Greyhound Bus ads

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These are color advertisements for Greyhound Bus from the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s. The early ads focus on soldiers returning home and later they focus on travelling to see different parts of America.

In his Civil War: a Narrative Shelby Foote talked about the long campaigns meant that the primarily rural soldiers traveled far and developed a different sense of the nation. Similarly, in WWII many of the young men had traveled to Europe, Africa or Asia. In the years after, and before the wide spread of the car culture or cheap airfare, these young men and their families wanted to see distant places in the States. Greyhound buses provided them with a means to travel long distances.

These ads, and those after the jump, are from the Ad Access section of Duke University's digital repository. 

Revenge and forgetfulness

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To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it. ― Confucius

Black Friday stampede

Because it follows the Thanksgiving holiday this Friday isn't really the start of a weekend, so I will forgo my usual Friday video and instead, in honor of Black Friday shopping madness, I'll post a stampede video.

Not sure what would be more intimidating, those elephants or Walmart shoppers at the moment the doors open for the Black Friday sales.

Happy Thanksgiving

The Peasant Meal by the Le Nain Brothers

If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get. - Frank A. Clark

Vodou flags

 Images from Indigo Arts Gallery

(click any image to enlarge)

In popular culture the word voodoo has came to be indelibly associated with sticking pins into dolls, black magic and creating shambling zombies. To differentiate the actual Haitian religious practice -- which is a mixture of West African beliefs and Catholicism -- the spelling vodou is used these days. Normally such renaming annoys me, but I can see the rationale in this switch.

Vodou flags are a mixture of French battle flags with West African bead work. They feature beads and sequins. Originally they were religious in intent, although with the growth of tourism to Haiti they have also adopted a more secular and commercial purpose. From Haitianna's article Vodou Flags - An Essay on Collecting:

As Vodou flags made their way out of temples and into Port-au-Prince galleries and the hands of foreign buyers, curiosity about their purpose and function grew along with the numbers of people making flags. Some artists like Georges Valris imbue their flags with Christian imagery such as angels. Valris , who denies any belief in voodoo, regards flag-making as a commercial enterprise. Other flag makers, including Jean Baptiste Jean Joseph, are diehard voodooists. He once told me a story about seeing the mermaid figure of La Sirene, who controls the fate of anyone dealing with the ocean, actually walking out of the sea. But Joseph is also practical, using the flag medium in documentary fashion to portray what he sees around him including cats and lizards. This broad range of pictorial representation makes him a welcome anomaly among the current crop of voodoo flag makers, a group whose numbers seem to be swelling in recent years. With his innate color sense and use of luxurious materials such as velvet and satin, Joseph is setting a high standard for the next generation of flag makers to follow.

Each flag maker is known for something special. For Yves Telemaque, it’s the fantastic and optically challenging borders of his flags. By surrounding the central image in triangles and circles, then using faux pearls to accentuate contrasting colors, Telemaque rivals the paintings of Jasper Johns. Then there are traditionalists like Clotaire Bazile, who adheres to voodoo heritage in his portrayal of gods and goddesses and their symbolism. His simple diamond borders recall the careful workmanship on American patchwork quilts. Even newcomers to the field are distinguishing themselves. Lerisson Dubreus uses the trapunto technique of his forebears who made flags half a century and more ago.

These examples, and those after the jump, are from Indigo Arts Gallery's catalog of Haitian Vodou Flags. They sell the flags (as well as artwork from other regions) if you're interested in purchasing one.

A small and complex machine

A nicely filmed video that shows the design and fabrication of a Patek Philippe wristwatch. The effort and care put into machining, finishing and then assembling the tiny parts of the watch's mechanism is amazing.

In an earlier post The evolution of complexity in watches I did reflect upon how deceptive the apparent complexity of watches could be:

Above are three main types of time pieces: ... a cheap crystal watch, ... a mechanical watch's mechanism, ... a digital alarm clock.

