Punch and Judy
A place for pictures of the “old rascal” himself, and his friends.
screenshots from yesterday’s footage
Against Art
Read the rest by Jochen Gerner.
Speaking, as we were, of the circus
and of circus tradition . . .
The stone mansion at 10 St. Nicholas place in Upper Harlem, near 150th Street, was built in 1886 by circus legend James Bailey. Original, animal-themed stained glass windows decorate the façade, and inside the crumbling interior (it was once a funeral home and has fallen into decay), there is a warren of bright rooms and narrow corridors. The back garden is spacious but overgrown, and some people call it a “modern Grey Gardens.” The mansion is full of features from the original construction, but needs several million in repairs. But for a gorgeous historic stand-alone mansion that includes about 8,250 square feet of interior space, the price tag is a lot lower than you’d ever guess.
(New York Magazine via a reversecowpie tweet)
Wallace’s Rottweiler
George Beccaloni, an evolutionary biologist with the London Natural History Museum, has taken it upon himself to champion Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin’s, now largely lost to popular understanding.
Calling himself Wallace’s Rottweiler, Beccaloni has barnstormed across England to preserve Wallace homes and other sites. He convinced the Natural History Museum in London to buy the scientist’s insect collection, correspondence and books from Wallace’s two grandsons.
He also runs a Wallace Web site and is helping British standup comedian Bill Bailey plan a routine based on the scientist. Beccaloni’s biggest job by far, however, is defending Wallace’s legacy.
A comedy routine?
Also controversial is Wallace’s support of spiritualism, a popular movement that held seances and believed spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. He upset Darwin and damaged his scientific reputation by arguing that the development of the human mind and some bodily attributes were guided by spiritual beings rather than natural selection, Beccaloni acknowledged.
The story is even more involved.
another adolescent fantasy down the drain
A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie’s Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.
A Rat’s Nest of Hippies
Anonymous, courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.
Seattle Parks Department employees, 1955
Says the Seattle Municipal Archives, “We have no idea what’s going on here. Caption contest, anyone?”
What is Transhumanism?
Kyle Munkittrick wrote to Marginal Revolution about the three characteristics that would signal a shift to transhumanism. If I excerpt any part of it, it will distort the scope of the argument, so better to read it in whole.
State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
Legislators in Rhode Island are attempting to shorten its official name to disassociate it from a history of slavery.
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his unorthodox religious views, minister Roger Williams set out in 1636 and settled at the northern tip of Narragansett Bay, which he called Providence Plantations. Williams founded the first Baptist church in America and became famous for embracing the separation of church and state, a legal principle enshrined in the Bill of Rights a century later.
Other settlers made their homes in modern-day Portsmouth and Newport on Aquidneck Island, then known as the Isle of Rhodes.
In 1663, English King Charles II granted a royal charter joining all the settlements into a single colony called “The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” The name stuck. Rhode Island used that royal charter as its governing document until 1843.
Opponents of the name charge argue that “plantations” was used at the time to describe any farming settlements, regardless of slavery.
Rhode Island merchants did, however, make their fortunes off the slave trade. Slaves helped construct Brown University in Providence, and a prominent slave trader paid half the cost of its first library.
Japanese pregnant dolls from the 19th century
(via marginal revolution)
They did, Paul. They did.
After 74 years, Kodak is retiring Kodachrome.
Photojournalist Steve McCurry’s widely recognized portrait of an Afghan refugee girl, shot on Kodachrome, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. At Kodak’s request, McCurry will shoot one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film and donate the images to the George Eastman House museum, which honors the company’s founder, in Rochester.
“I want to take (the last roll) with me and somehow make every frame count … just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome,” McCurry said last week from Singapore, where he has an exhibition at the Asian Civilizations Museum.
The Zapruder film was shot on Kodachrome.
the origins of father’s day
An article from Inspiration Line explains that, according to an article in The Spokesman-Review, “one group of men conventioneers laughed and said they didn’t want a Father’s Day. A National Fishing Day would be better, they told her.”
President Nixon made it law in 1972.
Richard Was a Dick
Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said: “I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that.” He gave “a black and a white” as an example.
“Or rape,” Colson offered. “Or rape,” Nixon agreed.
I never sought anything in you but yourself
From a NY Times review of Cristina Nehring’s book A Vindication of Love.
“We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” she writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring’s literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections. Her heroes and heroines tend to die, like Young Werther, who shoots himself; or try to die, like Mary Wollstonecraft, who throws herself off a bridge; or suffer, like Abelard and Heloise, one of whom is castrated and one of whom ends up in a nunnery. And yet Nehring admires these flamboyant men and women for the creative force of their affairs, for their ability to live outside the lines, for the ferocity of their feelings. She sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad, and quotes approvingly Heloise’s statement to Abelard: “ ‘I looked for no marriage bond,’ she flashed. ‘I never sought anything in you but yourself.’ ”
(via marginal revolution)
screenshots from last night’s footage
from the comments
If it weren’t for photos I would have no idea what my father looked like. I first saw a photo of him when I was in high school and although it could be considered a poor substitute for the man I never got to meet, it at least filled a bit of the wondering void in me.
This question made me imagine how much more I might know and understand about him if he had also left a visual story behind. I’d be able to follow the places he went, see what he saw and discover whether we were attracted to similar things.
It would be a cool thing to have, don’t you think?
the temple on the hill
The Ennis House, the last and largest of four houses Frank Lloyd Wright designed in a ‘textile block’ style, is being put up for sale for $15 million by the Ennis House Foundation run by his grandson Eric Lloyd Wright.
Inspired by Mayan ruins in Uxmal, Mexico, the estate is built from 27,000 blocks featuring 24 design variations and has breathtaking views of the Hollywood Hills. It has been featured in several films, including 1982’s Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and 1959’s House on Haunted Hill.
After the earthquake, the foundation spent years restoring the house, including its distinctive windows and glass-tile mosaic fireplace; shoring up a retaining wall, reconstructing the motor court, repairing the roof and replacing some of the blocks.
James DeMeo, the foundation’s president, said: “It’s beautiful to look at. It is the temple on the hill.”
100 year old color photographs
A portrait of Leo Tolstoy taken in 1908.
The Emir of Bukhara (now Uzbekistan) 1910.
the last archival storage devices we would ever need
The quest for a billion-year storage device is under way.
A team led by Alex Zettl, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a robust nanoscale system that could store massive amounts of digital information for very long periods of time. Any products that eventually emerge from this work could conceivably be the last archival storage devices we would ever need.
Orange Crate Art: Brian Wilson & Van Dyke Parks
From I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (1995), directed by Don Was.
it’s for kids!
2009 Orphan Car Show: 1927 Graham Child’s Hearse
This one off was built in 1927 as a prototype for a line of funeral cars sized for carrying the remains of children. According to the adjacent sign, Albert H Whittekind spent two years carving the wooden adornments on the flanks. The hearse runs on a Graham chassis, which was the truck division of Dodge Brothers before that brand was absorbed into Chrysler. No funeral homes ever purchased any of these smaller hearses and so this one was never replicated. The children’s hearse is now owned by Cole Funeral Home of Chelsea, MI.
fresh colonies of purple brown bacteria
Whoa.
Scientists have brought a newly-discovered bug back to life after more than 120,000 years in hibernation. It raises hopes that dormant life might be revived on Mars. The tiny purple microbe, called Herminiimonas glaciei, lay trapped beneath nearly two miles of ice in Greenland. It took 11 months to revive it by gently warming it in an incubator. Finally the bug sprang back to life and began producing fresh colonies of purple brown bacteria.
(via marginal revolution)
Why we don’t have trains
Beginning in the 1920s, General Motors began investing in mass transit systems. According to historian Marty Jezer (and Congressional hearings held in 1974), between 1920 and 1955, General Motors bought up more than 100 electric mass transit systems in 45 cities, allowed them to deteriorate, and then replaced them with rubber-tired, diesel-powered buses. Buses are more expensive, less efficient, and much dirtier than electric/rail systems. (And of course automobiles are even less efficient than buses, by far.) In 1949, General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil of California were convicted by a federal jury of criminally conspiring to replace electric mass transit with GM-manufactured diesel buses; in a noteworthy illustration of justice for corporations, the court fined GM $5000 and forced H.C. Crossman, the GM executive responsible for carrying out GM’s policy, to pay $1.00.
—”Tire Dust,” Rachel #439 (Annapolis: Environmental Research Foundation), April 27, 1995
This is just the warmup. The article is actually about widespread allergies to rubber in the form of tire dust.
The $7 Federalist
Indiana National Guard Capt. Nathan Harlan was a high school junior when he paid $7 for a 1788 first edition of volume one of “The Federalist” — a two-volume book of essays calling for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.