Monthly Archives: July 2013

We shift to the country for our final round of Liquor shots, beginning with the All Saints Church at Alton Priors, near the famous Alton Barnes white horse and also The Barge, the traditional hub of all crop circle gossip. In the picture I was trying to emulate the angle of that used in the Lis 08 collage. Compare with here.

Sarsen stones in a field just east of the church. There are two trap doors within the church itself, one containing a sarsen stone with a prominent “eye”, and the other only cement. I provide pictures of these here.

Closeup of one of the field sarsen stones.

The only shot I took of the very peculiar brass plaque within the church, basis for yet another Lis collage: Lis 09, the final in the series. Much better photos of the shrine (i.e, not taken through a window) are found here.

Adam’s Grave taken near a path crossing near All Saints. I like this shot quite a bit.

Pool table within The Barge. The crop circle depicted had already been brought up in this blog before my trip to England in a post called “The Hole, Other Considerations” from June 14th. Like the very recent 6/21/13 crop circle I was able to first view from the very same Adam’s Grave seen in the photo above, this particular crop circle, described in Michael Glickman’s blog as a “lid”, is one of those more uncommon two parters, and also occurred in the very same field as the 6/21/13 creation. During one of my many visits to The Barge, I watched as a pub regular named Mad Pete reinforced the outline of this crop circle design with a felt pen. Mad Pete has a whole wall devoted to his eclectic photography just the other side of the bar. Home page of The Barge is here.

In 1997, an artist named Vince Palmer created the amazing ceiling mural in the side room containing the pool table, which he apparently also touches up now and then according to The Barge Inn main page. Below is pictured a small section of the work, showing a UFO (?) hovering above the Avebury rock circle.

The very same crop circle design seen on the pool table is also used in an article about the subject, pinned to the wall of the pool room. I’ll have to look up more information about the “Fields of Gold” article soon, and I want to bring up that Milk Hill lid formation again in that and probably other contexts. Is it the symbolic lid to The Hole?

Interesting:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2020910/Crop-circles-Now-ET-little-help-mircowaves-GPS.html

Compare the “lid” crop circle with the Croppie beer logo, a local brew created by Honeystreet Ales.

And now what might be the final Liquor shot posted to any of my blogs… sigh! This is another article on the wall of The Barge’s pool room or ceiling mural room if you will, a quite disparaging one concerning rock star Reg Presley, lead singer of The Troggs, who was a frequent visitor to The Barge and who championed an alien source for crop circles. Presley died in February of this year from lung cancer at the age of 71. A better article should be pinned to the wall to honor him.*

—–

* How about this one:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/wild-things-down-in-the-cornfields-reg-presley-thinks-that-somebody-out-there-is-trying-to-tell-us-something-martin-whittaker-meets-the-trogg-turned-cropwatcher-1422340.html

I plan to write a 2 part travelogue about my 2 week stay in Wiltshire, one for each week. The first week I stayed in Devizes on the west side of the heart of crop circle country. The second week I joined B. and K. (wife and best friend) on the east side, occupying a rental unit near Marlborough. The summary of the story is that Devizes is most likely *not* an option to stay for longer periods of time after I’m/we’re retired, unlike what I thought before the vacation. But the good news is that Marlborough still seems like a very decent option, with a number of advantages over Devizes and any other nearby locations such as Pewsey or Calne. A drawback, however, might be the additional cost of a rental in Marlborough.

But back to the beginning of the trip to start the text for these batch of photos, and some sad news. My camera *died in England*. Yes, the one I affectionately named Liquor (have to ask B. again about the name origin), and with which I took not some but *all* pictures for both this blog and its 4 1/2 year predecessor, the Baker Blinker Blog, has finally given up the ghost. The final photo of the Final Liquor Shots, 02 entry that pairs with this particular post is the last I took with the camera, period, seeming to add to its significance.

We start in Devizes and the cemetery that played a quite prominent role in the beginning collages of the Lis series from Feb/March of this year, a series which *greatly* aided my decision making in Devizes especially, and might have even saved this leg of the trip, period. This is the cemetery of St. John’s church, very near where I stayed with [TV] above the Hound and Hares bar near the center of town. This particular tombstone, as described in Brian Robert Marshall photo of the same here, is called the Millenium momument. From his caption:

The monument is eleven years old and is starting to weather nicely so blend with the rather older tombstones and graves. Visible are symbols and scenarios mostly but not necessarily associated with the town. These include a hot air balloon, a helicopter, a tractor, a lollipop lady, a train leaving a tunnel, a canal boat and a Nativity scene.

I like the way both Marshall’s photo linked to above and my own photo have people in the background with their backs to the camera. Marshall’s photo was used in Lis 01, along with another shot of the Millenium momument from a different angle, a couple of his photos of St. John’s church, and a pyramid shaped sculpture more in the middle of Devizes. In the Lis 01 collage, all these shots and various angles are smushed together a bit like a cubist painting to create a certain Essence of Devizes as a whole, or at least that was the seeming objective.

It’s possible that this particular photo of mine, and others here, might be used in new collages, as some kind of extension of the Gilatona Lis series. If so, what will they be called??

