Well chosen accent pieces can make or break the flow of an otherwise well thought out room. Poorly chosen pieces, or errr… ugly pieces, are sore on the eyes and greatly distract from the room’s other aesthetic qualities. Assuming there are any. And if there are none, that’s ok too- we’re here to help with that.
Oftentimes we can find ourselves in a decorating rut. We recognize our homes are in need of extreme makeovers, but unlike high profile television networks, our bank accounts are not exactly endless. The good news is that a little creativity in the area of home decorating can go a long way, and if we’re lucky we won’t have to spend a thing. In the event that we’re unlucky, we’ll spend a few dollars (which we could probably find at the bottom of our couch anyway).
This post focuses on how you can vamp up your home lighting style with a little paint, a little time, and a lot of fun. First things first, rummage through your home and find an ugly lamp. You’ll want to find a piece that- overall has good structure (even if it’s boring or plain) and is in working condition. You’ll need a few materials for this project, but don’t worry- most of these things you’ll already have.
Materials
Rubbing Alcohol
Cleaning RagPainter’s Tape
Craft Spray Paint
New lamp shade (found in the home furnishings section of most stores) if you’re less than happy with the current shade.
Choose an optimal spray paint based on the current finish of your lamp. Spray paint cans list the ideal finishes on the front or side of the can.
Now, painting 101, clean the surface of your lamp by wiping it down with a cleaning rag and some rubbing alcohol. Be sure to remove any hardware (screws, switches, etc.) so that it does not get painted. Also, to protect the cord from paint, use the painter’s tape as you would when painting the trim on your walls at home. We’re ready to paint! Or at least we should be- so long as we’re either outside or in a well ventilated space with newspaper lining the floor.
Now the fun part. Holding the can 8-10 inches away from the lamp, evenly distributing color throughout the lamp’s surface. You will have to do this using multiple coats. It’s important to refrain from saturating one area; otherwise you’ll have drips that remain on the finished product. Wipe drips immediately away using a damp rag. A few coats of paint is generally enough to get the job done. Less coats result in an uneven distribution of color (which can be a cool look if that’s what you’re going for). Let the lamp dry overnight, otherwise you’ll end up smudging the color.
For ideas on styles visit our online inventory of lamps. Do you have ideas on how to get out of a home decorating rut? Send them to marketing@bellacor.com for a chance to be featured as a guest blogger.
Lord Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University states:
“Archaeologists all over the world have realized that much of prehistory, as written in the existing textbooks, is inadequate. Some is quite simply wrong. What has come as a considerable shock, a development hardly foreseeable just a few years ago, is that prehistory, as we have learnt it is based upon several assumptions which can no longer be accepted as valid..”
We are not sure about many things at this juncture. The date of the Tarim Basin culture seems to have radio carbon dates as well as other data that could place it anywhere from before the Ice Age to 2000 B.C. The same can be said for many things in Peru. Poverty Point might be the origin of the Iroquois that the Canadian Encyclopedia took all the way back to 4000 BC. but we have many experts who won’t go further back than 1700 B.C. for this location. Thankfully Jennings is more in line with our proposed history that makes it a Stonehenge-era artifact when he says it does not fit in the Archaic Period. The matter of mounds that start in 5500 B.C. as burial chambers in L’Anse Amour certainly is in keeping with the New Grange complex that was used for more than funerary purposes. Mounds may have become Pyramids and certainly the Cahokia and Caral (Peru) pyramids were for more than funerary purposes.
Yonaguni has the base of a pyramid and people lived on it just as the Caral site people did near Lima. It may be as old as 17,000 years and is certainly over 9,000 years old as we will see in a later chapter. Dating games are frequent in the jungle of academics and the Pyramids in Egypt have been dated by the American Research Center in Egypt in ways the ‘official’ Egyptologists like Hawass are never reporting. The Pyramid known (falsely) as Cheops is 450 years older and even older than the step pyramid of Zoser according to their data.
The Olmec have been found in the Caribbean as far back as 5,000 B.C. even if they didn’t build huge centers at that time. My research puts the earliest Mu people coming to Mayan lands around 6500 BC. and recent archaeology has found a site through satellite photos that dates to 400 BC. When I was there in 1993 the Mexican government was stating the Mayan civilization was not earlier than Christ and few if any remained. Despite all these differing dates you will be able to make decisions. Some of those decisions will reflect on the nature of the academic morass that gets funding from the people who are directing our beliefs. In the end we hope the newer technical equipment that Dr. Robins worked on at the Getty Institute in Santa Monica after writing his book The Secret Language of Stone will enable more ancient dating just as Dr Thorne’s team has done with the Mungo Man and Nanking man. It was exciting to hear these biological remains can now be dated and analyzed to the extent that we now know Neanderthal had refined drugs 90,000 years ago.
