Well, semantically there is in the sense that one might say that after life there is death, but I get where you are coming from and agree with you.
The wishful, or religious, believe that there is something akin to life, or consciousness, in the afterlife, which is like saying there is life in the afterlife which is at best contradictory and/or tautological i.e. redundant!
Let's use musical lyrics as our guide.
"Life is life, killed by death we, most likely, thereafter, never abide!"
Finis, this is the end, my trusted friend, the end!
Re: Departed during 2021
Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2021 10:13 am
by tango15
I would take issue with both of you on that statement. A number of things have occurred in my life regarding the deceased, for which I have no logical explanation and which have led me to believe there is another form of existence which we don't understand.
I wonder what jimtherev has to say about the afterlife?
Tributes have been paid to the former children’s TV presenter Rick Jones, best known for hosting Play School and Fingerbobs, who has died from cancer. He was 84.
A generation of children grew up with Jones on TV, as he appeared on a variety of BBC children’s shows in the 1970s. His death was announced on Friday.
He began his career as part of the team fronting Play School, a daily programme for pre-school-age children, which featured him singing songs and playing his guitar.
He then was the mime artist “Yoffy” behind Fingerbobs. The 10-minute episodes featured paper finger-puppet characters, including Fingermouse and Gulliver the seagull, in different scenarios. There were only 13 episodes of the series, but they were repeated regularly for more than a decade.
Advertisement
Jones was born in February 1937 in London, Ontario in Canada. He moved to the US in later life, living in San Francisco with his wife, Valerie Neale.
A keen musician, he had success as a frontman and songwriter for the British country rock band Meal Ticket. Using his musical talents, Jones was one of the presenters who presented We Want to Sing.
Barry Ryan, who has died aged 72 after complications from a lung disorder, spent the last 40 years of his professional life as a fashion and portrait photographer, working for magazines such as Italian Vogue and David Bailey’s Ritz. But most of his fame derived from his brief, if meteoric, success as a pop star and teen idol in the mid to late 1960s.
With his identical twin, Paul – at 16, they were not much older than their fans – in 1965 he formed the duo Paul and Barry Ryan. The pair belted out catchy, dramatic love ballads, songs that drifted around the UK Top 20, bobbing tantalisingly close to the big time until, in 1968, they had a hit single with Eloise, and with it the perils and pleasures of stardom.
By 1968 Paul had retired from the stage, leaving Barry to front the song solo. Paul had written the track for his brother’s deep, soulful voice; in later life, Barry would tour with Eloise as a tribute to Paul, who died from lung cancer in 1992.
Eloise is mysterious. Its collision of styles – Puccini meets gospel meets Broadway musical – was part of what was being manufactured as “new” in pop. Not everybody warmed to it, with one critic describing the song as “sounding like a man being strangled by a cat”. The orchestral textures and structural intricacies were clearly influenced by Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park; and its “popera” owes much to Phil Spector’s Wagnerian overlays on tracks such as Walking in the Rain. Hyper-melodramatic content with soaring male vocals were in vogue. Yet none of this accounts for the enduring allure of Eloise.
No one can agree whether it is a sugary madeleine of a song about a man’s idealisation of an unobtainable woman, or a melodrama of dark obsession and savage yearning. But everyone does agree that the vocal style and the power of Barry’s voice carries the song. “Singing from the heart,” one critic noted. Barry performed the recording in two takes, with a high degree of professionalism in the production. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, on their way to founding Led Zeppelin, were two of the session musicians.
Years later, in 1986, when the punk rock band the Damned made their cover of Eloise, Peter Barnes, their music publisher, remembered: “Dave Vanian adored the song and mirrored the vocal performance as a tribute.” Barry, in the audience, was heard to say, “I like their version more than my own.”
In 1969, Barry was injured in a studio fire in Munich. Although he was not physically scarred it had a psychological impact, which may have increased his dependency on alcohol. In 1986 both brothers entered rehab. Barry never drank again.
Barry’s life had its share of Dionysian excess – parties at his flat in Eaton Place were renowned; Jimi Hendrix spent his first night in London there. But he never forgot his roots. Born in Leeds, he was the son of Marion (nee Ryan) and Fred Sapherson. Fred left when the boys were two, and Barry and Paul were brought up by “Nana”, their adored grandmother, watched over by three loving “sisters” – technically their aunts, but who were roughly the same age as the twins – while Marion, who had had her boys as a teenager, pursued her singing career. She became a successful performer, rising to prominence in the 1950s with the band leader Ray Ellington, and was a regular on the television musical quiz show Spot the Tune.
By the time the twins were 11, Marion was earning enough to buy Nana a big house and to pay for boarding school. Barry passed the 11-plus to the local grammar but Paul did not, so the pair went instead to board at the fee-paying Fulneck school in Pudsey, outside Leeds. At 16 Marion sent them to a kibbutz in Israel, where they lasted two weeks and were later discovered singing in a Tel Aviv nightclub. Now they knew what they wanted. Through Marion’s husband-to-be, the impresario Harold Davison, Paul and Barry signed with Decca.
By the mid-70s the twins had disappeared from the music scene and Barry turned to his lifelong passion, photography. His friendship with the German photojournalist Christa Peters exerted a strong influence and his photographic sensibility developed into an unusual fusion of self-expression and documentation. It surprised no one but him that when he submitted six pictures to the National Portrait Gallery, all were bought.
In 1976 Barry married Miriam, daughter of Sultan Ibrahim of Johor. They divorced amicably in 1980. Barry had a talent for not falling out with people – and that stood him in good stead when, after Paul’s death, he published a memorial book of 80 portraits, donating profits to Cancer Research. Everyone he contacted agreed to pose, including Sting, Paul McCartney, Björk and Stephen Hawking.
