statue. She was an '"Omnibus" child prodigy' with remarkable talent." The story is told movingly in A LABOR OF LOVE: The Life and Art of Vinnie Ream, by Glenn Sherwood.

Toward the end of her life, she also did a famous sculpture of the Native American Sequoia (Cherokee Chief Sequoyah). Vinnie Ream is buried in Arlington National Cemetary. Vinita, the second oldest town in Oklahoma, originally named Downingville, was later named Vinita in her honor.
For more about this remarkable woman see:
Smithsonian Magazine
The Vinnie Ream home page
Arlington Cemetary
and also the links found here.

BBC World Empire Crumbling

The BBC World Empire is crumbling as Eastern European broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai languages are scheduled to end by March 2006. These are to be replaced by an Arabic television news channel in 2007. The change is very controversial because the BBC World Service is funded by a Foreign Office grant and currently provides news in 42 languages other than English.

The Hypergene MediaBlog quotes Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division at the We Media Conference as stating that: "We don't own the news anymore. Our job is to make connections with and between different audiences".

Blogacus does not mean to be overly sceptical, but is the BBC move motivated by money, politics or both?

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Monday, November 14, 2005

Fierce. Courageous. Loyal.

Blogcus

Blogacus

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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Blogacus as abacus and Spartacus

Blogacus is a blog, weblog viz. online journal related to the abacus and to Spartacus. We are a freedom-loving device. Our subject is the tempo of our times: Technology Events Media Politics Online - TEMPO (TM).