The ziggurats may be the source of the colloquial saying that has certain descriptions of excrement flowing downhill. The nobles certainly joined the priests near the top of these urban dwellings. Is there a greater library the world has ever known than the Great Pyramid at Giza, because of its mathematical and construction precision? The astronomical and other placements, such as being at the center of the earth’s land masses; and then we should consider Time and measurements of all variety are here as well.
There is so much to be learned from all these structures and the civilizations that lived on them and in some cases (Not Giza) used them to maintain the spirit of their departed loved ones. However, the following article from May 27, 2001 in the Toronto Star gives us insight into the way academia ’spins’ the artifacts to make it seem they are finding things that add to their existing perception while fighting for their own personal glory rather than honoring the greats of human history.
“Lima, Peru
A stunning archaeological find in Peru–the ruins of what researchers believe to be the oldest city in the Americas–has sparked acrimony in the international academic community. {Nothing like the fraud of the University in Colorado who got funding to ‘discover’ Savoy’s Gran Pajaten or Villaya ruins that were already in the local tourist guide books.}
A team from Peru’s San Marcos University has painstakingly excavated the arid hillocks above the River Supe north of Lima to reveal the sacred ruins of Caral–a city with six ancient Pyramids, an amphitheatre and residential complex dated to as early as 2627 BC. ‘In these structures of stone, mud and tree trunks we find the cradle of American civilization,’ says Ruth Shady, who is leading the excavations.
The operation is being hailed as the most exciting digs in Peru since 1911, when Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham stumbled on the ruined Inca citadel of Macchu Picchu hidden in the clouds of the craggy Andean highlands.
Anthropologists working at Caral believe the windswept ruins 20 kilometres from the Pacific Ocean will provide a glimpse of the birth of urban society in the Americas and may challenge theories that the earliest civilizations settled by the sea.
They say a priestly society built the stone structures without the aid of wheels or metal tools almost a century before the Egyptians erected the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The remains, 200 kilometres north of Lima in a coastal desert between the Andes and the ocean, predate Macchu Picchu by three millennia and are some 1100 years older than Olmec in Mexico, the oldest city in the Americas outside Peru.
Shady accuses U.S. anthropologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago’s Field Museum of trying to steal the credit for seven years of her hard work.
‘The problem is that he has presented Caral as his discovery, when my team has been investigating here since 1994, sleeping on the ground and working tirelessly to uncover it,’ an irate Shady says in her cluttered Lima office.
Haas helped Shady carbon-date reed matting from Caral last year after he became interested in the site in 1996. The two co-wrote a paper in the April edition of ‘Science’ magazine.
‘I think there has been a misunderstanding,’ Haas told Reuters by telephone from Chicago, adding that U.S. media had played up his role. ‘I never wanted to take any credit from Ruth for her discovery.’
Up to 10,000 people may have inhabited the 65-hectare site at Caral, archaeologists believe, and its construction suggests a regional capital with urban planning, centralized decision-making and a structured labour force.
For a nation subjugated by 16th-century Spanish conquistadors, who ransacked its rich indigenous culture in a frenzied lust for gold, such discoveries testify to the long heritage before the arrival of Europeans in what they dubbed the “New World.”
‘I hope this will help Peruvians understand their history,’ says archaeologist Rodolfo Peralta, 31.
‘Otherwise, people will think our history is just a tale of being conquered by the Spanish.’
One of the many riddles confronting archaeologists at Caral is why the inhabitants abandoned the settlement. Like all pre-conquest civilizations in Peru, the inhabitants left no written records and the Caral settlement was too early even to have ceramics or more than the most basic tools.
‘One theory is that a drought produced a famine which forced the city dwellers to move on,’ says Peralta, noting that the residents painted many buildings black in the final stage of habitation, {This fits with the quarantining of plagues such as the Marmot to rat-carried plagues known as the Black Death that cycled through the Altaic regions for millennia per modern research, and per the work of William of Rubruck who knew how to stop the plague years before the Catholics he reported to brought it to the Americas. Churchill acknowledges it was used as a culling societal tool.} after originally colouring them white for purity.
