going to work
Idaho 1909

Isabela

Cave of Darkness
The Coral Grotto of Light
Strange Adventures in "The Fall and Rise of Humpty Dumpty"
A. S. Seer
see also Lost in The Desert and Walter Fletcher as Appetite Bill

Ann Burlak "The Red Flame"

post posts posted post-Boynton

Houdini at the wheel

I'm not suggesting a war of posts - though post-war would be a nice change.
As long as things didn't get out of hand.
Posts are after all what keep us here.
Moving posts, intriguing posts, transporting posts.
Posts!
One post can support a great deal. A cache for instance.
The absence of posts is a sign of something. Sloth, apathy, desuetude, busy-ness, depending.
Posts can be convivial.
Making posts can be laborious, even arduous at times.
Yet posts are useful, even necessary.
Here's one more

Mrs. Shotbang with her four children she delivered herself. Husband broke his foot early this spring. About time baby was to be born they ran short of coal and bed clothing, Mrs. Shotbang had to take care of the newly-born baby and the rest of the family, cutting fence posts for fuel. The family almost froze; no mattresses on the beds this past winter, only quilts over the hard springs.

Russel Lee
Williams County, North Dakota, October 1937
loc

Home industries, County Donegal, Ireland

"Debutantes in their Boudoirs"

Philadelphia Sunday Press December 1st, 1895
-
loc

How long do reindeer live?

As long as they can.

flehmen [flay-mun]

the raising of the head and the curling of the lip as a behavior in response to stimuli, especially sex pheromones. It seems that cats and horses do it, but not so much the traditional birds and bees (nor educated fleas).
From a German word that means ‘curling the lip in sexual excitement.’

The Cassadaga propaganda

Un missionnaire du moyen age raconte qu'il avait trouvele point ou le ciel et la Terre se touchent

Illus. in: L'atmosphere; meteorologie populaire / Camille Flammarion.
Paris : Librairie Hachette et cie, 1888
loc

This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever...
The attraction is known as the Casimir Effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly.
APOD 17.Dec.06
-
Some of us are wont perforce to wonder what it is the universe is expanding into

Finbarr O'Reilly

Sheldon said they cook 28 hogs the day before Mother's and Father's Day weekend and Easter.
-
There are 4 cities directly under the central government, 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions and 2 administrative regions in China, as well as more than 3,000 cities and towns under them.

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

Elbert Hubbard

It was thought that he had forgotten to fasten his seat belt.
John Purroy Mitchel bio at wikipedia
-
The Boy Mayor of New York City at loc

nimptopsical [nim-tops-ih-kul]

drunk. This word is one of more than 200 synonyms for ‘drunk’ compiled by Benjamin Franklin; some of the others included cherry-merry, lappy, and “been too free with Sir Richard.”

Also:

myomancy [mye-uh-man-see]: divination by the movements of mice. Modern scientists probably study the movements of mice as much or more than the ancient myomancers did, and for ends that are not dissimilar

snollygoster [snah-lee-gahs-ter]: a dishonest politician

spanghew [spang-hyoo]; to cause a frog or toad to fly into the air.

chamade [shuh-mahd]: a signal inviting someone to a parley (usually a drumbeat or a trumpet sounding). Now perhaps useful to those who carry beepers. "Sorry, have to go, it's a chamade."

Vofuhreffekt [vor-fyur-ef-ket]: a German word, literally 'presentation effect' which describes a problem, usually with a computer, that doesn't happen when other people try to replicate it (such as, say, the Help Desk guy you called for).

Erin's Weird and Wonderful Word of the Day

...as a person might watch schools of minnows swimming in a brook beneath a bridge
-
...it rivals the find in South Africa and Indonesia of the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish previously known only through fossils
-
...the bird averaged a surprising 350 km daily. In some cases, a breeding pair made the entire journey together.
-
The single cell of this fragile new species of Xenophyophore, found at 4,300 m depth, is enclosed within a plate-like shell, 1 cm in diameter, composed of mineral grains.

Census of Marine Life

One does what one can.

Alexander Graham Bell and others at ground breaking for the Volta Bureau building in Washington, D.C. (detail):

among those present are, in the front row from left: Elsie May Bell, Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller, and Marion "Daisy" Bell

-
Another view:
Why Some Deaf People Hold AGB in Contempt

Ward Hill Lamon

He often slept on the floor
outside Lincoln's bedroom door,
wrapped in a blanket and armed to the teeth.

