Rosie the Riveter, WWI style

Click any image to nelarge

WWII leading to a lot of women in the workforce, personified by Rosie the Riveter, is well known. Less well known is that in WWI a lot of women were also employed in industries. These pictures, and those after the jump, show some of those women on the job.

They are taken from The Public Domain Review's article Women at Work during World War I where there are more.

You Are My Sunshine

Get ready for an ominous weekend with alone.

Showing off

Finnish cavalry stunt from the 1930s
(click to enlarge, from Hippodrome Almaty)

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends. - Orson Welles

Restoring a broken 1880 Martini-Henry target pistol

The above video is from Andre Will Do It, a YouTuber who shows the steps he takes to restore old guns and equipment. There are more of his videos at the link.

The Wilson House, a mid-20th Century time capsule

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In 1959 Ralph Wilson, owner of Wilsonart a laminate company, designed and built his home. It was his residence as well as a test-bed and model home for his company's products. I imagine modern hipsters drool over it since it is a well preserved example of 1960's interior design. It is quite striking and stylish.

From the Wilsonart webpage:

The Ralph Sr. and Sunny Wilson House represents a hybrid of ranch and modern-style home architecture. The open interiors and U-shaped plan reflect the influence of the California Case Study House - a series of architectural experiments from the early 1940s and 1950s that were offered as better solutions for residential living.

The interiors of the Wilson House feature extensive use of decorative laminates in innovative applications, most of which had never before been seen in the home. The kitchen countertops reveal some of the earliest work in post-forming, a process where laminate is bent and wrapped to form continuous curves from the top to the side edge of the counter. Other applications include laminate clad built-in cabinetry in the kitchen, laundry, and bathrooms—even in the shower! The house also boasts some of the earliest undermount sinks in laminate tops – considered an innovation even today. While these types of installations are commonplace now, they were virtually unheard of in the late 1950s.

The Wilson House was featured in Ralph Wilson Plastics Company advertisements, as well as in the editorial pages of the nation's top trade magazines. It represented an ideal of design for affordable and fashionable residential housing and had a profound influence on future uses of laminate. Today, the house stands as one of the best residential examples of the mid-century modern style in the state of Texas.

There are more images after the jump, as well as more information and pictures at: Wilsonart's The Wilson House,  Mid-centuria's The Wilson House: A Laminate Laboratory and Roadside Wonders' The Wilson Laminate House.

Night Tango

Get ready for a nocturnal weekend with Mad Manoush.

A sculptor draws doctors operating

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Barbara Hepworth was a 20th Century English sculptor. Her statues were similar in style to Henry Moore (she was a fellow student with him in her formative years). In 1947 her daughter fell ill and Hepworth ended creating a series of drawings of surgeons at work in the operating theater. Hepworth's comments from Tate's Sculpture and the scalpel:

“In about the middle of 1947, a suggestion was made to me that I might watch an operation in a hospital. I expected that I should dislike it; but from the moment when I entered the operating theatre I became completely absorbed by two things: first, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and co-ordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life, and the way that unity of idea and purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement, and gesture, and secondly by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.  

From the very first moment I was entirely enthralled by the classic beauty of what I saw there; classic in the sense that architecture and function were perfectly blended and purity of idea and grace of execution were in complete harmony.”

Considering how abstract her sculptures are, it is interesting to see her drawings. It is striking how detailed her faces and hands are, while the rest of the image is barely sketched.

HT: Flashbak.

Hunting with eagles in Mongolia

Illustrations of every day Japan by Masashi Shimakawa

click any image to enlarge

These pictures, and those after the jump, are by the Japanese artist Masashi Shimakawa. He illustrates scenes of everyday life. His use of color, shadow and light is excellent. I particularly like his night scenes.

You can find more of his work at his website and his Instagram account.

Loser

Get ready to capitulate this weekend with The Cleverlys.

