@beautifulones via @jhamiltonphotographytt

I finally got an off day from work, so I decided to spend part of it with my mom, so I took her to the “PRINCE: Immersive Experience” and as you can see she loved it, and seeing her face lit up with joy & smiles made it all worth me going a 2nd time! #PRINCEimmersiveexperience #Prince #WhenDovesCry #PurpleRain #Letsgocrazy #beautifulones #poplife #rasberryberet #viralreels #love #viral #computerblue #darlingnikki #diamondsandpearls #moneydontmattertonite #gold #theimmersiveexperience (at Chicago Downtown) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiQ2wxTvY-c/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Current singles #PutitUponMe with @blackfolkinc @b_lowmfbrown #BeautifulOne with @tanyell423 & @__chillmode__ and #BobbyBrown staying consistent and blessed to keep it moving 🙏🏽Posted @withregram • @thehype87.3 S/O these artists in rotation on #TheHype873 @digitalradiotracker report REPORT DATES FROM 4/17/2022 - 4/23/2022 https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc3dwLnphGU/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Something beautiful

One week and some change into his presidency, the changeover being a matter of arbitrary administration timing and in fact having occurred already by the time you hear this, Samuel Vimes has appointed a special committee to undertake a study of . . . well, call it artistic expression in Ankh-Morpork generally, and perhaps of the government's relationship to it in particular, but don't let that fool you into thinking he wants a memo making "appropriate recommendations."

Of course, the committee already exists, although it started life as the Moral Standards in Art Committee under Lord Vetinari's reign. In the opinion of several committee members, changing the committee's nomenclature without substantive changes to its purpose amounts to whitewashing history, and to a certain extent they are correct, although in fact as far as the _real_ committee's capacity to make substantiative recommendations it is by now a question whether it could make any worse recommendations than the ones it used to make. And that's a sad thing to say, because there are at least two of the committee members who would say that the committee used to make almost no recommendations at all, what it used to do instead being a process Vetinari once, to the committee's complete confusion, compared to "churning butter." The committee these days does make a few recommendations, now and then, and indeed they make those recommendations _well_, but this is the product of a kind of committee necrophilia in which the committee does not so much ask itself as it in fact is tasked with asking itself: well, do we really want to ask ourselves that question again?

Some of those recommendations are almost never acted on. In the case of Vetinari's comparison, a few are in fact churned. But the few that are acted on generally turn out to be remarkably positive developments, almost as if some divine intervention is being brought to bear on the city's cultural life, and this gives people like Lord Downey a warm feeling. Downey is in fact the chair of the committee. He was chosen by Vetinari in part because he has a background in law and in part because that background is irrelevant to any of the actual tasks that Downey has performed in his tenure at the helm of the MSA, and also because he has the requisite social connections to make people like his decisions about what is or is not a good idea. People like an honest broker; they hate a broker who offers nothing but a raw deal. So Downey is a well-loved individual.

Meanwhile, Ankh-Morpork's Department of Art has been shunted back into a wing of the Opera House, the Winged Monkeys having apparently been discarded by some later director who didn't see their appeal.

It's all so normal. I'm getting the feeling I'm reading a report, one where everything is ok and people are reporting that everything is ok.

And why shouldn't it be? It's not as though Vetinari was an evil tyrant or anything. He was a baron, and even a baron isn't really that powerful, when you get right down to it. Vetinari couldn't even stop the major landowners from trucking in food that contained rat tails. He couldn't do much of anything, really, that some halfway competent despot wouldn't be able to do, because he was a little old man who wasn't much of an anything himself, only a title.

In fact, the reason Vetinari was so popular, was that he had to cede most of the power to the merchants and the guild masters. Those were the people he had to deal with every day. And that was a pretty good thing, because it meant they stayed busy taking care of things.

So the idea that Vetinari would be a tyrannical god-king or even a reasonable king or mayor -- well, that's funny. He was just a little old man who needed his morning coffee or his glass of red wine as much as you or I do, only more so. And he would drink his coffee, and he would order his red wine, and like everyone else who lived in the city, he would watch the walls of Ankh-Morpork and see the city bustling and smoking like a teapot under pressure.

It's not as though anything was going to break the city, not as long as it stayed within its very well-defined parameters. And if it wasn't going to break the city then it wasn't going to disrupt the order of things, which is to say the order of the last few centuries.