Of the three the mechanical watch visually seems to be the most complex, but there is little doubt that the digital clock is actually more complex by orders of magnitude. While the switches, LEDs, capacitors and resistors are simple enough, hidden within the IC chip, and discernible only by microscope, are circuits of immense complexity.

Indeed, just like extremely large scales escape us, our perception is far too crude to make real sense of something so small. In the end we only see a slice of reality.

La Bamba

Get ready for an multi-national weekend with various artists.

Babylonian stew

This video is about three stews that were made from ancient Babylonian tablets that contained the oldest known historical food recipes. From The History Blog's article Babylonian stew which is about the Yale project that recreated these dishes:

The Yale-Harvard team prepared three recipes which were all from one tablet [cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection]: two lamb stews — one with beets and one with milk and cakes of grain — and a vegetarian recipe enriched with beer bread.

The variety of ingredients, complex preparation, and cooking staff required to create these meals suggest that they were intended for the royal palace or temple — the haute cuisine of Mesopotamia, says Lassen. Few cooks were able to read cuneiform script, she adds, hence the recipes were most likely recorded to document the current practices of culinary art.
...

“Making a stew is a very basic human thing and I think that is one of the reasons that we really went into this project,” says Lassen. “There is something really human about eating and food and tasting things, and that’s what we wanted to explore by recreating these recipes. Maybe not entirely as they as they would have prepared it — maybe our ingredients taste a little bit different — but still approximating something that nobody has tasted for almost 4,000 years.”

Beadle's New Dime Novels

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These are covers from Beadle's New Dime Novels. They were published between 18974 to 1886. The featured a mix of historical, war, adventure ands western fiction. At the time of their publication the settling of the American West was in full bloom. Many of the stories revolve around the Indian wars of the time. As you might imagine considering the conflicts, the Indians are portrayed as dangerous and bloody antagonists. Not surprisingly, it seems that white women were also frequently at peril in these stories.

They are from the Nickels and Dimes website. There are more pictures after the jump as well as many more at the link. Also, if you follow the link the full magazines are archived, so you can read the stories in them.

Conversations with North Korean defectors

This video features interviews with three North Korean defectors who have adjusted to life outside of that country. In the first part they recount their experiences growing up in North Korea, in the second their impressions of the wider world after their defections (two of them even spent time in the States).

Their comments about Trump are interesting. Prior to him they considered Korean diplomacy to be in a sort of equilibrium, with the Kim's saber rattling to get aid. The three obviously considered Trump to be dangerously unpredictable and seemed never to understand that it is a negotiating tactic to reshuffle the diplomatic deck and limit North Korea's options in the process.

The quote that did jump out at me was when one of them discussed their impression of the U.S., "Real freedom means respecting others' freedom as much as you value your own". Sadly, not so much these days.

Roadhouse Blues

Get ready for an early morning beer this weekend

with Daryl Hall, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and others.

Smoking to relieve asthma

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I can't imagine anybody who would really think that smoking anything would help with breathing problems, but I'll be generous and suppose they meant well and just missed the mark by a mile or two. I do love the "they may be safely smoked by ladies and children" line in the above ad. The voice bubble coming out of the guy's nose is also a sight to behold. Then again, who am I to doubt the medical advice of a talking nose?

These samples are from the  Messy Nessy post A Brief Compendium of Medical Quackery. There is much more quackery at the link.

Returning to Earth from the ISS

An interesting video on how the Soyuz capsule is used to return crew from the International Space Station. The actual touchdown of it looks pretty brutal.

