Hey Man Nice Shot

Get ready for a relinquished weekend with Brass Against and Samuel Hope.

 

The birth of the modern suburb

Above is a rather odd video, but it does have some good information in it. It uses the video game Fallout 4 as a starting point and moves on from there. If you don't know, the Fallout game series is set after a nuclear war and you run around fighting mutants, and raiders, and what-not, but that's not the topic of the video.

The aesthetics of the game world is a retro-1950s futurism with robots, atomic power and a sort of goofy old-timey Americana feel to it. Generally, you only see the post-war ruins of it, but Fallout 4 starts with a pre-war segment set in a suburban cul-de-sac. The Architectural Outcast uses that as a springboard to discuss how America's suburbs came to be.

WWII soldiers were not well paid, but as compensation they were promised certain post-war benefits via the GI Bill. One of these benefits was an affordable house with no down-payment. The problem was that during the war, and the Great Depression that proceeded it, not a lot of houses had been built and so there was a shortage of housing, and what houses that were available were old and rather worn out.  

The U.S. solved the problem by going on a massive housing boom. Much of it was via planned housing developments surrounding cities, which led to the modern suburbs. For efficiency's sake, different models in these developments were limited, and so we got the cookie-cutter feel the suburbs are known for.

There were also attempts at kit houses. Because it was featured in the Fallout neighborhood, he discusses the Lustron House, a prefabricated steel house that never gained traction and is nothing more than an oddity today. 

The Lustron Home
 

Columbus's acheivement

Columbus's fleet departs for its historic trip

It is Columbus Day. Some of the common talking points around it strike me as being rather puerile. For example, we have the 'stolen land' bit, and the strange 'Columbus didn't really discover it because other people were already there' point. 

As for the first, while the Indians undoubtably got ravaged in their encounter with Europeans, throughout history populations have sloshed back and forth taking and losing land. In fact, prior to the arrival of the Europeans the Indian tribes had been long engaged in chronic warfare with each other, with their areas of control shifting as their fortunes ebbed and flowed. If you had the misfortune of being a captive atop an Aztec pyramid you were already being ravaged.

As for the 'Columbus didn't really discover it' snark, Columbus isn't only, or even principally, known for being the first European to step foot on the soils of the Americas. We know other Europeans had travelled that far already. Rather, his voyage led to something theirs did not, the meaningful connection of the two hemispheres. As I've said in an earlier Columbus Day post, "The world changed from an academic's sphere to a physical globe on which the oceans were routes to all its lands." That is the importance of his achievement. 

His discovery was world altering. We have a term for its consequence -- the Columbian Exchange. Columbus's discovery led to the opening of transatlantic trade, and with that plants, animals, diseases, and people passed from one hemisphere to the other. Wheat, corn, potatoes, rice, barley, cattle, pigs, and horses all crossed the Atlantic to the benefit of all. Unfortunately, diseases did as well, much to the detriment of the Amerindians. That transfer greatly impacted both sides of the Atlantic. It shaped the world we live in today, and that is the legacy of Columbus's voyages and the true reason he is to be remembered. 

       

Lamps

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When the sun goes down human eyeballs need to get light somehow or another. In this post I present paintings of our friend the lamp, in all of its either electric or flaming glory. 

Pink Skies

Get ready for a neo-psychedelic weekend with The Bloomfields.

 

Walking in space

Two astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough, exit ISS to fiddle about doing this and that. Seeing the station up close is interesting, we're used to seeing cheesy and rather plain movie sets with astronauts clomping around on them in magnetic 'gravity' boots or dangling from wires to simulate weightlessness, but the actual surface is quite detailed. The amount of external cabling surprised me, and I imagine it would horrify IT network engineer types with its sometimes rather haphazard looking routing. Also, since gravity isn't an issue, the station spreads out in a far more organic manner, with the modules, solar panels, and what-not laid out as needed. 

There was, in a couple of shots, what looked like debris of some sort that was orbiting in proximity of the station. Were I ever to do an ISS spacewalk, that debris would probably include my space suited body when I forgot to secure my safety harness properly and floated away to my doom.  

I gave it my 'walking in cities' tag. There is no city, and for that matter no walking, but it's close enough I guess.

 

Gibson Girls

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My previous picture post was of Isidre Nonell's artwork who painted mainly poor people on the bottom rings of society. Today we go to the opposite end of the spectrum with the work of Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1946), a magazine illustrator, who created the Gibson Girls. They are an icon of the affluent, beautiful and stylish modern women of the day.

