Claude Lyles Artworks / Estudio Cielo Azul LLC: Virtue is a mean between too much and too little, a Golden Mean so to say, per Aristotle

Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida.

I am making more use of links, music and visual. Click on them and then you might have a second link to search. Some locations, such as YouTube generate revenue for your "free" viewing by running ads, so be patient. On occasion there is a "skip ad" button. Sometimes it will load and start when you go there, sometimes you need to click on the white arrow in the red box.

I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only five have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember: BELOW THE FOLD is where (most) of the controversial stuff is placed. Sometimes stuff is a hybrid, say humor and political. Nevertheless, I do this blog for me, it clears my mind and then I do it to share stuff I think is interesting, fun, needed to be considered, etc. I like, also, the feedback I receive, either on a specific article or the concept in general. Right now there are about 70 of you who receive this directly. Claude

ART:

Left is 16 x 12” oil on wrapped canvas near Garden of the Gods; tap on to enlarge; center is 10 x 8” oil on canvas board of a small island here at Lakes Park; right is 11 x 14” oil on canvas board from photo I took last winter in N Cheyenne Park in Colorado Springs, CO.

Well, I’ll keep it in the family, L made up this bouquet with flowers from Trader Joe

OTHERS:

And, this is BIG…

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Oil painting by 21 year old Kyle Ma😳

FLORIDA:

Evening walk, there were two rainbows, one ever so slight to the left, flowers out my front door.

L working on a puzzle, “finished”, I should say.

Morning walk

Car section:

Two different stops running errands one day last week, each parked next to me…embarrassing.

Jag

Sting Ray

NOT Florida section but you gotta go…

ARCITECTURE:
LINK TO 14 Most Beautiful Cathedrals In The World

My favorite is St Chapelle in Paris, it is like being inside a crown of jewels and as the sunlight changes the projected colors all around you move. sainte-chapelle.Fr for the website.

VOLUNTEER - LOOK THEM UP TO SEE IF YOU HAVE A FACILITY IN YOUR CITY…
info@gigisplayhouse.org

READING:

I read…Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate😬

From a WW II non-fiction on spycraft I just finished.

My fourth read over the past 12 months of WW II spy craft. This one was totally different as it focused on one 22 year-old’s experience over the war years on behalf, primarily, of Englands war effort. Don’t be put off by the 600 pages. Chapters are short, like vignettes, short, like diary entries. A little flippant. But, in the end as the war effort declines he brings you current on the status or obit of their agents who infiltrated the European theatre. He is humble enough to point out he is in an office, they are the one’s in danger, and most, if they live long enough go back and forth time and time again. “What happens if the agent is caught” he was asked…that’s the cyanide in the title. The tortures are horrific. The German soldiers inhuman. A female agent was captured as she dropped into France - the “welcoming party of 17 all raped her before killing her. One woman had first a fingernail per day pulled out until she would break, not doing so, they then removed each toe nail, a day at a time. The starvation, the hanging by limbs until they suffocated or limbs dislocated and not repaired. One woman’s fingers were all cut off - look down at your hands and picture all of the fingers chopped off, no pain killer, no follow up to prevent infection; and on and on and on. The average lifespan of a wireless operator dropped into France who transmitted the agents’ message was…6 weeks. Still, they volunteered to fight the Axis. So, a German agent was caught in England…they flipped him to spy on Germany, trained him in England’s codes and dropped him into Germany. They gave him fake codes to trick the Germans into waste their time trying to figure out the codes and made sure they got them off his body when he had an “accident” during the drop. He wasn’t as smart as he thought. One thing to remember when you read these spy histories…can you believe anything you read? Some info is classified, some items are to mislead, even after scores of years. Still, it is interesting to learn how things operated and what was going on at x point in the battle.