Veterans Day

Moving forward to relieve the front line troops in the trenches

Today we remember our veterans. Walter Hare of the West Yorkshire Regiment recalls when he first went to the front line in December of 1916:

We moved to the right, I remember, got into a church yard – a cemetery – and then dropped down into a trench. And I couldn’t believe it; I was knee deep in mud for a start. I’d never been told about the Somme and the mud on the Somme, it was all new to me. Well we sloshed down this communication trench and we passed a support line and then we went further up and got to what was the front line. And then that was the first we knew about trench warfare – we were told we hadn’t to show our heads above the parapet because there were snipers and they would get us if we did, you see, so we had to be careful. It was a bit of a shock because I could hear shells exploding and rifles and machine guns going, and I thought, ‘Well, I shan’t be here above five minutes.’ It depressed you a bit; just I’d not been warned about it, you see, I’d no idea what it was like. (source) 

Japanese craftmanship

These videos are from the YouTube channel Aoyama Square. They show various example of traditional craftmanship and are very nicely filmed. Above is a woodworker making tubs and barrels. Below are examples of copper casting, wood carving and textile dyeing. There are a lot more videos at the link.

Papa Oom Mow Mow

Get ready for a nonsensical weekend with Big Den Hegarty.

Inside the UB 110, a salvaged WWI German submarine

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In 1918 the UB 110 was sunk. It may have been the last submarine sunk in WWI. The English salvaged it, intending to commission it into their navy, but the war soon ended and UB 110 was scrapped. How they could have ever figured out all the controls and valves needed to sail her is beyond me,

These pictures, and those after the jump are photographs that were taken while she was in dry dock being refitted. They are from Rare Historical Photos post Inside the German submarine SM UB-110, 1918. There are more pictures as well as more information about the UB 110 which, including a possible atrocity at the time of her sinking, at the linked article.

Adrift in a void

Wreck of the SS Punta

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? - Wole Soyinka

A lesson in marital discord

The Adams and the Kings argue and in the process the narrator give us a lesson in marital discord. Often times when looking at old film and photos the small details rather than the central subject is what catches one's eye. In this case, for me at least, the décor of the two homes, especially the Kings', is more interesting than the fights.

Knights in White Satin

Get ready for a one-sided weekend with Tatia Kay.

Happy Halloween

Oh my, Halloween is so fraught with landmines in these politically correct neo-puritan days that even picking out a card can be a chore. Anyway, and at the risk of being insensitive and offending any Children of the Corn that might visit this blog -- Happy Halloween.

Errr.... also, please try to ignore the unhealthy and oddly cannibalistic connotations of a corncob pipe being smoked by a corncob (insert the Surgeon General's warning here, etc., etc.).

A mainland Chinese reflects on living in the West

The Hong Kong situation is revealing fractures in the Sinosphere (Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora) that were previously invisible to us Westerners. This video features a letter written by a mainland Chinese person who discusses the issues facing Chinese living in the West and the isolation the CCP inculcates in many of them. The comments to the video are quite interesting as well.

Real & imagined opium dens

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Opium dens, which started out as an Asian thing, became popular, or at least somewhat trendy, during the 19th century in Europe as well. Some of these pictures are of actual opium dens, others like the one above with all the drugged white women, are staged.

If you want to get titillated by Victorian opium addiction you can always go to Project Gutenberg and read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey. Just be prepared for a lot of blithering foppery if you do decide to read it.

Finally, as usual, there are more pictures after the jump.

Brown Eyed Girl

Get ready for a retrospective weekend with Imaginary Future.

St Joseph elementary school in Banjul, Gambia

The video labels it as a high school, but in the commentary it is for grades 1 through 9. Vic Stefanu, who filmed it, has a large number of interesting videos at his YouTube site.

Out of reach

A Eunuch’s Dream (1874), Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Bring it on Home to Me

Get ready to ask for a second chance this weekend

with Scary Pockets featuring Joshua Radin and Hunter Elizabeth. 

Starting a WWII Soviet T-34-85 tank

The above video shows a 1944 T-34-85 being started after it sat in a barn for a while. It is powered by a 38 litre V-12 diesel. Below is more video of the tank, including shots of the interior of the turret and hull.

Paintings by Naoki Tomita

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Naoki Tomita is a Japanese painter who paints striking urban and suburban landscapes. He applies hiss oil paint thickly and in the process creates a blending of realism and impressionism from his brush strokes.

He also paints portraits, but in these samples, and those after the jump, I've concentrated only on his landscape work.  