The illusion of endless cycles

Toilet paper roll, patent: US465588 (click to nelarge)

She’s a manner of speaking. Even the flowers don’t come back, or the green leaves. There are new flowers, new green leaves. There are other beautiful days. Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real. - Alberto Caeiro

Martin Mars Water Bomber startup and taxi

It used to be used to fight fires in Canada, but it is now retired. It is the World's largest flying boat.

Photographs of old photographers

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Not exactly self-portraits, but close enough. These pictures, and those after the jump, are a series of photographs of old-timey photographers, some posed and some of them candid. They are from La boite verte's post Des photographes à l’ancienne. There are many more examples at the link.

Creep

Get ready for an unrequited weekend with Brian Justin Crum.

A small market in rural Laos

Usually the walking videos I post are in cities, this one is a tour of a small market in rural Laos. It occupies a short stretch of a dirt road and is very basic, but it does seem well stocked with food, as well as having some clothes and other commonly needed items. I suspect a lot of the women buy the food for their meals on a daily basis at a market like this.

NASA's space tourism posters

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted Visions of the Future, which contains a number of hypothetical posters for space tourism. To those of us of a certain age it is just a reminder of the sorry follow-up to Apollo. Ah, what might have been.

Anyway, this is their blurb for the posters:

Imagination is our window into the future. At NASA/JPL we strive to be bold in advancing the edge of possibility so that someday, with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future.

There are more posters after the jump, and a few more. as well as more information and larger size downloads, at the JPL link.

Homemade wheat beer and crayfish

The above video is from Li ZiQi, an extremely popular Chinese 'Oriental Lifestyle Foodie', making wheat beer and eventually cooking a meal of crayfish and enjoying the beer. Her videos are very beautifully filmed and well edited.

She has a carefully curated image as a young Chinese girl living a simple rural life and demonstrating traditional cooking and crafts. From her About page on her online store:

[Li ZiQi is] a girl who lives in the mountains and forests in the village of northwestern Pingwu, Mianyang City, Sichuan Province, China.

Li Ziqi didn't own happy childhood. When she was a child, her parents got divorced and her father died early. She started living with her grandparents. Their life was poor but affordable. Li Ziqi's grandfather was a cook in the village. When there was a ceremony going on, such as a wedding or a funeral, her grandfather would be in charge.

In her videos, she shows how to cook various dishes, which she had learned from her grandfather. Besides cooking, she also learned how to make bamboo baskets, grow vegetables, and make carpenter handiworks.

----------

Li Ziqi's works convey a positive attitude toward life. Ziqi's videos can help people fulfill the "dreams of the countryside."

These are the dreams of many people at home and abroad, especially Chinese people. Many people show great interest in Li Ziqi clothing. In front of the camera, she always appears in a set of Chinese Han clothing which is made in rough fabric.

Also, her videos help more people learn and understand Chinese traditions and culture. The spirit of struggling for independence and self-reliance conveyed by her life experience has attracted great attention at home and abroad.

Additional information, including biographical information and a brief interview of Li ZiQi, can be found at Li ZiQi - A Modern Chinese Fairy.

What I Like About You

Get ready to cut a rug this weekend with Los Colorados.

Colorized pictures from a 1903 Russian costume ball

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In 1903 Tsar Nicholas II, to celebrate the 290 anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, hosted a costume dress ball in the Winter place in St Petersburg. These pictures from that ball were colorized by Olga Shirnina and they certainly are beautiful. Of course the ball occurred in the sunset of an Age, in 15 years it would be swept away.

These pictures, and those after the jump, are from the vintage News post Dazzling Color Photos of the Legendary Romanov Costume Ball of 1903 which has more of the colorized photos, as well as a number of black and white ones. Enjoy.

"What did you do at work today?" "I pulled over a submarine."

Above is a video of the Coast Guard cutter Munro boarding and seizing a semi-submersible drug carrying submarine in the Pacific. I originally saw the video at Borderland Beat.

The title of the post is from plixplop in the comments to the video.