A fair number of the illustrations feature courting or marriage scenes. Naturally, as with a lot of works aimed at women, the men in them are a rather hapless lot being manipulated by the Gibson Girls who are, by and large, a rather smug looking group of young ladies.  

Charles Dana Gibson

My Blue Heaven

Get ready for a blissful weekend with
Natalie Hanna Mendoza, Jonathan Stout, and Sam Rocha.

 

Walking in Zamboanga City

Zamboanga City is in the southern Philippines. The walk starts in a market area and wends its way to the city center. The video was photographed nicely, without all the aimless camera pans you can get in these types of videos. 

I did like seeing the jeepneys in the city center area. Jeepneys are a wildly painted means of semi-official public transportation that I always identify as being unique to the Philippines. Their decorations mix religious and secular iconography, often with the sacred heart of Jesus next to a Playboy centerfold. They're quite an experience to ride in.

      

Isidre Nonell's art

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Isidre Nonell y Monturiol (1872-1911) was a Catalan artist who is known for his paintings of the poor, gypsies, and other people living on the margins of polite society. His colors are bold, and his brushwork very heavy. He died early from typhoid fever.

Isidre Nonell

Floresta

Get ready for a verdant weekend with Esteves.

 

The electron microscope

The above video explains the workings of electron microscopes. A beam of emitted electrons is guided and shaped into a focal point by a lens of electromagnets. There can be multiple electromagnet lenses to further focus the beam. Eventually they can narrow it down to resolving individual atoms. It was not clear to me how the image was captured, but then again, most of the details of it all passed well over my head.  

It reminded me of the 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. In it the hero, Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud while out sailing. This causes him to start shrinking a few days later. As he continues to get smaller his shrinkage starts to ruin his marriage (insert your own joke here) and, when word of his condition leaks out, it turns into a media circus. He gets small enough to move into a doll house. Unfortunately for him, his pet cat spots him and decides he would make a tasty appetizer. In escaping the cat, he falls down the stairs into the basement and is too small to climb back up. He monkeys with a mouse trap to get some cheese to eat and is interrupted by a giant spider -- well it is a giant to him -- and has to battle it for the cheese. Below is the ending, where he climbs through a screen and ponders his fate. It is a good, albeit very odd, movie. 

The end of hotdogs

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OK, hotdogs aren't really finished, but the end of summer means it is the end of grilling them on the patio. So, to prevent our memory of hotdogs from fading into Paul Revere and the Raiders territory, here is a picture post showing hotdogs and hotdog carts. I particularly like the last picture of the Japanese woman trying to daintily eat one with chopsticks.

Tennessee Waltz

Get ready for a larcenous weekend with Stringspace.

  

Hockey's goalie masks through the ages

I used to follow hockey. I started following it when I was but a young sprout in 1967 when hockey doubled its size via expansion. They did that expansion by creating what was a 6 team expansion division, which faced off against the older 6 team division when it came to Stanley Cup time. As a result, for years the older division routinely clobbered the expansion division in the Cup playoffs.

Since I didn't have a team, I decided to root for the St Louis Blues, the best of the new expansion teams. My sports heroes were Red Berenson as well as Bob and Barclay Plager, which caused many a confused look among my peers because none of them payed any attention to hockey back then. The early Blues dominated their division, but the Stanley Cup eluded them until 2019.

 

John F. Peto

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John F. Peto (1854–1907) was a painter who was unknown in his day. Early in his career he entered paintings to the Philadelphia Academy, but in 1899 he moved to the resort town of Island Heights and his public work as an artist ended. He rented rooms and played clarinet in a local band to support himself. Occasionally he sold paintings to tourists. He primarily painted still lifes.  

John F. Peto 

Goodnight, Irene

Get ready for a misstepping weekend with Ringo Nischack and Harry von Glahn.

 

September 11

9/11 sketch by Laurie D. Olin

I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy…
I will never forget seeing what love can heal…

― Steve Maraboli ―

 

Japanese pirates

Japanese pirates were call Wakō. While originally entirely Japanese, later they included Chinese, Philipino and other southeast Asians. The video is a good history that covers the growth, spread and the ebb and flow of the Wakō's fortunes (as well as a fight over a slave girl mentioned in passing, a seeming constant of history when it comes to warriors).   

 

Cantinières and other camp followers

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Old-timey armies, and for that matter modern ones as well if you consider civilian contractors, almost always had a cloud of non-combatants that traveled with them. Cantinières were women attached to an army to provide canteen services. Camp followers were people, generally women and their children, who would informally travel with an army. They provided a variety of services: cooking, laundry, nursing, selling goods, and companionship, both unpaid and paid. 