Elijah Cox
Portraits of African American ex-slaves
from the U.S. Works Progress Administration,
Federal Writers' Project slave narratives collections
Library of Congress

Betty Powers, ex-slave, Ft. Worth Texas September 14, 1937
-
Patsy Moses, ex-slave, Waco Texas November 15, 1937
also here
-
Ellen Polk, ex-slave
-
Virginia Newman, ex-slave, Beaumont Texas June 11, 1937

previous citation here, here

The "B" may well be for Boynton, for all we know

vatic
then nothing for more than 100 pages then
grifas
then, in Nochecita, in the scene with Reef and the schoolmarm Linnet Dawes
plagal (first misremembered as pagil)
there are two typographical errors, symmetrically positioned, on facing pages, so that they meet in the closed book, somewhere in the first 40 pages of the hard-cover US Penguin edition; another, an instance of word redundancy, around p.200 - but that low an incidental frequency is outside our present scope of interest.
Favorite phrase in the book so far:

flesh-eating sheep sailed over the fence between dreams and the day

never more than 5 milliseconds off the tight beat

Time was, I'd've identified with the naked man; nowadays though, it's the 'gator.

David Byrne's got gospel up

Sophie Ratcliffe is writing a book about sympathy

more or less connected:

pogo stick man
-
the Tenth Dimension
-
Rembrandt's mom
-
the SIXTH SENSE

starling clouds
Black Sun in Denmark

More Terry and the Pirates fun:
How To Spot A Jap
link via Incoming Signals
-
and, loosely related somehow - a history of Misirlou at Dinosaur Gardens

Unveiled Mysteries describes an encounter with St. Germain (see also The Comte de Saint Germain), here described as an Ascended Master, virtually a God, and able to manipulate the fabric of reality. Ballard describes a series of astral trips in time and space with St. Germain, to lost civilizations in South America and the Sahara, as well as well-stocked bunkers of the ancients in the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Mount Shasta. Ballard and St. Germain revisit past lives as citizens of Atlantis and Mu, and they turn out to be relatives. A final chapter mentions encounters with entities from Venus, a theme of later UFO cargo-cults of the 1950s. Connoisseurs of this genre will appreciate Unveiled Mysteries. The book is written in a breathless style with a more than liberal amount of em-dashes, Inappropriate Capitalization, and melodramatic plot-points which resemble golden-age pulp sci-fi. There are incoherent, surreal rants which would not be out of place at a Church of the Subgenius rally.

The book has obvious similarities with A Dweller on Two Planets, including passages which were probably lifted directly. And much of Ballard's metaphysics, history of lost continents, 'Great White Brotherhood' spiel, and so on, is derivative from Theosophy. However, according to some of Ballard's ex-disciples, plagiarism was probably the least of his spiritual shenanigans.

Anonymous John B. Hare's editorial dissing of Godfré Ray King's Unveiled Mysteries
Sacred Texts

A Pedunculate Cirripede from the Upper Silurian of Oesel, Esthonia
-
Some grasping nitwit has started something called the Pynchon Wiki, having opportunistically attached it-and-him-self to the rise of attention in re. "Against The Day", which deserves neither linkage nor attention.

Curse of Scotland:

John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of Stair who, as Scottish Secretary, gave the orders for the infamous Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 in which the Campbells killed 38 members of the Macdonald of Glencoe clan as they slept.
-
Glencoe
-

embonpoint
-
Old Zip Coon

In Hoc Signo Vinces (In this Sign Shalt Thou Conquer) 1880 detail
Thomas Hovendon
Paris as Proving Ground
Americans in Paris Met etc.
-
Images from a more detailed zoom at DIA:

Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood, 1885
John Singer Sargent
Summers in the Country: Giverny
Americans in Paris
Metropolitan Museum of Art
-

Mischief, magic. Monet's hand enters the paint and the painting.
-
A less brief exegesis from the archives, here, with a link to an early-days image that's tonally much less faithful.

absquatulated
-
eclipse green
-
petroleur

George Saunders recommends other authors.
And since this site recommends George Saunders, most especially the story "Commcomm" in the book "In Persuasion Nation" it seemed incumbent...

Henri Lachambre, aéronaute-constructeur breveté, Paris. 24

Andrew Moore, photographer

Domesticated 3
Amy Stein

most of the images would seem to be photoshopped, which she isn't real explicit about in her artist's statement.
Seeing them at first as captured and real was pretty exciting, a set-up for the disappointment of realizing(? I'm still not exactly clear, this doesn't seem to be real, but there's no captions) they'd been created, rather than found by the camera and the eye. The obvious question, of why it matters, is pretty easily answered - because it does. Not because of some unspoken rule, or the regulations of some official club somewhere, there's no commandment you can turn to and work your way around - it matters that's all.
They're great images, she's a brilliant photographer, but knowing they were built, or that some were and some weren't and she intentionally blurs the line, makes them much less exciting.
The first image linked to though I think may be veracitous.
-
link conscientious

---------------------- ... the one lost in the steam
of a pot of boiling cabbage, I would be the one...

"... further and clearer..."

interior of William Reifschneider's "balloon shop"
Streator, Illinois ca. 1907-1920

seems to fit with this at barista
this at bibliodyssey
and this at CIB

Truman Capote March 30, 1948. He was 24 23 years old.

Riverheart High School to Montauk - doing the twist in the baggage car 1962

Anita O'Day 1919-2006
-
obit at TheaterMania
-
Publicity photo 1958 at LoC
-
a taste of Anita O'Day at Newport 1958 at YouTube
courtesy ionarts

Col. Umberto Nobile, designer of the dirigible "Norge" walking along the narrow catwalk inside of the huge gas bag during the flight over the polar area
-
General Umberto Nobile's airship Italia,
circling over the city of Stolp
-
Grand salon of the Dirigible R 100
-
James B. Mars and wife
-
Harriet Quimby

Capt. Amundsen resting from arduous duties in pilot control car of the dirigible

Genthe Chinatown S.F.

It almost looks like she's jumping, both feet off the ground,
but really she's wearing these:
Arnold Genthe - Chinatown, San Francisco, between 1896 and 1906.
This was taken in April 1906:

Houdini performs for hospitalized children

"During an earlier project when I was making cuddly toys from pigskin, I came up with the idea to make something out of my own skin. At first it scared me, but I could not get it out of my head and eventually I had to do it."

Joanneke Meester
iv nyarts
http://nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6529&Itemid=199

Wim Delvoye
-
Wim Delvoye

In 1910, Mr.and Mrs. D.H. Woolf walked from Kansas City* to NYC, with their dog. I'm unable at this time to tell you the name of their dog.
It's unlikely they were any more than the most distant relations of Virginia Woolf; and likely no relation of D.H. Lawrence at all.
-
*glancing reference at the remarkable showhistory.com with a link to Con mezzi a traino animale at the equally remarkable La storia dei globetrotters.
In both instances the Woolfs are cited near the bottom of the page.
-
"around the world within 5 years. These cards are sold to cover the expenses"
-
And, by the by, Karl Bushby's still at it. His footprints are now in Russia, having begun their appearance in Tierra del Fuego and continued uninterrupted from there up the American continents and across the Bering Sea.

Pompeii

Eskimo cliff dwellers

Life? or Theater?
Charlotte Salomon
20th Annversary Exhibition
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
Yale Library
-
Charlotte Salomon prepares for her entrance examination to attend the Berlin Art Academy.
Life? or Theater? at the Jewish Museum
-
George Duncan's Women of the Third Reich

Nice one:

mega-merger quickens local copper stocks

Jim Jeffries
-
Jim Jeffries and wife
-
Billy Jordan introducing Jeffries at the famous championship battle at Reno, Nevada, July 4, 1910
-
Jack Johnson and James J. Jeffries in ring
-
Jeffries knock-out
-
Nuttall Ornithological Club, taken near the Brewster Museum, 1889, by flashlight

Tom Paine's Nightly Pest
Gillray (below)

The miser's feast
...a miser seated at a table eating a meager meal; Death stands off to the right as an emaciated and naked manservant holding in his right hand a tray with a bone on it and behind him, in his left hand, the dart of death; Famine, a withered hag, naked to the waist which funnels to a point, wearing a large hat and fashionable skirt, stands at the open door through which enter a fashionably dressed prostitute and another woman carrying stolen articles to leave with the miser. Padlocked chests and cupboards, moneybags, and plastered-over windows (for tax savings purposes) attest to the avarice and miserliness of the occupant

James Gillray
see also:

SIN, DEATH, and the DEVIL. vide Milton.
FRENCH LIBERTY/BRITISH SLAVERY
Scientific researches! - New discoveries in pneumaticks!

-
James Gillray at Wikipedia
at Spartacus.school.net

Ernest Schelling
-
Band members posed on stage with instruments, a reel mower, and the "follyphone" during rehearsal for the "Musicians Gambol", a benefit to be held at Carnegie Hall December 30, 1929, for the Edward MacDowell Association; among those present is John Philip Sousa.
image loc
-
Paderewski avec Ernest Schelling, une amitié solide
-
The grasping excessively entrepeneurial David Rumsey and his despicable irritating AMICA (The Art Museum Image Consortium Library {The AMICO Library™} [sic]) have this image of Schelling on offer, provided you subscribe to their enterprise by giving them money ($15US a month, $150US a year).
The same image is at the Library of Congress.
-
Schelling's first wife was Lucie Howe Draper, not to be confused with Lucie Bigelow Rosen, who may be seen here performing on an early version of the theremin.

“Although dark energy accounts for more than 70 percent of the energy of the universe, we know very little about it, so each clue is precious,” said Riess, who is credited with codiscovering the dark energy.

It was in the year 1885 that a remarkably singular occurrence in my history happened in St. Louis. In the church at San Francisco the pastor, Henry A. Sawtelle, J. S. Ring, a deacon, and I were very close friends. Mr. Ring had passed on some years previous at San Francisco, and we had an etching taken from a photograph and enlarged to almost life size. This likeness hung over the sitting-room sofa in our chamber, and on my return from the office about six o'clock, as I was resting on the sofa directly under this likeness of Mr. Ring, I went off into a partial doze, when I heard a voice plainly and distinctly utter these words: “We three will soon meet again.” The voice roused me and I immediately told Mrs. Bemis what I had heard, with the remark, “Something is going to happen.” The next day we were apprised of the death of Henry A. Sawtelle, and the hour of his passing away was identical with the time that the voice came to me. Since then long years have elapsed, but no reunion has occurred of the three. The memory of that voice, which I did not immediately recognize, has never been forgotten. The day will come when this meeting will take place, be it a longer or a shorter time before fulfillment. I do not attempt to explain this phenomenon but only mention it as a fact.

CHAPTER VI
Recollections of a long and somewhat uneventful life
Stephen A. Bemis
California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
-
Today in History LoC

North Korea: "The land where children are kings."

images of North Korea
Philippe Chancel in Der Spiegel

their earthy rulers

Dartford High Street (detail)
-
houseboat stranded on the banks of the Mississippi River (detail) 1930 or -31
-
Eleanor, Chicago 1953 (detail)
Harry Callahan
-
French military dirigible "République" leaving Moisson for Chalais-Mendon (detail) 1907

Willow Pattern - Cheeseburger
Peter Wade

recent gleanings from the Library:

Tim Sullivan shoe beneficiaries
-
Classroom at the Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, showing teacher observing students reading
-
Walt Whitman
-
William Zeckendorf sits behind desk in his "cylindrical office" in New York City 1952
-
Man from Planet X
-
Elvis Presley, taking oath in court, following altercation with Ed Hopper and Aubrey Brown (on left)
-
White House kitchen between ca. 1891-93
-
Sanitation Department workers, Sal Tusa and John Ceffalia, weeding growth of marijuana in a lot on Cozine Avenue near Miller Avenue [Brooklyn] Jul 31, 1958
-
Charles Atlas, half-length portrait, shirtless, facing front
-
Two Hunter College students covering their faces with books, at police headquarters after they were picked up on narcotics 1968
-
Dolce far nientes in parlor
Mary True reclining and reading
-
Eliza Grace Symonds Bell seated on velocipede in the garden at Milton Cottage, near Edinburgh, Scotland ca. 1859

One-time Child Prodigy Found Destitute Here

The Painter
Dumas

"either beautiful or true or true and beautiful or surprising or ironic or whatever..."

Sensational Viking

...the qualification of a voter is, having enjoyed a woman in the open air within that district: the candidates are commonly fellows of low humour, who dress themselves up in a ridiculous manner. As this brings a prodigious concourse of people to Wandsworth, the publicans of that place jointly contribute to the expence, which is sometimes considerable.

garret election
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

If I had to choose one photograph, out of the thousands I've seen at the Library of Congress, that made the toil worthwhile, this would be it.

more at db annex

Got the captions for the photochromatics at db annex done, as a way-gone into remiss and belated response to the nice comments and general good will there from - last year! - bibliodyssey and goddelijke gladiolen and of course as always boynton and barista and carolina vigna-maru and improprieties and all the other as yet unknown but not unfound, and all.

Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Brooks of Pittsfield, Maine, and their twelve daughters posed around stove in kitchen

Paul Kolenda inspecting his ten sons in front of the Detroit offices of their company, a home sanitation systems business

A short slog later there you go - links fixed. The record pages are scripted so you'll have to take my word here that the captions are accurate and direct from the Archives of Ontario.

Oh, Canada!
All those empty links below began with this, then unbeknownst to me, as so much is, the links themselves load from the browser cache so checking them immediately after posting gives the false impression they'll carry through the day, but no.
Hmmm...what to do?

Portrait of woman Toronto 191-?
Archives of Ontario

Every man and woman in Canada can help win this war by practising self-denial
"He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city"
-