The Hornsby Chain Track Tractor and new links

Click to enlarge

This is a post that adds a couple of new links to Flares. When looking for a graphic to illustrate it I searched on 'chain links' (I guess if nothing else I'm hopelessly cliché). Anyway, I found the above image of a fellow riding his Hornsby Chain Track Tractor.  If you're interested, The Old Motor has a post with information about them -- The 1908 Hornsby Chain Track Tractor.

As for the new links, under 'Recommended' in the far right column I've added:

• The Volokh Conspiracy is a go to site for me, a non-lawyer, when it comes to current legal matters. The discussion in their comments sections are particularly enlightening as multiple views and opinions are hashed out in them. 
• Victory Girls is a blog I frequently followed links to, so I added it to Flares' link list so I didn't have to rely on stumbling across a link to find my way there.

Say Something

Get ready to throw in the towel this weekend with A Great Big World featuring Veronica Ballestrini.

Preparing to restore a Rembrandt

Viewing Rembrandt's The Night Watch

(click image to enlarge)

The Rijksmuseum has started Operation Night Watch, a project  to evaluate and eventually restore Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch. Rather than remove the painting to a lab for the process, a glass enclosure has been built around the painting and the process will the viewable by the public. The Operation Night Watch website also has numerous videos detailing the work.

From their press release:

On 8 July 2019 the Rijksmuseum starts Operation Night Watch. It will be the biggest and most wide-ranging research and conservation project in the history of Rembrandt’s masterpiece. The goal of Operation Night Watch is the long-term preservation of the painting. The entire operation will take place in a specially designed glass chamber so the visiting public can watch.

Never before has such a wide-ranging and thorough investigation been made of the condition of The Night Watch. The latest and most advanced research techniques will be used, ranging from digital imaging and scientific and technical research, to computer science and artificial intelligence. The research will lead to a better understanding of the painting’s original appearance and current state, and provide insight into the many changes that The Night Watch has undergone over the course of the last four centuries. The outcome of the research will be a treatment plan that will form the basis for the restoration of the painting.

1939 in Sheridan County, Kansas

Click any image to enlarge

These pictures are from the site Photogrammar which is an archive of photos taken between 1935 to 1945 by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information.

The site has an interactive map. I randomly clicked on a box inside of the map and got pictures from 1939 which were taken in Sheridan County, Kansas. It looks like it was a hardscrabble life, but I've read that, during the Great Depression things were generally better on farms than in the city, so maybe they considered themselves lucky.

Enjoy these pictures, and those after the jump. Of course there are many, many more at the link.

Cambodian grilled chicken with dipping sauce

This video is from the YouTube channel Rural Life. She's grilling chicken in this video, in her other videos the young lady demonstrated a variety of Cambodian recipes and dishes.

Wade in the Water/Nina Simone/Trouble so Hard

Get ready for an emancipated weekend with The Big Push.

Happy 4th of July

Click image to enlarge

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As always, may our self-proclaimed betters choke on those words. Happy 4th of July my fellow citizens. Enjoy the BBQs, festivities and fireworks.

The mighty Grillbot

The 4th of July brings BBQ grilling to mind. The above video is a review of a robot that cleans the grate of a BBQ grill. The brushes that keep falling off adds a bit of humor to it all. Even on sale these Grillbots cost $90 to $100. Seems like a mighty steep price to do away with your gill brush, but to each his own. You can follow the link if you have a hankering to buy one.

Speaking about robots, I wonder whatever became of The Robotolizer?

Images from old Japanese fireworks catalogs

Click any image to enlarge

The 4th of July is nearly upon us and of course that means fireworks. These images are from CR Brock and Company's early 20th Century catalog of Japanese fireworks. They are from the City of Yokohama library's digital collection and I found them via La boite verte's article De riches catalogues de feux d’artifices japonais en haute resolution.

You can download PDFs of the catalogs from the Yokohama library site. Run the URL though Google Translate Web to be able to find the links to the PDFs.