La Bamba

Get ready for a nuptialized weekend with Shut Up & Kiss Me! 

 

Turning scrap metal into rebar

This is a video of a Korean Daehan Steel plant where scrap metal is salvaged and turned into rebar. They also, oddly enough, grow vegetables at it. The photography is excellent; several shots are quite spectacular. The video is not narrated, but you'll want to turn the captions on. They are informative and amusingly flippant at the same time.    

 

Happy Labor Day

Going to Work by L. S. Lowry

Work - Henry Van Dyke

Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom;
"Of all who live, I am the one by whom
"This work can best be done in the right way."

Then shall I see it not too great, nor small,
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers;
Then shall I cheerful greet the labouring hours,
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall
At eventide, to play and love and rest,
Because I know for me my work is best.

 

Paintings with beds

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We spend ~1/3 of our life in a bed sleeping or... uh... otherwise engaged. These are paintings of beds: some regular beds, some sick beds, some death beds, some made beds, some unmade. Enjoy.

Tamally Maak

Get ready for a torch toting weekend with Serge Nikol and Etric Lyons.

 

Mr. Queen

Mr. Queen, which is available on Netflix, is a television show with the premise that a modern-day Korean male chef is magically transported to a Queen's body in the Joseon era (19th century). Were it an American show with that premise I would never watch it, anticipating that it would be awash with endless humorless gender lessons. 

However, it is a Korean show, so the Western gender studies stuff is nonexistent and instead they just mine the absurd situation for laughs. The result is a very funny and entertaining show that I highly recommend. In most of this post, which mainly covers the first episode, I'll try to avoid spoilers about events later in the show.

The cook, Jang Bong-Hwan, is the head chef at Blue House (Korea's White House). He's an arrogant, skirt-chasing, alpha male who thinks very highly of himself. He gets framed for corruption in the Presidential kitchen, and while being chased by the police, he falls off his balcony into a swimming pool and bonks his head on the bottom. When he wakes a beautiful woman in flowing robes swims up and kisses him. He passes out once more.

When he awakes again, he's in an old-fashioned room. He's disoriented, and when he finds a mirror, he is horrified to discover that he is now a pretty woman. He decides that he must be dreaming, although he's miffed that he's dreaming he is the girl instead of being with the girl. Eventually, he figures out things are too vivid for this to be a dream which throws him into a panic. 

He goes into the hallway to find it lined with maids bowing down to him calling him 'your Royal Highness' which only increases his hysteria. He blindly runs around with a tail of maids and eunuchs chasing after him until, as shown in the clip above, he decides that some twisted human trafficking outfit kidnapped him and gave him a sex change operation. It isn't until the implication of them all wearing old-timey clothes sinks in that he realizes he traveled through time as well as ending up in a different body. 

He calms down enough to start questioning his maids as to what happened to the woman whose body he's in. They're puzzled by the fact that he refers to the Queen as someone other than himself, but by this point they're dialing into the fact that their Queen appears to be a bit bonkers since she woke up from her near drowning. He discovers he is in the body of Kim So-yong, the Queen Bi (the King's fiancé). He also connects the water she almost drowned in to the water in the swimming pool he fell into, and decides water is the key to returning to his body. 

First Mr Queen runs around dunking his head in every bit of water he can find: mop buckets, horse troughs, and the like, but that doesn't work. It only convinces the maids that their Queen has a few more screws loose than they originally thought. He decides the lake the Queen nearly drowned in is the key, so he cons his maids into showing him where it is. As soon as he sees a sign pointing to it he sprints off to do a swan dive into it, only to land in the mud at the lake's bottom because it had been drained to prevent any more drownings. 

Mr Queen then remembers he's the Queen, so he orders his flunkies to refill the lake. They tell him they can't, because the orders came from higher up. So, covered in mud, he sets out to find the King to get water back into the lake.

When we meet King Cheoljong, he's in a pavilion reading a Korean version of the Kama Sutra. His eunuch tells the King he has been studying the book for too long. The King replies that he needs to properly prepare for his most important duty -- producing an heir. Oh-oh, Bong-Hwan (a.k.a. Mr Queen) may have another problem besides returning to his body.   

The King then sees Mr Queen and calls him over. Mr Queen lifts his skirts and runs over. Mr Queen barely greets the King, instead he immediately launches into asking/demanding that the lake be refilled. The King tells Mr Queen that he can't fill the lake because the draining was ordered by the Grand Queen Dowager and that he won't, or can't, rescind the order. 