My second photo from this post is another reinterpretation of a Brian R. Marshall photo used in a Lis collage, this time Lis 04, which is paired with Lis 03 to make one of the two diptychs of the series. My interpretation of this diptych appears here. I’ll just let interested readers peruse that interpetation post if they will, but one thing I want to point out here upon studying my own photo and Brian’s similar one of the blocked up train tunnel: there is *absolutely nothing* in my photo that resembles in any way the 2 connected figures I identified in the center of Marshall’s photo — nothing. Given what happened to me at almost *this very spot* during my stay in Devizes (more on that later), I can’t help but come to the conclusion that these images, this Green Man effect, is actually represents some kind of psychic wormhole into another dimension. Again from the interpretion oriented post linked to above, I directly associate this effect with the Cygnus X-1 black hole.

For some reason now, I’m picking up on a connection between the woman with her back to us in Lis 01 — and who is doubled with the man appearing in Lis 02 and Lis 03/04 (they appear together in Lis 02) — and the Manchester Museum statuette that mysteriously circled around in its cabinet (or coffer) to turn its *back* on the person writing this museum blog entry. This mystery is described some in the Diamond Too post just above. Note especially the similarity of the stacked set of symbols on the back of the Manchester statuette (http://egyptmanchester.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/feb-2013-007.jpg) with the similarly stacked symbols of the Millenium monumet the woman with her back to us in Lis 01 is obviously associated. Also note in this collage I combined *two B. R. Marshall shots* of this Devizes cemetery monument from different angles — mimicking Marshall’s “spinning” around the monument to create his particular set of photos concerning it. The more I look at the two things, statuette and cemetery monument, the more I think they must be linked in this way. But how???

Let’s move on for now, and leave that new mystery for a future post (!) We come to a shot into the interior of the Wiltshire crop circle country “Hole” I’ve described in a recent series of post; best to start with The Hole, Part 03 on this subject. Unfortunately I really didn’t get to explore the interior of The Hole at any length due to time constraints and also the relative remoteness of the thing. The shot comes from just south of the Cherhill white horse, which I hiked up to on my second day in Wiltshire/Devizes.

Moving to Avebury now — this would be the third day of my stay — we have several pics of a particular rock that I identified with on this particular day. Peculiarly, although I returned to Avebury perhaps 8 or 9 times during my trip, I did not study this rock again. Maybe I was sad because I identified the stone with my now dead camera. But anyway, I took a shining to it, as they say, and particularly noted a figure 8 on its top, along with what appears to be a “c” just above it. Compare with this map I prepared of what I call Sharieland in Herman Park. Again, we have a close conjunction of an “8” and a “C” (which stand for 8 ball and cue ball respectively). I’m tempted, then, to call this Avebury rock “Herman’s Rock”, and it even may be related to the rocks depicted in this early Frank and Herman Einstein! blog post from October of last year.

A shot of the Avebury Cove Rocks featured in a number of Gilatona-Lis collages, including the final 4-part Falmouth series. Interesting article on mysteries surrounding the Avebury rocks:

http://www.britainexplorer.com/avebury-stone-circle-mysteries.html

Yet another Gilatona-Lis related photo, this time of Ironmonger Lane in Marlborough, the setting for both Gila 06 and Gila 10.

As it turned out, this alley ran all the way from High Street, the very wide main street of the town, to a parallel road plainly named Back Lane. The length of Ironmonger Lane is perhaps 100 yards…

… and you can quickly circle back to High Street from Back Lane by using another connecting alley called Chandler’s Yard just to the west. High Street is glimpsed through the whitewashed exit to Chandler’s Yard in the center of the below photos.

(continued in Final Liquor Shots, 02)

Amazing journey to England the past 2 weeks. Will probably have to write all my experiences out in at least a 20 part travelogue of some sort. Spent the first week based in Devizes and the second in Marlborough, 2 mid sized burgs framing the heart of Wiltshire crop circle country on the west and east respectively. Some highlights…

* *Did* see some crop circles, and all basically by “accident”, or spotted during hikes I’d already planned for other reasons. *Didn’t* go into a crop circle, although had one opportunity to do so — well, kinda two. More on that later. The most dramatic one I saw with my naked eye, again without trying or attempting to find it, was this work, perhaps interestingly one of those less common two parters.

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2013/Stantonstbernard2/StantonStBernard2013b.html

(per notes by Red Collie in comments, the crop circle seems to be tied with the Alan Turing Building of Manchester, UK)*

But the crop circle season is *way* behind this year, and we weren’t able to see much less enter a larger or obviously unhoaxed effort. The next time we visit Wiltshire (yes, there’s probably going to be a next time!) we’ll go in July or August, perhaps. But for this time late June was perfect.

* English *roads* — they’re narrow and you drive on the wrong side of the road. They’re basically unnerving and frequently caused meltdowns on my part. Also the parking there is a problem. It’s just *very* different overall. Couldn’t have guessed most of that without going to England to experience in person.

* English coffee — not very good. *Very* glad to get back to my Stateside Starbucks and extra shot iced lattes for sure! The main coffee shop over there is Costa; we didn’t/couldn’t visit any Starbucks outside the airports. The nearest Starbucks to us in Wiltshire were in Swindon and Salisbury, which we didn’t get to.

* English countryside — more beautiful than advertised.

* English *weather* for exploring this countryside and also the population centers — *perfect*! It was almost never too hot over there, and the coolness and hiking went hand-in-hand. Rain wasn’t too much of a problem for us during the visit, thankfully.

I’ll write more soon. Currently I’m looking up more info on that crop circle I give a link to above. My Gilatona-Lis collages created after deciding to go helped *tremendously* in exploring the landscape and decisions made.

Be back with more details shortly!

—–

* more on Turing machine from wolfram site:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html