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New Years is upon us, and so many of us will be attending parties tonight. I know I'll be taking my tuxedo out of mothballs and awing the young'uns when I hit the dance floor with my patented Watusi moves. I hope you have a good New Years Eve as well.
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Sir Muirhead Bone was a 20th century Scottish etcher and watercolorist. He primarily focused on architectural subjects. However, in WWI he was appointed as an official British war artist. These drawings and prints are from his WWI artwork.
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Holy Family by Lourry Legarde (click image to enlarge) |
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
He’s making a list and checking it twice,gonna find out who’s naughty and nice,Santa Claus is comin’ to town.- Haven Gillespie -
It is Christmas Eve and so one could reflect on the true meaning of the holiday. Either that or, depending on your family's tradition of whether you open presents tonight or tomorrow, you could greedily focus on the gifts instead.
And I don't mean the 'tis better to give than receive' blithering of do-gooders, I mean the stuff you'll get. Will it be your heart's desire, some junk headed to the back of your closet, or a lump of coal? Well, Santa has been spying on you all year so you better -- like I'll have to -- rely on his mercy over your year of foibles.
Regardless of the quality of your gift haul, have a Merry Christmas. Oh... and Peace on Earth and all that too.
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A smaller than usual collection of paintings featuring Christmas trees. Enjoy them as you go through your pre-holiday frenzy.
Just before Christmas I have a different TGIF music video post. I figure we've all heard the usual Christmas songs about a gazillion times, so I post Japanese Christmas songs for a change.
While strictly speaking, not a holiday, Christmas is popular in Japan. However, since Japan is Shinto and Buddhist it is does not have religious trappings. The Christian elements have been stripped out and only the secular remain: Santa Claus, decorations, presents, snowmen, jingle bells and so forth.
Christmas day will feature a family dinner, often times and oddly enough a bucket of KFC fried chicken. However, Christmas Eve has morphed into a couples' holiday akin to Valentines Day. That is why a lot of their Christmas music ends up being sappy love songs like the one above (and what sort of a dope proposes with an empty ring box?).
The video below shows the travails of dateless salary men on Christmas Eve. Of course, Japan being Japan, nobody does ridiculous quite as well as Japanese girl bands, and so we follow with a few of those, ending with my favorite which starts frantically and only gets more insane.
Christmas brings to mind the North Pole and Santa's sweatshop workshop. That, through a fairly convoluted path, brings us to Hubert Wilkins' 1931 attempt to reach the North Pole via a WWI submarine. The above video documents his expedition. It had a lot of problems and didn't succeed, but he did manage to bring his ship and crew back to Norway. It's a very interesting story.
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Coffee. The first cup of it in the morning elevates it to nectar of the gods territory. Throughout the day it provides a pick-me-up and a drink to gossip over when on breaks. These are paintings of coffee, sometime just coffee in a cup, sometimes being savored.
This is a film from sometimes in the 1950s showing an automated assembly line machining engine blocks and other parts. The automation was largely controlled by limit switchs. While they work well, once set up there is very little flexibility in the processes of an assembly line. Modern computer-controlled switching can be more generalized, changing tasks on the fly as needed.
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Popular Mechanics, first published in 1902, is a magazine that focuses on science, technology, machines, DIY projects, cars, planes, rockets, tools and the like. At one time it was widely read, but as with most periodicals, the internet has cut into its domain. It is still published. Its articles about future cutting edge technology were frequently ridiculous, and from the looks of things that hasn't changed.
These images of covers from the 20th century are from the Internet Archive. There are many more covers in their archive.
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USS Utah (BB-31) seen from her memorial She was hit by two torpedoes and sunk during the attack (click image to enlarge) |
On the morning of December 7, 1941, I had relieved the watch in the port engine room [of the USS Utah]. I had been on watch about 20 minutes when the first torpedo hit the ship on the port side. It was about 5 or 8 minutes before I could hear someone hollering that the Japanese were attacking us.
I ran up the ladder to the third deck. On the port side was our sleeping quarters, and water was already washing over my bunk. I went to the starboard side of the ship, went up to the second deck to our locker room and mess hall. There were several other men there. One asked if he should take his dress blue uniform with him. I told him he wouldn't be needing that for a good while.
I grabbed an extra pair of dungarees, a carton of cigarettes, and went on topside. A friend and I sat down on the side of the ship and slid into the water. We swam to Ford Island where we were picked up by a party. They took us to the USS California to unload ammunition. That evening, we were taken to an ammunition ship that was tied up at the docks in the shipyard. We spent the night there. -- Cecil Camp
This video shows a family preparing, cooking and eating hornets in rural Nepal. Like many of these types of videos I suspect it is largely staged. I think the hovel they supposedly live in is actually a set, and they live elsewhere. Still, it an interesting video and certainly an exotic dish.
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The first power plants were built in 1882. They produced the electricity which was then distributed by a grid of wires. Since then, the power stations and the grid to support them have expanded enormously. Power lines are a ubiquitous and little considered part our landscape. Of course, power lines and the poles that support them have been captured by artists, sometimes as an aside in a landscape painting, sometimes as the main subject.