As soon as the King first saw the mud-caked Mr Queen he had started holding his nose from the stench. This only annoys Mr Queen even more, and he ends up slapping the King to knock his hand off his nose. The palace staff is horrified. Also, as is the habit of middle school boys worldwide, the King has disguised his racy book with a fake cover.  Mr Queen gets interested in it and grabs it to look at it. The King grabs it back, and soon Mr Queen and the King are in a ridiculous pissing match over the book while the increasingly aghast palace staff looks on. Eventually, after their fight manages to demolish the book, Mr Queen leaves to sow chaos elsewhere.

The series is a type of Korean historical show called a sageuk, which frequently feature a lot of palace intrigue and this show is no different. We soon meet the Grand Queen Dowager, the real power in the palace, and her slimy brother, who are the main villains. The Royal marriage is for political purposes, and they're worried that the news of the Mr Queen's current bout of bizarre behavior will leak out and ruin their plans. So, they move the wedding up to the next day. 

Needless to say, Mr Queen is repulsed and horrified when he hears that news. To his priority of making it back to his body in the future, he now has to add not getting noodled by the King in the meanwhile. First Mr Queen tries to tell the King that he actually isn't the Queen, that he's really a man from the future. All that accomplishes is Mr Queen getting dragged off to see if the Court Physician can treat his case of sudden-onset insanity. 

The day of the wedding arrives. Mr Queen, who is buried in layers of ceremonial garb, doesn't know, nor does he care to know, the procedures and etiquette of a Royal wedding so he just sort of plows through it making a hash of things in the process. The palace denizens keep getting more bewildered and alarmed by his strange behavior. 

However, he makes it though the wedding and the night of matrimonial bliss is on the horizon...

Mr Queen's two principal maids preforming their hopeless task
of trying to keep their Queen prim and proper

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It has good production values, music, sets, costumes, sword fights, and is one of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time. The character Mr Queen is a supremely self-confident fish out of water who careens through whatever situation he finds himself in and imagines he is handling it perfectly. He also, when speaking, mixes in modern Korean expressions and English loan words so the locals often times have no idea what he is even talking about. Plus, he tries to flirt with every pretty female he encounters, although they are always mystified by what he is going on about. His loony decisions and unhinged behavior are hugely entertaining. The people around him are always baffled by what he's saying and doing, and their hopelessly confused reactions are spot on.  

I have to give a special hat tip to Shin Hae Sun, the actress who plays Mr Queen/Kim So Yong. She captures the mannerism of men, the way they walk, sit, talk and their expressions. Added to her excellent acting is a male voice expressing her inner thoughts, so the viewer quickly accepts that it is a man inside the Queen's body. Shin Hae Sun creates a memorably silly character in the process. I doubt the comedy would work as well with another actress cast in the role. She carries the film and steals nearly every scene she is in.

Another fine performance is Kim Jung Hyun as King Cheoljong. When first introduced the King comes across as a pompous dimwit. We'll soon discover that there is more to him than meets the eye; he's only a puppet King, but like everybody else in the palace he is engaged in endless scheming. He also always tries to maintain what he supposes is the proper level of dignity for a King. Since he is usually Mr Queen's straight man, his blustering over Mr Queen's nonsensical antics works well. 

Court Lady Choi, played by Cha Chung Hwa, deserves mention. She's Mr Queen's principal attendant and she's tasked with maintaining the decorum of the Queen's office. Needless to say, with Mr Queen that's an impossible task and poor Court Lady Choi has a slow-motion nervous breakdown as the show progresses.

Jo Hwa Jin, played by Seol In Ah, is the Royal Concubine and the King's girlfriend. In the clip below she is the woman called Uibin (that's her title). She would rather be the Queen herself and is none too happy about the king's betrothal to Mr Queen. Since she's pretty, Mr Queen naturally tries to flirt with her. However, as is the case with all of his flirtees, she has no idea what he is doing. Instead, she thinks his odd behavior is just Mr Queen playing a 4-D chess version of palace politics and replies with veiled threats which pass well over Mr Queen's head.

Royal Chef Man Bok, played by Kim In Kwon, comes to rue that day he ever met Mr Queen, who takes over his kitchen and torments him endlessly: insulting his cooking, infesting the kitchen with his maids, and at one point reducing the Royal Chef to doing nothing more than tending to the fire.

Finally, here's another scene of Mr Queen in action. It shows him at his macho best.

Bohumil Kubišta

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Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918) was a Czech painter. He was first influenced by Expressionism, and later by Cubism. He studied color theory and geometry in artistic layout. He was very influential in the development of Czech modern art. He died young from the Spanish Flu.   

Bohumil Kubišta self-portrait