Ball and Chain

Get ready for a constrained weekend with Melody Angel.

Aboard a fishing junk out of Hong Kong in 1960

Visualizing the Tower of Babel

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Genesis 11:1-9 King James Version:

1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The images are from Picryl's Tour de Babel.

Somebody That I Used to Know

Get ready for a collaborative weekend with Walk off the Earth.

A matter of perspective

Patent for the windowed envelope (click to enlarge)

I feel today, with all the possibilities we have in our hands, all the new technology at our disposal, everything is becoming obvious. Nothing is surprising. You can see beautiful things on Instagram, but there is something that doesn't touch you deeply. Everything is normal, while there's nothing that grabs you and turns you upside down. - Ludovico Einaudi

Operating a Gutenberg press

This video is a demonstration of the working model of a Gutenberg printing press located at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum.

Faces of the ancient Egyptian 1%

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These are examples of Fayuum Mummy portraits. They're paintings, from the Hellenistic era Egypt, that were attached to mummies and are meant to depict the deceased. However, from the above link:

On first inspection the Fayum mummy portrait paintings look like true-life depictions of actual individuals, but closer analysis reveals that the 'individual' features are sometimes no more than repetitive, formulaic renderings. In other words, quite a few of the portraits appear to have been created from a small number of facial templates, disguised by the use of different fashions, hairstyles and beards.

Regardless, they are still the only extent collection of portraits we have of more common people of antiquity, rather than the kings and generals we usually see in ancient art. That said, it was still only the very upper crust of society that could afford them.

Time Of The Season

Get ready for the other endless season with OptycNerd.

Street food at the Ruifeng Night Market

This video shows some food from a night market in Kaohsiung Taiwan. I love Taiwanese night markets, they feature a lot of stalls and stores with all sorts of goods and have a lot of venders selling street food. Tasting the different foods is a lot of appeal of the places.

Of the food shown I would love to try the Big Takoyaki Ball in a cup (although the commenters to the video seem to think they are overcooked and that it is a shame to break the balls up before serving them) or the Flaming Beef Cubes cooked with a blowtorch.

The fabric of society

Images from Spoon & Tamago (click images to enlarge)

At last he looked over at his host, contemplating the dead civil servant's American flag shoulder patch. He unscrewed the flask and this time raised the container towards the hooded garment.

"Believe it or not, Mr. Postman, I always thought you folks gave good and honest service. Oh, people used you as whipping boys a lot, but I know what a tough job you all had. I was proud of you, even before the war.

"But this, Mr. Mailman" - he lifted the flask - "this goes beyond anything I'd come to expect! I consider my taxes very well spent." He drank to the postman, coughing a little but relishing the warm glow.

He settled deeper into the mail sacks and looked at the leather jacket, ribs serrating its sides, arms hanging loosely at odd angles. Lying still, Gordon felt an sad poignancy - something like homesickness. The jeep, the symbolic, faithful letter carrier, the flag patch ... they recalled comfort, innocence, cooperation, an easy life that allowed millions of men and women to relax, to smile or argue as they chose, to be tolerant with one another - and to hope to be better people with the passage of time.

Gordon had been ready, today, to kill and to be killed. Now he was glad that had been averted. They had called him "Mr. Rabbit" and left him to die. But it was his privilege, without their ever knowing it, to call the bandits "countrymen," and let them have their lives.

Gordon allowed sleep to come and welcomed back optimism - foolish anachronism that it might be. He lay in a blanket of his own honor, and spent the rest of the night dreaming of parallel worlds.

- David Brin, The Postman

A rainy day in Kyoto

In the above clip Ranbalac, the videographer, visits the popular Golden Temple in Kyoto on a rainy day. In 1950 the actual Golden Temple was burned to the ground by an insane monk. The present structure was rebuilt in 1955.

The gardens are beautiful, and the sea of umbrellas floating through them, along with the sound of the rain, make for an interesting entry into my walking in cities video series.

