Beeville Memories An entertaining bit of history by resident Yvonne Hastings on the website for the town of Beeville, Texas. If I were teaching a writing workshop this fall (but I'm not), I would use this as a splendid example of the use of vivid detail. Seriously, great storytelling.
Everyone loves mysteries, especially when they are of the Egyptian kind. Cagliostro, the High Priest of Humbug, knew this when he evolved the Egyptian Rite of Masonry, in the eighteenth century.
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| Henry Ridgely Evans |
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| Urim and Thummim source: www.cmmayo.com |
Urim and Thummim
Hebrew term that means “Lights and Perfections.” An instrument prepared of God to assist man in obtaining revelation from the Lord and in translating languages.. .Using a Urim and Thummim is the special prerogative of a seer, and it would seem reasonable that such instruments were used from the time of Adam. . . . Joseph Smith used it in translating the Book of Mormon and in obtaining other revelations.It was in upstate New York in 1823 that Joseph Smith received the vision of the Angel Moroni, who revealed to him the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, which appeared with the Urim and Thummim,
two stones in silver bows—and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, [that] constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim—deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted ‘seers’ in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book. …In the article "Joseph Smith's Translation of the Book of Mormon," Stephen D. Ricks notes that Smith used a "seer stone" he had found, in addition to the spectacles or "Nephite interpreters" (that is, Urim and Thummim). Nephites refers to the language of the descendants of Nephi, son of the Jewish prophet Lehi in the Book of Mormon, who (so the Mormons believe) colonized America after 600 B.C. Ricks quotes W.S. Pender, who interviewed Joseph Smith's brother in 1891:
Among other things we inquired minutely about the Urim and Thummim and the breastplate. We asked him what was meant by the expression "two rims of a bow," which held the former. He said a double silver bow was twisted into the shape of the figure eight, and the two stones were placed literally between the two rims of a bow. At one end was attached a rod which was connected with the outer edge of the right shoulder of the breast-plate. By pressing the head a little forward, the rod held the Urim and Thummim before the eyes much like a pair of spectacles. A pocket was prepared in the breastplate on the left side, immediately over the heart. When not in use the Urim and Thummim was placed in this pocket, the rod being of just the right length to allow it to be so deposited. This instrument could, however, be detached from the breastplate and his brother said Joseph often wore it detached when away from home, but always used it in connection with the breastplate when receiving official communications, and usually so when translating as it permitted him to have both hands free to hold the plates.
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| Sara Mansfield Taber Creativity Coaching |
This is my invitation to you: Come and talk about the life you want to have and the work you want to create. We will work together to make your visions real.
Sessions may include discussion of such issues as:
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+ life transitions
+ child-rearing and parenting
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. . . The army, and its powerful general Victoriano Huerta, veteran of years of smashing campesino uprisings, turned out to be a lynchpin in sustaining and, in the end, destroying Madero’s government. Apparently, if anything bothered General Huerta’s conscience, he grabbed it by the throat and drowned it in drink. He was famous for his drinking jags; he would die in early 1916, if we are to believe the U.S. Army surgeons at Fort Bliss, and I don’t see why not, of cirrhosis of the liver.
It was General Huerta who had escorted Don Porfirio and his family to their ship in Veracruz. Huerta who, on the orders of interim President de la Barra in 1911, and much to Madero’s disgust, swept into Zapatista territory, burning villages and executing prisoners; Huerta who, now on orders of President Madero, squashed the Orozquista rebellion in the north in 1912. Huerta, who ordered Pancho Villa’s execution for stealing a horse; Huerta who, grudgingly, obeyed when President Madero ordered that Villa be sent to prison instead.
General Manuel Mondragón
And let’s not forget General Manuel Mondragón, lean and mean, a gunslinger out of Central Casting with those sludgy eyebrows. Artillery expert and machine-gun designer, General Mondragón was Porfirio Díaz’s weapons procurer, indignant that, thanks to Madero’s head of secret service, Felix Sommerfeld, the bulk of that lucrative business had been taken from his French friends and given to the Germans. (“His feverish eyes hide a fierce inner fire, noted the poet José Juan Tablada. “What can this fire be but burning ambition for power, control, and despotism?”)