As an aside my wife, son and I watched a Tokyo fireworks display from our hotel room a few years back. I have no idea what the occasion for the fireworks was, but it was a very impressive show.

Jolene

Get ready for a weekend of groveling with Vazquez Sounds.

Mixing dreams and memories

Two Poor Men Sleeping by Isidre-Nonell  

Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake] - Christina Rossetti

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in night.
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.
Thus only in a dream we are at one,
Thus only in a dream we give and take
The faith that maketh rich who take or give;
If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake,
To die were surely sweeter than to live,
Though there be nothing new beneath the sun.

Here there is a bit of money

This is a nicely done video showing the underbelly of Lagos, Nigeria. It has snippets from a variety of people showing a small slice of their lives. It is produced by Al Jazeera if that matters to you.

The Meenakshi Amman Temple

Click any image to enlarge

From Atlas Obscura's post Meenakshi Amman Temple:

[T]he temple was built by Tamil Hindus native to southeastern India, and it first appeared in recorded history in the 600s AD. In the 1300s, the sacred structure was ransacked and destroyed by the Muslim general Malik Kafur in a successful attempt to spread Islam to Madurai. It wasn’t until nearly 250 years later, in 1559, that the structure was rebuilt by the first Nayak king of Madurai.

The Meenakshi Amman Temple remains standing today, the tallest tower reaching 170 feet high.

It is amazing how intricate and colorful the statues and decorations are. Actually, a lot of buildings in antiquity were similarly colorful, their pigments have just been lost over time due to neglect.

These pictures, and those after the jump, are gather from here and there on the web. Enjoy.

Crying

Get ready for a weekend of waterworks with 10 Poema.

Between my real life and my dreams

A space cowboy eats ice cream on the Moon

(picture via Shorpy)

Make Believe by John Foster

When I wake up in the morning
Not all is what it seems
I drift through a world of make believe
Between my real life and my dreams.

Strange Adventures from the space book
That I read the night before
Crowd in upon on my drowsiness
Through imagination's door.

Between sleeping and waking
The alarm clock's jangalang cry
Becomes the roaring fire-railed rocket
That hurls me through the sky.

My bed's a silver spacecraft
Which I pilot all alone
Whisp'ring through endless stratospheres
Towards planets still unknown.

Outside through the mists of morning
The spinning lights of cars
In my make-believe space voyage
Become eternities of stars.

Is that my mother calling something
That my dreams can't understand?
Or can it be crackling instructions
From far off Mission Command?

Sparta -- yet another visit to Russian TV Land

Regular readers will know that I frequently act like a monkey when a shiny object is dangled in front of my eyes. That is, I tend to get fixated and head off on tangents from time to time. So, it should be no surprise that after watching and reviewing the Russian TV show Vyzhit Posle, there would be more Russian TV in my future.

Above is an opening scene from the Russian TV series Sparta (available on Netflix). In the foreground is Barkovsky, a new student who is observing his fellow students as they eat lunch in a cafeteria. In the background we see Irina Shorina, a rather frumpily dressed Russian super model, errr… I mean student, who is carrying her tray. Just then a young fellow jumps up, walks over to her, says something snotty and then tears her blouse open.

Wait -- this is high school?

Anyway, he points at her flat chest and makes jokes about it and all the male students, being red blooded Russian boys who wouldn't get caught dead trying to date a flat chested Russian super model, all guffaw in laughter. The girls are also all laughing, strangely unperturbed by a guy ripping open a girl's blouse in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.

Meanwhile Barkovsky seems unamused by it all as he pours salt into his hand, walks up to the bodice tearing hooligan, tosses the salt in his face and then knocks the cad over as he pulls his pants down and then ends it all by throwing a plate full of food into the bounder's face. A scuffle ensues, but it is soon broken up by the Russian lunch lady who runs in and scolds the lot of them. Entertainingly, she completely ignores the Russian super model student with the torn open blouse. Ah, a day in the life of a Russian lunch lady.