Man, woman and dog with Royal Military College in background
-
Portrait of a woman, likely Violet
-
A woman sitting
-
A woman and a small boy sitting on a fence
-
Woman seated with kittens
-
Portrait of woman wearing a fur-trimmed coat and fur hat
-
Woman tying her apron
-
Woman standing in field of dandelions gone to seed
-
Unidentified woman standing in orchard
-
Woman standing on shore beside a boat
-
A woman outside a building
-
Woman posed by a creek with a sailboat in the background
-
Portrait of a woman
-
A man in a rowboat talks to a woman on the rocky shore
-
A woman standing in the woods
-
Woman driving a horse-drawn binder
-
Soldier talking with a woman
-
Woman receiving keys to new Chevrolet Toronto, April 1947
-
Woman talking with police officer in Toronto
-
Woman cleaning her guns
-
A woman and a man conducting a CBC broadcast from a car
-
Portrait of a woman and spinning wheel
-
Woman registering for a program
-
Three men and a woman, possibly immigrants arriving at Quebec, at Gross Pointe
-
A woman standing in the crowd at a meeting of the Ontario Labour/Communist group March 27, 1948
-
Robertson Davies and a woman with the Dominion Drama Festival Plaque
-
Unidentified woman lighting a soldier's cigarette
-
Woman on a bicycle at the Canadian Cycling Manufacturer's (C.C.M.) Bicycle Museum
-
Street scene showing front of H. Dalton's Shaving Parlor and a residence with a man and woman standing outside Giants then too
-
Young woman seated at a piano in a parlour
-
Miss Green and another woman seated near a piano, Oak Leaf
-
Miss Green and another woman, Oak Leaf
-
Portrait of a woman and her dog
-
Back view of a Native woman in traditional dress
-
Portrait of an Aboriginal woman with her baby on her back
-A night-time bonfire at the Winnipeg Snowshoe Club
-
Unidentified woman smoking a cigar
-
Young woman smoking bear meat Deer Lake, Ontario June, 1956
-
Native woman at Sandy Lake
-
Janet Woppumnaweskum, Metis woman, Rupert's House
-
Portrait of a woman and a man. The man is seated at a harpsichord. One of them is the Old Stafford music teacher
-
Philip Mathew plays the fiddle at Fort Severn
-
Woman fishing
-
Premier Leslie Frost in native head-dress with his wife and a native woman
-
Woman at Fort Severn mending a gill net
-
Man playing fiddle for his family outside a hut, Moosonee
-Man and woman in tobacco field

Moosonee by local photographer Paul Lantz

Sisters of Rwanda

Sister Grace is far more beautiful than the Revlon model tacked to her wall.

description of the discomfort of being quilled is often very much exaggerated

Possibly not a hoax:
Even Bugs Bunny got in on the act; in the 1949 cartoon "Bowery Bugs," an old man is so charmed by the rabbit's tale of the famous bridge jumper Steve Brodie (Brodie's feat, alas, was a hoax) that he agrees to buy the bridge from him.

A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers."

For You, Half Price
Gabriel Cohen/NYTimes/tnellen
-
Steve Brodie researcher/historian/cryptological-bibliographer David Shulman at the listserv of the American Dialect Society
obituary for David Shulman at the Scotsman.
Shulman insisted Brodie was legit.
-
Possibly:
Jack Johnson, the boxer, ran away from home in Texas at the age of 12 to go to New York and meet Steve Brodie.
Jack Johnson was denied first-class passage on the Titanic when he was challenging Tommy Burns on his way to becoming the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World - the steamship company would only offer him a second or third class birth, which he refused.
From Hickoksports biographies:

Johnson was determined to become world champion. He took a major step toward the title by knocking out former champion Bob Fitzsimmons in the 2nd round on July 17, 1907. Tommy Burns, who had won the championship the previous year, went on a tour of England and France. Johnson followed him.
He finally caught Burns in Australia, where a promoter named Hugh D. "Huge Deal" McIntosh put up a guarantee of $30,000 for a Burns-Johnson match. Burns accepted. McIntosh refereed the fight, which took place on December 26, 1908--"Boxing Day" in Australia.
The 6-foot-1, 200-pound Johnson had a large advantage in reach over Burns, who was the shortest heavyweight champion ever at only 5-foot-7. Johnson gave Burns a thorough battering before a police inspector stepped into the ring to stop the fight in the 14th round.
When Johnson returned to the United States, a search began for a "Great White Hope" who could win the title from him. Former champion James J. Jeffries was finally persuaded to come out of retirement, but he was out of shape and Johnson toyed with him before knocking him out in the 15th round on July 4, 1910, at Carson City, NV. The victory sparked race riots across the country, in which nineteen people were killed.
Johnson's second wife committed suicide in September of 1912 and he married a young white woman three months later. That was the last straw for white authorities. Johnson was sentenced to a year in prison for violating the Mann Act, which forbade transportation of a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.
-

Johnson was, unbeknownst to me til just now, the subject of a film by Ken Burns - Unforgivable Blackness.
Leadbelly did a great tune called "Titanic" with these lines in it, as I remember them from the Koerner, Ray, and Glover version:

Jack Johnson went to get on board
the cap'n said "Jack,
we don't haul no coal"
fare thee Titanic, fare thee well
say midnight on the sea
and the band playin' "Nearer My God To Thee"
fare thee Titanic, fare thee well
Spread lifeboats all around
save the women and the children
let the men go down
fare thee Titanic, fare thee well.