Don’t be surprised if the next blog is in code 😅

HUMOR:
GOOD NEWS!!!
LINK TO Babylon Bee: Facebook-to-scan-prayers-for-misinformation-before-passing-them-on-to-God

TAKE THE TIME TO WATCH, about 8 minutes
Funny but also observant - and I am not a fan of Bill Maher - he even makes fun of his studio audience:
LINK TO Woke Summer Olympics

From WSJ

From Babylon Bee headlines

Babylon Bee hits the target

SAD funny…they’re idiots…

I FOUND THIS TO BE INTERESTING:
THEY CALL IT HOMELAND SECURITY - BTW won’t see this on CNN, etc…
Link to article on flying illegals out of Abeline TX, quietly

I actually do this by praying (especially) morning prayer in Liturgy of the Hours…
LINK TO: ten-blessings-that-flow-from-praying-the-psalms - that’s Old Testament and OT to be fulfilled by Jesus

Interested in the link between Love
And Truth? (I would add Beauty)
THE LINK for a brief but insightful article - give it a chance
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From Babylon Bee parody site

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Bishop Barron says…

NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME JOHN 6:41-51

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus offers himself as food for the soul. There is a great truth revealed in the bread of life discourse. It is the law of the gift. This personal, incarnating God wants to be eaten and drunk, to be radically and fully for the other.

Why were the gods of the ancient world so popular? Because they were projections of ourselves—vain, arrogant, resentful, violent. This means that they put little moral pressure on us. They were frightening but not morally demanding.

But this God who shows that he is totally love and who wants us in relation to him, to eat and drink him in, is the God who wants us to be like him. As he is food and drink for the world, so we must be food and drink for the world. As he gave himself away utterly, so we must give ourselves away utterly, without clinging to the goods, honors, or values of the world—all those things that aggrandize the ego.

The personal God, the incarnate God, the God of the gift. How compelling. How deeply challenging. How will you decide?
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Isn’t it true? These after all are children, they just haven’t yet been born.

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THE LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE: learning-from-romeo-and-juliet
A sample… “Traditionally, there are two interpretations of Shakespeare’s play. The first, and most prevalent one today, is that Romeo and Juliet are lovers in a most innocent manner. The tragedy is that, because of the hatred between their families, their love ends in heartbreaking death. But Shakespeare’s intent is to demonstrate that irrational hatred and irrational love both lead to death. Romeo and Juliet, for example, pursue their love in a mostly erotic, unrestrained fashion – they cannot wait to jump into bed together. They display no prudential or temperate self-control, and so their impetuous pursuit of a disordered love leads to their tragic demise.”

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Let’s be honest here, folks

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2 Letters to WSJ

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I don’t want COVID, however,

So, Babylon Bee parodied…

😅

FINALLY *******************************
When you pray: pray for all who have NOT YET come to know the love of God - some would call them unbelievers. If for no other reason than to protect you and make your life easier - think if all whom you interacted believed in the love that God has for us!, But too, for them, so they know what you have come to know.

BELOW THE FOLD: WARNING:

Pay attention you…

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Remember when the frontal-lobe patient said…

He has absolutely no clue

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The Sayings Of Senator John Kennedy graduated Magna Cum Laude from Vanderbilt. He has a Law degree from University of Virginia and a degree from Oxford in England. He is no country bumpkin; he is very insightful and funny.

His comment about Cuomo lecturing us.
"It is like a frog calling you ugly."

"This election in GA will be the most important in history, you have nothing to worry about unless you are a tax payer, parent, gun owner, cop, person of faith, or an unborn baby!"

"You can only be young once, but you can always be immature "

"Americans are thinking, there are some good members of Congress but we can’t figure out what they are good for. Others are thinking, how did these morons make it through the birth canal."

"Always Follow your heart ...but take your brains with you."

"The short answer is ‘No.’ The long answer is ‘Hell No.’"

"When the Portland mayor's IQ gets up to 75, he oughta sell." :)

"I keep trying to see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's point of view, but I can't seem to get my head that far up my ass."

"Go sell your crazy somewhere else. ..we are all stocked up here."

"She has a Billy goat brain and a mockingbird mouth!"

" I trust Middle Eastern countries as much as gas station sushi, with the exception being Israel."

"You can get a goat to a climb tree, but you’d be better off hiring a squirrel."

"Don't stand between a dog and a fire hydrant."

"Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) says as government shutdown looms.

"It appears he might do the right thing, but only when supervised and cornered like a rat."

"This is why aliens won't talk to us."

"Democrats are running around like they found a hair in their biscuit."

"Chuck Schumer just moo’s and follows Nancy Pelosi into the cow chute."

"Just because you CAN sing doesn’t mean you should."

On Nancy Pelosi, "She can strut sitting down!"

– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy

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