The last few centuries! That sounds wrong, doesn't it? Like there's a place where the history goes to die. But that's exactly what Ankh-Morpork is, or has always been. Like a vast old cathedral, built in a period when people still believed in god, but now it's merely a fabled monument, so big that we don't even notice that it's still there. The people who are inside of it are no different from the people who believe in the cathedral, or perhaps even worse, because they think they're something else, like gods or as we say around here, "gods."

They live inside it, and the whole thing is really a game. A game, but a special game, the kind of game you can only play when you're really bored. Ankh-Morpork has all kinds of games. It has a lot of people who specialize in the game of cheating the tax man. It has a lot of people who specialize in the game of monkeying around with big machines. It has a lot of people who specialize in putting people in jail. And then there are the people who specialize in pranks and magic tricks.

They live inside Ankh-Morpork, where the games are, but not outside, where everything else is. One thing that's funny about a city that nobody visits is that it always pretends it has visitors, and one thing that's funny about a game that nobody plays is that it's always actively being played. The city loves and needs the games, and the games pay back with the most important thing that a city needs: a sense of purpose.

People don't play when they know they're being watched. They don't play when everything they do has been done by someone else before. And they don't need to, because it's all been done, right down to the giant redwoods in the industrial district and the swarms of wasps over their doors.

And it's a funny thing to ask whether the games are being played -- not by the people inside the city, but by the people outside it. Because a city is always a place where people live. It's a place they live in, and work in, and visit, and leave, and all the other things you do with a place. Even a city like Ankh-Morpork, which is just a collection of games, has people who live in it, and people who work in it, and in their own ways, people who visit it. Ankh-Morpork doesn't have to be visited -- the city will visit you, or maybe you'll be sent to it, and then you'll know, you'll say, "I'm in Ankh-Morpork."

So a city can have all kinds of people in it, and play all kinds of games, and they all fit right into the game that Ankh-Morpork plays.

And there's one thing about games, they always have rules. Some of them may change, but if you take all the games in Ankh-Morpork, all of the games people play, and look at them all, you'll find that there are common rules that make them what they are.

And if the city is a place where people live, and if its inhabitants are playing a game, and if the game that they're playing has its own rules, then it is, in some fundamental sense, a place of power. Not a lot of power, but some, like the ability to put an end to the games. And it's not as though you could ever do that, is it? No, the very thought would be absurd, as absurd as the thought that there would ever be more than one king or one god or one army.

And it's not as though the people who live in a place like Ankh-Morpork could ever really do anything about that, is it? No, of course not. The people who play the games live in the city, and the city tells the games what to do. The people who live in the city, they make the city real.

This Day in History: America the Beautiful

On this day in 1893, a professor stands atop Pikes Peak.[1] She is struck by the beauty around her and is inspired to write a poem. Her poem is later set to music. Today, we all know that song as “America the Beautiful.”

The song nearly became America’s national anthem. And it all started because a professor accepted a summer teaching position in Colorado.

That professor was Katharine Lee Bates, daughter of a minister and teacher. She’d been teaching at Wellesley for several years when she got an offer to teach at Colorado College. Little could she then know it, but the decision to take the summer teaching position would have far-reaching effects.

Bates was soon on a train, headed west. She visited Niagara Falls, and she saw the World Fair in Chicago. The scenery that flew past the train’s windows was stunning, and the trip made a deep impression on Bates. Already, she was seeing how great and beautiful and diverse the American countryside is.

The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-america-beautiful

#Suede - #BeautifulOnes Today, Nov 20, 2023 is #BeautifulDay!

Happy anniversary to Suede’s album, ‘Coming Up’. Released this week in 1996. #suede #londonsuede #comingup #trash #beautifulones #filmstar #lazy #saturdaynight #europeisourplayground #howardwakefield #petersaville

Du bist wunderschön – You are beautiful

on the mirror in a hotel bathroom is written with toothpaste: "You are beautiful" (in German)

Download image (via Dropbox) (without registration - keine Registrierung notwendig, ggf. das Fenster zum Registrieren rechts oben [x] wegklicken)

📸 dejarennae

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Andante Multilayerr Ankle Bracelet Kechain.

The Beautiful Ones

"Beautiful Ones" #beats #beatmaker #logicprox #macbookpro #soundcloud #DatBoyDubb #solrepublic #Prince #thegreatest #beautifulones https://www.instagram.com/p/Bvk_IoAB7zw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=18fo0ppt1muf1

Theo at @blueballs.ch yesterday #Hurts #HurtsBand #TheoHutchcraft #TheoHurts #BeautifulOnes #BlueBallsFestival (at Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre)