I've made a couple of changes to Flares' links. Powerline's article feed stopped working, so I moved it from 'Blogs of Interest" to the 'Recommended' section. Don Surber has moved from Blogspot to Substack, so I updated his link as well. Their new links:
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Tramp steamers are ships without a fixed schedule. Instead of pre-arranged routes, they trade on the spot market picking up new cargo upon the delivery of whatever they are hauling. Although they can be any type of ship: freighters, tankers, container ships, etc., in popular imagination they are smaller, older, rust buckets.
There is a sub-genre of movies and literature set on tramp streamers. They feature a cast of colorful passengers, most with dubious motives and questionable pasts, as well as crews full of sketchy characters that are likely up to no good. Of course, there will also be a hot dame or two mixed in to roil the pot. They're almost always entertaining in a cheesy sort of a way.
I thought insurance issues would have prevented modern freighters from carrying passengers, but apparently you can still book passage on some tramp steamers. Sounds kind of dreadful to me, but who knows?
The above video shows the construction methods and workings of a Fokker DVII biplane. The planes entered service in 1918, late in the war, but proved to be an excellent warplane. After the war all existing DVIIs were transferred to the allies as part of the armistice. Below are a pictures of surviving planes.
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A jungle is woods in a tropical zone. It is miles upon miles of trees underneath which is a dense weed utopia. They are difficult to move through and so, like any remote area, they are cloaked in mystery and romanticized.
To temperate dwellers they contain strange tropes: from safari members nervously muttering "it's quiet, too quiet" as they watch the trees, to Rosseau-like dreams of animals frolicking together in peace instead of eating each other, to ape-raised Tarzan swinging through the trees as he yodels to elephants.
Above all, they are places where one's imagination can run as wild as the foliage.
This a is a Peruvian dish called Lomo Saltado. It is a stir fry of steak, onion, tomatoes, pepper, soy sauce, and French fries served with a side of rice. Sometimes the French fries are also served to the side, but a common preparation includes them in the stir fry so they can absorb the flavor of the juices. Looks wonderful to me.
It comes from an infusion of Chinese techniques into Peruvian cuisine. In the 19th century many well-off Peruvians had Chinese cooks as indentured servants. They introduced stir frying (saltado) and many of the ingredients, including the side of rice, to the dish.
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Ralph Pallen Coleman was an American artist active during the first half of the 20th century. He did paintings and illustrations. He started doing work for pulps and local newspapers and worked his way to selling to more mainstream magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Home and Garden. Later in his career he turned more towards religious-themed artworks.
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| Ralph Pallen Coleman |