The cafeteria scene was a flashback, the show now moves to the present where the bulk of the story takes place. It starts with a young woman teacher apparently committing suicide by jumping out of a 3rd story window at the school.

Enter our hero, Igor Andreevich Kryuko (pictured above), who is a rather odd Russian version of a down on his luck, hard-boiled detective. He also has a suicide in his past -- his wife caught him kanoodling a blonde in his car, went home and promptly jumped to her death. Ironic, aint it? Oh yea, the blonde is now his boss in the precinct they work at.

To complete his character, Igor lives on a house boat, has heart problems, eats a lot of tomatoes, bends paperclips into little figurines and is about the most unobservant detective to ever walk the Earth.

While everybody else concludes the teacher's death is a suicide he decides that a crime was committed so he launches a murder investigation. Hilariously from that point on he spends all -- and I mean all -- of his time lurking around the high school looking for clues. Good thing there are apparently no other crimes in this city.

As he bumbles around conducting his inept investigation we discover that, with the exception of the lunch lady from the above video, virtually all the teachers, staff and students of the school are degenerates in some way, shape or form. We have a parade of liars, petty criminals, sluts, pedophiles and neo-Nazis along with beatings, peepholes in the boy's lockers room, teachers getting roofied, students getting squashed by trucks, Russian mafia goobers, abandoned children, students filmed doing strip teases and more!

Yeeesh, even Mario Cart has better graphics than this clunker

The 'more' being S'Parta, the video game this TV show is named after. The game is presented with the same sort of moral panic Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto generated at one time. The game allows you do whatever you want to, so if the kids play it they are bound to all turn into homicidal maniacs. A corporation, presumably an Eeeeevil corporation, has bribed the school with free computers to install S'Parta in its computer lab. Naturally, all the kids started playing it non-stop and they're turning into homicidal maniacs and worse as a result.

What's funny is the game as shown is a wheezing bore with nothing to do in it and, as you can see from the screen cap above, it has amazingly crappy graphics for this day and age. If I paid $60 on Steam for this monstrosity I would be pretty livid, but the kids all seem to love it.

If I say much more I will be getting too deep into spoiler territory, so I'll leave it at that. Also, the show only had one season so I won't be revisiting it like I did with Vyzhit Posle. Would I recommend it? Well, the filming is gorgeous, but the characters are somewhat flat -- it depends on how curious you are to see what a modern Russian police show looks like.

Finally, in light of the flat chested super model student in the video that started this post, I'll end it with Leningrad's song Tits. It features infidelity, discusses the benefits of breast augmentation surgery, has wise advice from Vladimir Putin, mixes in mention of the Magnitsky Act and reenacts Da Vinci's Last Supper. Be sure to turn on captions if you view it. It is probably NSFW.

The design and manufacture of beer cans

A detailed look at the making of aluminum cans for drinks. The logic of the design choices are explained well, and the manufacturing process is clearly illustrated. An interesting look at a mundane topic.

Sloop John B

Get ready for a Bahamian weekend with Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and friends.

30 days at sea

This is a time lapse of a cargo ship traveling from the Red Sea to Hong Kong. Many years ago I sailed much the same waters, but I was on a warship and I remember the trip as being from east to west.

We had left Hong Kong and were in the Gulf of Tonkin when the Yom Kippur War started. The carrier group I was with pulled out and sailed through the Straits of Malacca and headed first to the Gulf of Oman off the Straits of Hormuz, and eventually south to the Gulf of Aden where my ship, and another destroyer, ran a blockade of the Bab el-Mendab Straits into the Red Sea.

It was hotter than hell and the sky was yellow with wind-blown sand. The Indian Ocean was beautiful.

Ardent in one way or another

Flattery in courtship is the highest insolence, for whilst it pretends to bestow on you more than you deserve, it is watching an opportunity to take from you what you really have. - Sarah Fielding