It appears the inhabitants of Caral believed the buildings were divine, dotting their homes and temples with tiny alcoves, filled with dried-mud figurines. {’Buildings were divine’ is a stretch. The reality of earth energy and the spiritual world was better known to these people than the archaeologist who wants to make them seem backward, I suggest.}
Subsequent civilizations never occupied the site but apparently revered it, leaving gold and silver at its perimeters.
South America’s most advanced pre-conquest civilization, the Incas, built temples on its outskirts. {The Incas had great doctors who did brain surgery and their government was the template Bacon used for his utopian ideas. However they are not the builders of Tiahuanaco and other huge constructions including 500 Ton rocks. The Spanish encouraged them to make such claims, including the Easter Island statues. It is a total fabrication as we will see. It involves very horrific deeds and genocide in the not too distant past on white people in Easter Island.}
As with the Mayans who ruled Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras around AD 300, the construction of religious pyramids at Caral– including one that stands 20 metres high and a staggering; 150 metres long–suggests the existence of a theocracy.
But the inhabitants of Caral differed from the Mayans by living in their ceremonial centres, Peralta says. {A debate exists on this point, in my mind. If he had been to Chichen Itza and if he saw the obvious markets and sports or entertainment centers, or read Thomas Merton’s descriptions; would he say this?}
Rooms and courtyards on top of the terraced mounds suggest they had both religious and administrative purposes. Varied housing also suggests a stratified society, with separate residential areas for the priestly and labouring classes. {But why not commercial and trading people rather than priestly? What real evidence for the constant sacrificial and overt religious dominance presented exists? The ‘Devoted Ones’ of the Bible as presented in Gifts of the Jews by Cahill, which was backed by various Christian churches, says they are sacrificial victims. Sacrifice of the young was common among Phoenicians and Roman women had the right to decide the issue of whether to raise a child or not. What we call abortion is not new or far different than sacrifices. The ancients often respected the soul of the child going to their death better than we do, by rituals of freeing the soul.}
There are also signs that Caral had the earliest known system of crop irrigation in the Americas. Coastal artefacts, including 32 pipes made of pelican bones and copious anchovy and sardine bones, suggests their residents may have traded their cotton and fruit crops with fishing communities in return for food. Researchers expect to learn much more about the daily lives of the people when they uncover the city’s cemetery. ‘You can tell a lot from a culture from the way they bury their dead.’ Peralta says. Excavations already have exhumed a skeleton from the walls of one home, where it was buried. Researchers say it was not a human sacrifice.”(1)
You can also tell a lot about a group of people who dig up the graves of the past and project their current immoral views of reality upon past civilizations. The matter of putting people in buildings has a long history. When we say putting people in buildings we mean just that. The person, who would ritually give their life to consecrate an edifice for posterity, may often have vied for the opportunity.
In other books I have reported various results or explorations in South America by the likes of Gene Savoy and the Heliopolitan religion his people are re-energizing. This most recent find adds to many most intriguing South American sites that need integration in any true world history. The Heliopolitan Druidic ‘travelers’ that are the Chachapoyas and elites of this region were all over South and Central America. This recent discovery adds to the work of the great discoveries of Gene Savoy as well as what is yet to be opened for international study at the Madre de Dios pyramid complex in Brazil.
“They found a plaza with ceremonial doorways aligned to Machu Picchu, which can be seen in the distance, across the Aobamba canyon. They also found a two-storey temple, which faces the rising sun.
The team believes one part of the site was a sun temple, like that found at Cuzco. They found a ceremonial passageway that seemed to have been aligned precisely on the sun and the Pleiades star cluster, used as a seasonal indicator for the planting of crops.
The only previous identification of the main part of the site had been by Hiram Bingham, the American explorer, in 1912, but he gave an inaccurate account of the position of the “Inca fortress”.
The Thomson-Ziegler expedition both re-located this sector of several square kilometres, which is much bigger than Bingham realised, and also identified as many as five sectors spread out across a hillside, making Llactapata a settlement of some magnitude.” (2)
REFERENCES:
1) The Toronto Star, May 27, 2001, by Daniel Flynn of Reuters, ‘Scientists Squabble over sacred ruins’, pg. F7.
2) From the telegraph news in the UK on November 7, 2003 we have an excerpt from an article by Science Editor Roger Highfield titled Explorers find the lost ruins of sacred Inca city.
Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest ‘expert’ at World-Mysteries.com