-
Chuck Berry was busted under the Mann Act as well, and by the same mentality if not the same men, and for much the same reasons.
Berry's tune Nadine has the unforgettably perfect lines:

I saw her from the corner
when she turned and doubled back
An started walkin' toward a
coffee-colored cadillac
I's pushin' through the crowd
tryna get to where she's at
Cam-paign shoutin'
like a southern diplomat

The essence of diplomacy, even in the primeval south of Berry's mid 20th c. Memphis Tennessee, has always been discretion - the oblique gesture, the calmly uttered phrase, reserve.
Southern Democrats, however, were renowned for their bombast, histrionic filigree, and rhetorical volume.
It's unthinkable that a poet with Chuck Berry's command of the language would have done that on his own, but it's easy to imagine someone in the music industry's demanding Berry shift his lyric focus a little, to avoid any consequent problems.

Sunset Pastimes at Hurricane Hall
-
With Terrific Encounters, Assaults, Naval Combats & Warlike Episodes
-
A Genuine English Locomotive
-
For the Joy and Mystery of it
-
The Greatest Necromancer of The Age - Perhaps of All Times
Happy Halloween Harry!

throwing peanuts at a gorilla

Photochromatic glimpses into the 19th century at db annex.
Captions and links soon to follow.

Quixotic victory

"Blogging is fun again. With powerful privacy controls that give you control over who views your words, photos, videos, and audio, you'll never have to worry about who's reading your blog. And with Vox's hundreds of beautiful designs that can be enabled with just a few clicks, you can spend less time working on your site and more time keeping up with the people you care about. Better still, Vox gives you seemless access to the popular web services you already use, such as Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and iFilm. The bottom line: Vox makes sharing your life with friends and family easy, entertaining, and safe."
Vox

Hello Google
"Google Custom Search Engine"
-
hello
Google Custom Search Engine
also this promising addition to the Google news search engine:
archive search
with a timeline

My Name

...the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt...

Mark Strand
Poetry Daily 23.Oct.06

This

Troglodytes or cave dwellers of extreme southern Tunisia. The interior of the Sheik's cave at Matmata showing his bed, jars for olive oil, the couscous covers and his lamp and gun.

was a lot like what it was like inside these

Bird's-eye view of Medenine photographed from minaret of mosque showing the odd cave-like dwellings of the inhabitants which serve two purposes; first as homes; secondly as safe deposit vaults for their goods and chattels during the months that these semi-nomadic people roam in the Arab country between here and the Mediterranean

F. Soler, photographer

Helen Keller reading

Whistler's yard sale

In Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest on an autumn day, Moscow, 1960

Photo Fighter
Therese Bonney
loc
Women Come to the Front
-
Therese Bonney chronology at St. Bonaventure University:

1923
- She helps to establish the European branch of the American Red Cross correspondence exchange between the children of Europe and The United States

1924
- She has her first photo essay printed, on how chic French dogs dress

-
Thérèse Bonney at wikipedia

Monster

Yichu Chen
Kashya Hildebrand
link path conscientious > Tiina Itkonen

THERE IS NO HARM IN DANCING
by W.E. Penn
respectfully and kindly dedicated
to all Husbands, Fathers and Brothers
who love their Wives, Daughters and Sisters
by The Author

THEY MUST GO!THEY WILL GO! THEY DO GO!
THE BALL. THE HOP. THE DANCE. IT IS ALL THE SAME.
THE WRAPS ARE THERE
They will be answered then
Men will not dance by themselves
Samples of Fruit Found on the Tree of Dancing:
VERDICT.

Street gang - corner Margaret & Water Streets
Springfield, Massachusetts 4:30 P.M. June 27,1916
Lewis Hine

all images between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900 loc

The Pantheon and the rue Soufflot, Paris, France
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The Tuileries and Champs Elysees, Paris, France
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View of Notre Dame de la Garde and harbor, Marseilles, France
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Penzance--St. Michael's Mount
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that horse has too many legs

Drink Coca-Cola 5 cents detail
c. 1890
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Calls in Cranford detail
Frances Stebbins, 1900
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home of Wm. Mullens and family detail
Lewis Hines, 1921
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"Kitty Canutt"
champion lady rider of the world, on Winnemucca detail
c. 1919

Men and women tramps near the station
Three Siberian people
W.B. Moore, 1910

Two women walking along street, Natchez, Mississippi
Ben Shahn October, 1935

Nuns clamming on Long Island

"...to contribute to the literature of how people retain and nurture their humanity"

Quotation of the Day:

“It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance.”

Robert Louis Stevenson
Garner's Usage Tip of the Day

Juliana Beasley :::
-
link conscientious

Maybe a leatherback turtle. Just for a day.

