What Happens When...

...you walk with me?

Well, today, some people asked me for spare change, a church begun by the one-time Wimbledon Ladies Tennis Champion Margaret Court stopped me in a city square and asked if they could 'pray over me,' and an enormously wealthy Brahmin-looking local Indian doctor in a drop-top Aston Martin waved at me and smiled while stopped at a set of traffic lights.

Poor, hopeful, rich.

All normal. Nothing unusual out there among the human race -, at all.

As you well know - the 2019 Aston Martin Volante convertible

So just glossing briefly over what's happening with our silver-backed Utility Token (a couple of new guys came in from the Middle East again following some more on-line activity there), it's time to dive deep into the more interesting stuff:

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

...Changed his name, adding the Dutch form of 'van der' to his mother's maiden name 'Rohe.' He didn't use the German 'von' because there were at the time legal restrictions due to the implication of aristocratic ancestry - and I think, there may be still such restrictions. It happens to be that the maiden name of my own grandmother was 'von Warburg' and you will note that although the American banker Paul Warmburg claimed to be originally from a Venetian family he never used the 'von' title - which casts some doubt in my mind as to what he could have really been.

Seagram Building, NYC (Mies van der Rohe)

The Germans still to this day prefer to say 'von Farnburg' - meaning 'from a far place' - for the 'von Warburgs' who took up residences literally in a mountain with a similar sounding name 'Warberg,' the 'berg' part meaning snowy or a high place. And so there has always been duplicity about the names employed, remembering that after the fall of the Serene Republic, those Venetian families who moved into not easily accessible parts of Europe were still having to evade marauding gangs even in high mountain castles.

So why are we talking about Mies van der Rohe?

Because we are talking about the movie '9 1/2 Weeks' and those van der Rohe and also Le Corbusier design artifacts featured in some scenes in there, and also about suits by Pal Zileri.

Huh?

Oh yeah.

'Pal Zileri' - who make incredibly good high quality fabrics and then design them into top notch modern suits mostly for men - is named after the 'Palazzo Zileri' designed by the famed designer of so many Venetian galleries and courtyards and 'palatial' buildings, Andrea Palladio. An Italian Renaissance poet - Trissino - gave Andrea the surname 'Palladio' after the artifact which Diomedes and Odysseus stole from Troy without which the Greeks could never have defeated the Trojans.

Le Corbusier design house Perriand LC4 chair

Oh yes. The 'Palladium' was a small statue depicting Athene and her human friend Pallas and probably Hermes as well, of which all ancient Greek writers used the following exact words: 'on the safe-keeping of which the safety of the city was thought to depend.'

There are a lot of these types of things, in various cultures - there is the Kursk Root Icon (which is supposed to be in New York City, I think, these days...) and there are rocks from space inside the Kaaba in Mecca, and there are similar anthropomorphic 'stones' in the Hindu cult of Tara-Tarini (Sanskrit meaning 'crossed' or 'star-crossed'), to say nothing of the infamous Temple of Artemis meteorite stones at Ephesus.

Poor, hopeful, rich.

You think any of these human beings actually knows what is going on?

The Christian-type people told me Jesus died for my sins. And that is why He died; according to them.

But I tell you, He died because human beings couldn't damn well see what they were looking at.