THE MARK OF ZORRO




The Zorro character was inspired by a real-life 19th-century outlaw called Joaquin Murrieta Carrillo, (1829 – July 25, 1853), whose gang was responsible for a series of cattle-rustling, robberies, kidnappings and murders during the California Gold Rush of the early 1850s. There is scant historical evidence Murrieta was anything other than an opportunist and a criminal, but as early as 1854 he had been turned into a romantic figure and a champion of the people in a best-selling book.
The popular legend said that he was a Sonoran forty-niner, a vaquero and a gold miner and peace-loving man driven to seek revenge when he and his brother were falsely accused of stealing a mule. A posse hung his brother, horsewhipped Joaquin and gang raped his wife who then died in his arms.
Swearing revenge, Joaquin hunted down each member of the posse and killed them. The state of California then offered a reward of up to $5,000 for Joaquin "dead or alive." Murrieta quickly became a symbol of Mexican resistance to the influx of Anglo-Americans into California, and equally his apprehension became a priority and a point of pride for the leadership of the young state.
And that’s where the legend ends.
In 1853, he was captured and killed in an ambush laid by members of a new law enforcement agency the California Rangers, laid by Ranger Harry Love, who brought in a human head claimed to be Murrieta’s. The head, along with the hand of one of his companions, was pickled in brandy and displayed all over California. In 1879, O. P. Stidger was reported to have heard Murrieta's sister say that the displayed head was not her brother's and there were numerous sightings reported of Murrieta as a middle aged man. His preserved head was destroyed during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.


A year after his death, book entitled The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta: The Celebrated California Bandit by John Rollin Ridge appeared. The Ridge dime novel contributed to the legend, especially after a portion of Ridge's novel was reprinted in 1858 in the California Police Gazette. This story was picked up and subsequently translated into French. The French version was translated into Spanish by Roberto Hyenne, who took Ridge's original story and changed every "Mexican" reference to "Chilean".
In 1919, Johnston McCulley, inspired by the John Ridge novel, was inspired  to create  his fictional character Don Diego de la Vega—Zorro. (Zorro is the Spanish word for fox).
McCulley produced The Mark of Zorro which was originally published as The Curse of Capistrano, in 1919 , as a serialized novel  It was republished as a book, in 1924, under the title The Mark of Zorro.
The book tells of the story of Californio Don Diego Vega, alias 'Señor Zorro', in the company of his deaf and mute servant Bernardo and his lover Lolita Pulido, as they oppose the villainous Captain Ramon and Sgt. Gonzales in early 19th-century California during the era of Mexican rule, before it became a U.S. state. It is set amongst the historic Spanish missions in California, pueblos such as San Juan Capistrano, California, and the rural California countryside.
McCulley's book drew the attention of then super star Douglas Fairbanks Sr, who was the driving force behind the movie version, the first movie version, which came out in 1920. Fairbanks and the production team changed the title from McCulley's original, The Curse of Capistrano, to The Mark of Zorro, and introduced many of the elements that were to become part and parcel of the Zorro persona - the Z-shaped sword strokes, Zorro's habit of slicing candles and leaving them burning. McCulley's Zorro wore a wide sombrero, in contrast to Fairbanks' small flat-brimmed hat and the screen legend was born.

'Sometimes'


'Sometimes'

By Sheenagh Pugh




Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.





Sheenagh Pughon her poem;


“It was originally written about a sportsman who had a drug problem and it expressed the hope that he might eventually get over it - because things do go right sometimes, but not very often... But it isn't anywhere near skilfull or subtle enough and I would cheerfully disown it, if people didn't now and then write to me saying it had helped them. By the way, you might also care to know that I originally wrote "the sun will sometimes melt a field of snow" (the sportsman's drug of choice was cocaine). But I mistyped "sorrow" for "snow" and then decided I liked that better. I believe in letting the keyboard join in the creative process now and then.
I think most people read it wrong. When read carefully, it says sometimes things go right, but not that often, and usually only when people make some kind of effort in that direction. So it isn't blithely and unreasonably optimistic. But a lot of people read it that way, which means I didn't write it well enough - the writer can always make the readers see what he wants them to if he does the job right.
 Also I know, because language is my job, that I have written poems in which the use of language is simply a lot more interesting and imaginative than it is there. So it bugs me now and then that this is the only one a lot of people think I've ever written. Same as Jenny Joseph is fed up of "Warning", which is really quite slight in comparison with many of hers but again is the one she is known by. I'm not letting "Sometimes" be printed any more except for some charitable purposes and in particular I won't let it be used by exam boards, which should make some of you happy!”

American Folk: Dave Van Ronk was one of the most important figures in the Greenwich Village folk-music scene of the 1960s. There's a street in the West Village of New York named after him.

“The musical mayor of MacDougal Street"

Van Ronk, a tall, garrulous hairy man of three quarters, or, more accurately, three fifths Irish descent. Topped by light brownish hair and a leonine beard, which he smoothed down several times a minute, he resembled an unmade bed strewn with books, record jackets, pipes, empty whiskey bottles, lines from obscure poets, finger picks, and broken guitar strings. He was [Dylan]'s first New York guru. Van Ronk was a walking museum of the blues. Through an early interest in jazz, he had gravitated toward black music—its jazz pole, its jug-band and ragtime center, its blues bedrock... his manner was rough and testy, disguising a warm, sensitive core. Van Ronk retold the blues intimately... for a time, his most dedicated follower was Dylan. Critic Robert Shelton







Antonio Carlos Jobim

Antonio Carlos Jobim with Sinatra


Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (January 25, 1927 – December 8, 1994), also known as Tom Jobim was a Brazilian composer, pianist, songwriter, arranger and singer. Widely considered as one of the great exponents of Brazilian music, Jobim internationalized bossa nova and, with the help of important American artists, merged it with jazz in the 1960s to create a new sound with remarkable popular success. 









Clever shooting

Public Park, Cleveland Ohio, Photo by Robert Frank, 1955

Neptune by Ignatius van Logteren (1720).


Neptune (Latin: Neptūnus) is the god of freshwater and the sea in Roman religion. He is the counterpart of the Greek god Poseidon. In the Greek-influenced tradition, Neptune is the brother of Jupiter and Pluto; the brothers preside over the realms of Heaven, the earthly world, and the Underworld. Salacia is his wife. Neptune was likely associated with fresh water springs before the sea.