Location: New York
Celebrity: Brittney Spears

She was in the restaurant I was working at and she ordered toast! (i guess she was on a diet) she had a cigerette in her hand and as i walked away she stuck the toast in her pants!

Life in Los Angeles in the 20th century was not nearly as dull as you've been led to believe.
There were giants in those days, really, and beings from other worlds arriving constantly.
There was abundance, and a tolerance of blemish unknown today.
There was celebration.
There was ceremony, and ritual.
There was worship.
Women were on the rise to positions formerly occupied solely by men.
The printed word was held in high esteem.
All classes and levels of society were encouraged to participate in the many festivities such clement weather made possible all year round.
Travel was slower then, but quite varied and far less restrictive, all in all.

Man sleeping on sidewalk, near downtown Los Angeles, 1980
photo archive
Chris Gulker

Reading Light
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin
Shots Magazine
-
link path Jessica Joslin's flickr site j_naturalia

Self-Portrait as Thing in the Forest III
Julie Heffernan
Lisa Sette

Badass fishing
Chrissy Angliker
Core77

UP
-
link Barbara's Blog

Some confusion yet resides among them:

On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal and all scientific research programs on the drug were shut down.
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LSD was first synthesized in 1938 and discovered to be psychoactive in 1943. It became popular in the '60's and was made illegal in 1967
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October 6, 1955 in History
Event:
LSD made illegal in U.S.
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Oct 6|LSD made illegal in the US
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LSD was legal in the United States until 1967
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The October 6, 1966 date gets the majority vote, and it jibes with my recollection.
My recollection being taking it, legally, in late September 1966, and seeing it abruptly made illegal two weeks later.
Fred Turner, in a piece excerpted from his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, in The Edge, glosses the Trips Festival segment of Brand's history a little, kind of like Tom Wolfe did, and partially, I think, from having read and absorbed Wolfe's facile take on all that wild profusion:

Toward the end of 1965, Brand and Ramón Sender Barayón, a composer of electronic music and a friend of USCO's Michael Callahan, thought up the Trips Festival as a way to bring the burgeoning scene together. Together, they found promoter Bill Graham (then a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe) and hired the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco for three nights: Friday, January 21, through Sunday, January 23. By this time, the federal government had outlawed LSD, so posters promised an Acid Test—a full-blown psychedelic experience—without LSD.

Turner writes "According to Tom Wolfe, it was also the start of the Haight-Ashbury era", deflecting the onus for having said that, but getting the line out there anyway.
Conception's notoriously difficult to draw lines on. Whatever that was - era or moment - it was already well alive by then.

How NOT to wear your hair when you work in a war plant.

-Victory Corps, tomorrow's defenders of liberty. Training in marksmanship helps girls at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, California, develop into responsible women.

Isamu Noguchi, full-length portrait, facing right, standing by his sculpture of a nude woman

Automatic transmitter type 703-A
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Can you imagine news flashes printed from your radio?
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Howard Thurston, magician, with man who looks like him and two young women, performing magic trick
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Royal Kohinur and Royal Pastel, Mutation Mink Breeders Association, Suamico, Wis.

Diamond Dick McClellan
not to be confused with
Diamond Dick Tanner

49UP! is out
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UP! series at wikipedia

Paddle/Pedal for Peace
June 02 2006
426 kilometers in two days between London and Paris under his own manpower; pedalling a bike and paddling across the English Channel on a stand-up paddle surfboard

Laird Hamilton
on a paddle board
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link path Here In Malibu
see also road runner

Naming the Stars

...and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since...

Joyce Sutphen

Poetry 180
a poem a day for American high schools
LoC poetry

...far from their homeland in the Wallowa Valley...

Chief Joseph's surrender to General Nelson A Miles October 5, 1877
LoC Today in History

Well, here's a fine how-d'you do.
The Image Base of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a massive art database which I would have normally been inclined to trust implicitly, has this image:
John Collier, artist
English, 1850 -
G. Sidney hunt, 19th - 20th century
but, at Dr. Matthew Eddy's History of Science HPSM MA Module Resource Webpage, we see the same image - this time with the notation:
Charles Darwin
Naturalist and Gentleman
By John Collier, 1883
National Portrait Gallery
and it is, in fact, no other than Charles Darwin, himself, there portrayed.

The Deceased Wife’s Sister Act may seem no more than a legislative curiosity today. Yet while it remained on the statute books it was the focus of intense, even obsessive, interest as Parliament continually renewed the well-rehearsed arguments for and against its repeal. By the end of the nineteenth century its notoriety made it an easy butt for satire: “And he shall prick that annual blister,/ Marriage with deceased wife’s sister”, promises the Queen of the Fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot, the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act had become humorous through incessant repetition. Yet although it was increasingly ridiculed the Act’s strange hold over the Victorian imagination cannot be denied.