Clock Face (Циферблат)

Get ready for the sands of time this weekend with Existan.

Machine to make a DIY spring

KSC - a review of Florida's high-tech tourist trap

Bas relief of the original 8 astronauts of the Mercury program

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I visited the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at Cape Canaveral last week. It has been over 20 years since I last visited the Center, and the changes were significant. As is the way of things in the Sunshine State, bits and pieces of old Florida are eventually replaced with a newer more Disneyfied version. The Center has not escaped that evolution.

The Center used to have a field where various rockets -- from the Redstone to the Saturn -- were displayed, a large building holding capsules and other space hardware and two tours. One tour was of the old Mercury and Gemini facilities (the Mercury pad was particularly striking with the blockhouse very near the launch pad and stuffed full of tube powered analog computers and, as its center piece, the large red button you pushed to launch the rocket). The other tour was of the Apollo facilities and featured launch control, the VAB and the Shuttle landing strip.

Upon entering the Center on this trip the first thing I noticed was the change to the rocket field, now called the rocket garden. It now had large buildings along its perimeter and pathways, some elevated, wound between the rockets. The effect was to obscure both their actual size and their size relative to the other rockets. It was difficult to compare them to each other.

The Saturn rocket has been moved and is now housed inside a very large building. Again, its size is somewhat obscured by not being as easily visible as well as now being contained in a larger structure. On the plus side the Shuttle Atlantis was now also being displayed. It was hung at an angle in a large building with its cargo bay doors open and, with two levels of walkways, you could get a very good look at it.

The museum that had the capsules and hardware was no more. I assume some of the stuff got scattered, but I never saw the Mercury, Gemini or Soyuz capsules, nor the Skylab mockup. In place of the museum were a number of 3D and iMax movies. I didn't watch any.

I think the old Mercury and Gemini pads got disassembled -- it is a shame they didn't at least move the Mercury blockhouse. Launch complex 34, where the Apollo Moon missions took off from has been leased by SpaceX. They've constructed their own launch tower.

The Center used to be the best tourists trap in Florida and I think it still ranks up there as one of the best to visit. It's a shame some of the history seems to have been lost or minimized, but I suspect it is a better stop for families these days. Regardless, if you're in Florida be sure to schedule a visit.

Space Oddity

Get ready for a celestial weekend with Mathias Skaarup, Mads Kronborg, 

Martin Havn and Kristian Bæk Michelsen.

Never Forget

My father, Norberto, was a pastry chef at ­Windows on the World in Tower One. For 10 years, he made many fancy and famous ­desserts, but the sweetest dessert he made was the marble cake he made for us at home. … Whenever we parted, Poppi would say, ‘Te amo. Vaya con Dios.’ And this morning, I want to say the same thing to you, Poppi. I love you. Go with God. – Catherine Hernandez

Gone fishing

I'm going to be gone for a few days. Meanwhile, entertain yourself with this short video of some Russian grenade-assisted fishing. What could possible go wrong?

The war and peace of impossible ambitions

A happy ape (click to enlarge)

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them. - Elizabeth Bibesco

Despacito

Get ready for a strangely diverse weekend with Mingoz and The Brotherhood.

Tokyo nostalgia

In 1966 a German film crew loosely recorded a day in the life of a Japanese family. There is no narration. There are scenes of them dining, various factory, market and shopping district scenes. In the street scenes it is surprising how many people are dressed in the old style. You don't see that much anymore, instead these days you see kids in the weird anime inspired costumes and what-not.

War Bonds

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These are newspaper ads for WWII War Bonds. Financing the war involved printing money. The bonds, which actually had a poor rate of return, were used to remove excess cash from the economy to control inflation. As you can see in these examples patriotism, the sacrifice of the soldiers, and the separation from husbands/boyfriends/sons (or the girl back home) were the themes of the ads.

These examples, and those after the jump, are from Duke University's Digital Repository. There are more at the link.

On the assembly line

Hopefully you have the day off from your worker bee job. Regardless, have a good Labor Day.