He also photographed Margaret Thatcher, who had left office by this time. Mid shoot, noticing the hem of her curtains was adrift, she fetched a needle and thread. Without turning around when he moved his camera, she scolded him: “Don’t even think about it, Mr Ryan.” Thatcher subsequently helped Barry secure a portrait with Ronald Reagan.
Sadly Barry did not live to see the release of Edgar Wright’s film Last Night in Soho, partly set in the 60s and with a soundtrack of the period. Wright was not born when Eloise was first a hit but he knew the version by the Damned. “When I heard the original by Barry Ryan I fell even more in love with the song. I’d always wanted to use it in a film.” The song so perfectly matched the tone of his movie that Wright called his main character Eloise.
Barry is survived by his wife, Christine (nee Goodliff), whom he married in 1995, their children, Jack and Sophia, his stepson, David, and his niece, Paul’s daughter, Paige.
Insufficient mention that his mother was the very attractive songbird Marion Ryan, who was a very popular singer in the 1950s and early 60s. My dear old dad used to fancy her like mad. I think you can be forgiven though, because, as they say on Pointless, "It was before my time."
Insufficient mention that his mother was the very attractive songbird Marion Ryan, who was a very popular singer in the 1950s and early 60s. My dear old dad used to fancy her like mad. I think you can be forgiven though, because, as they say on Pointless, "It was before my time." download Marion Ryan.png
I was not aware of that tango15...
You have kindly let me off on the basis of my "youth". It is not often that I am able to say that these days!
I don't believe in a grey bearded old man sitting in the sky and the pearly gates, but like tango15 I have experienced a few things that defy rational explanation, so keep an open mind.
I don't believe in a grey bearded old man sitting in the sky and the pearly gates, but like tango15 I have experienced a few things that defy rational explanation, so keep an open mind.
No desire to denigrate or deny other people's experiences and I do, not always successfully, try and keep an open mind FD2. Maybe I should start a thread on this subject, but given this subject's proximity to religion, and heeding the old advice about eschewing, comments about politics, religion and sex, I am apt to tread cautiously.
Given that both you and tango15, both posters for whom I have the utmost respect, have had experience of something or things, that defy rational or easy explanation, I must say I am intrigued. I guess that tango15, like you, is unlikely to harbour a belief in grey haired old men either.
Re: Departed during 2021
Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2021 2:08 am
by TheGreenGoblin
Of course there are often a lot of grey haired old men in the sky, but I prefer to call them pilots!
Re: Departed during 2021
Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2021 5:10 pm
by ricardian
Although I've been a church organist for umpteen years I always had serious doubts about any sort of afterlife, especially one with goodies upstairs in comfy chairs playing harps and baddies in the cellar with no chairs, playing banjos or accordions.
However, shortly after my wife died I was sat in the kitchen and noticed a little wren sat on top of the door. How it got into the house I know not, there were no open doors or windows. I moved slowly and opened all the kitchen windows but the bird sat there for almost 20 minutes, eventually flying away through one of the windows. The wren was always our favourite little bird, both of use being old enough to remember seeing it on the reverse of the farthing coin. Nothing like that has happened before or since.
(CNN)Roughly 24 hours after the death of Colin Powell, Donald Trump proved, again, that he is utterly incapable of empathy, grace or even common decency.
"Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media," Trump said in a statement released Tuesday morning. "Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!"
"But anyway, may he rest in peace!" Yes, Trump really said that.
The gulf between Trump's statement and that of other former presidents on Powell's passing is simply massive.
"Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Colin Powell," said George W. Bush. "He was a great public servant, starting with his time as a soldier during Vietnam."
"General Powell was an exemplary soldier and an exemplary patriot," said Barack Obama. "He was at the center of some of the most consequential events of our lifetimes."
"He lived the promise of America, and spent a lifetime working to help our country, especially our young people, live up to its own ideals and noblest aspirations at home and around the world," said Bill Clinton.
What Trump's statement should remind us is that this is a man uniquely self-obsessed -- and without any ability to see beyond
Powell was openly critical of Trump -- he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 -- and of the dark direction the billionaire businessman was leading the country. And so, Trump saw Powell's death as an opportunity to get back at him -- and took it. This is, in a word, classless. In two words: Utterly classless.
It also puts to lie Trump's regularly repeated assertion that he loves the military more than any other president has ever loved the military.
Powell was an highly decorated soldier and served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. While there's no question that his argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as a way to justify the second war in Iraq was a stain on his legacy, it's just as clear that this is a man who gave the vast majority of his adult life to service to the country.
No one should be surprised by this latest degradation of what it means to be a president by Trump. He spent four years in office defining the job downward. That some people will applaud Trump's trolling of a dead man is, perhaps, his most toxic legacy.
"but anyway, may he rest in peace!"
Doubt many will be saying that about Donnie.
PP
Re: Departed during 2021
Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:29 pm
by Undried Plum
A murderous bastard.
How dare he ask to be rest in peace?
Race, or class, he was a mass murderer.
I, for one, will not weep for him. Nor will I weep for the death of his bitch who mourned none for the deaths for his/her child victims and their families.
May they both roast in their religious Hell, whenever and forever that time may be.
****'em.
Re: Departed during 2021
Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:40 pm
by Undried Plum
Addendum to my previous post:
I recognise that he was as clever about his War Crimes as was Albert Speer in his/their aftermath.
Just as evil; just as clever.
A slime of an apologize, in both in individuals who made the same slimy "apology" for participating in their version of the human race to its destruction in their own evil destructional intent.
Very nasty people, who did a lot of very nasty things to an awful lot of people.
Lots of medals, of course. That's the way such things work. Especially nowadays.