Sarah Brown, University of Cambridge
The Literary Encyclopedia

The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 was a statute passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Previously, it was forbidden for a man to marry the sister of his deceased wife. This prohibition derived from a doctrine of Canon Law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a way which made marriage between them improper. This doctrine was reflected in the Table of kindred and affinity in the British Book of Common Prayer. Prohibition of marriage between certain degrees of kindred outlawed what is known as incest; prohibition between degrees of relationship by marriage (affinity) as opposed to blood (consanguinity) seems to have reflected an analogous taboo. At least one novel, Felicia Skene's The Inheritance of Evil; Or, the Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife's Sister addressed the topic in polemic fictional form.

wikipedia
from a foray into John Collier's life and work
started by ArtMagick

Desperately Longing for Something Original

Rafal Oblinski
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A white scarf was discretely added over an artist's depiction of a mermaid with an exposed breast on a poster advertising the 2006 Miss World contest, after officials in Warsaw's conservative administration deemed it too suggestive, the artist's agent said Wednesday.
CNews
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It was discretely added. What the mayor of Warsaw and his cohort altered there is substantially more important to the city than a poster by a local artist.
Warsaw's civic avatar is a mermaid, often depicted armed with sword and shield - naked, as mermaids are wont to be. She's a symbol of resistance and strength.

The people of Warsaw are proud of their symbol, which appears in many art forms, as the one on the left from the weekly magazine "Tygodnik Ilustrowany" in 1900. But however presented, the mermaid is always shown with sword in hand to indicate the fighting spirit of the citizens. Indeed, the people of Warsaw rebelled several times in the 19th.century against the Russian occupiers of the time.
In recent years, this spirit manifested itself in the continual struggle against the Nazis during World War II, culminating in the disastrous uprising of 1944 as a result of which the city was almost totally destroyed, and tens of thousands died. The maritime theme was also evident in the stylized PW symbol in the shape of an anchor that was scratched, painted, chalked on buildings, vehicles, signposts, throughout the five years of occupation.
The PW stood for Polska Walczaca, "Poland Fights."
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Among the lesser-known legends is the one written by Maria Krüger entitled "The Noble Griffin and the Beautiful Mermaid." According to the legend, the security of the medieval city of Warsaw was guarded by a manly and noble Griffin. When he once took a journey with the river boatmen to the Baltic, he met a beautiful Mermaid. They fell deeply in love and the Mermaid swam with them back to Warsaw. From then on, they both watched over the townspeople.
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The Little Upriser

Oracle at Delphi
Road to Damascus

Tai-Shan Schierenberg
"These instinctive visual images refuse to betray the plasticity of the medium."
'physically intense and aesthetically detached'
Flowers

"Billions of dollars are spent on advertising in this country. Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. It was all written, not because the writer felt something and then said it (if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effectively), but because he tried to impress and inveigle people, convince them something is very fine about which he himself does not really care a button."

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Garner's Usage Tip of the Day
Oxford University Press

"...a device you carry that, when switched on, tells a satellite exactly where you are every few seconds."
Momus
Wired
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Click Opera
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"A world of laptops and jet planes" as against "A world of cars and cell phones"

[is that all you do]

is that all you do
is put things together I
asked the prophet Ezekiel what
he coughed do you mean
well I said...

Jon Woodward
Verse Daily 26.09.06

"...or you'll find yourself giving it advice, which it does not need."

The Scale
Steven Kenny

The masterlode of Stanfoolery of the verbally thrips oratory

He'd always had a love of languages and was a fan of James Joyce, Charles Dickens and great speakers like Isaiah Berlin.

Big big world Jamaica Sweden

big big world Viet Nam

that I too will miss you much China

harassed by racially intolerant neighbors and the clandestine infiltration of state and federal law enforcement authorities

last days of the cross-bred lions too weak to eat

Corn Smut Lasagne

soul owner

Comedian uses dead pig as boat

All you need to know about John Updike's review of Le Carre's new novel “The Mission Song”, in the New Yorker:

"In “Absolute Friends” (2003), the sore spot became le Carré’s fury at the American and British intervention in Iraq."

That's a resound from Updike's cite of Lowell's poem “July in Washington” - the stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth - which technically would make Iraq the sore spot, not Le Carre's anger at American and British intervention.
But in fact the book[Absolute Friends] isn't about anything so facile.
It's a frighteningly vivid portrayal of a new Other, faster, smarter, far more powerful, treacherous, amoral - almost another race - sharing our time and planet with us, doing what it wills when it will.
The image is pretty scary, and totally convincing, so it's understandable Updike would feel the need to trivialize it. But it's inaccurate to say the book's driven by "fury".
As always with Le Carre's best books it's compassion that's holding everything together, not anger.