On pondering nature

Anonymous, Eyes on the Fly.

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“Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification--crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.”

-- Roman Vishniac

Shake, Rattle and Roll

Get ready for a domestic weekend with Big Joe Turner and his band.
 

Soviet Photography

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Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) was a magazine aimed at amateur Russian photographers. It features articles on technique, equipment and examples of photographers work. These are covers from Sovetskoe Foto, and as you can see many of them in the style of Soviet realism so familiar from their propaganda posters.

They're from the Magazine Rack's archive of  Sovetskoe Foto, a site that digitizes magazines. At that site the contents of the magazines are archived as well, so you can flip through them and get all their content. There are more covers after the jump, and many more at the link.

Making paper in Bhutan

Columbus Day

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One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. - André Gide

Victorian Railroad Lunatics

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We have scary clowns popping up on roadsides, the Victorians were plagued with railroad lunatics. When railroads were a new development there were numerous reports in the papers of normal people going berserk and causing all sorts of mayhem on them.

It was thought that the very act of riding a train could trigger such behavior, From Atlas Obscura:

As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves.

In the 1860s and ‘70s, reports began emerging of bizarre passenger behavior on the railways. When seemingly sedate people boarded trains, they suddenly began behaving in socially unacceptable ways. One Scottish aristocrat was reported to have ditched his clothes aboard a train before “leaning out the window” ranting and raving. After he left the train, he suddenly recovered his composure.

There was also a concern that insane asylums were often situated close to rail lines and that escaped inmates would gravitate to the trains to escape the area and cause all manner of mischief in the process.

Finally, trains allowed women to travel alone, and so there was an aura of sexual danger in riding them. From the same article:

After going on a particular train ride, female novelist George Eliot stated with tongue firmly in cheek that upon seeing someone who looked wild and brutish, she was reminded of “all the horrible stories of madmen in railways.” Elliot seemed to relish the excitement of a possible confrontation and sounded rather disappointed when the figure turned out to be an ordinary clergyman.

Djelem Djelem

Get ready for a weekend of gypsy hipsterism with the Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra.
 

Chatting with Sasquatch

In the above video a fellow by the name of Mike Paterson chats with his buddy Nephetia (sp). What sets this conversation apart is the fact that Nephetia (sp) is a Bigfoot, and a talkative one at that!

I'm not sure why the picture of the tent and the "orbs" accompany the audio. One would think a video, or at least some pictures, of Nephetia (sp) would be more useful in establishing the authenticity of this little woodland coffee klatch.

Then again, no need to be a cynic. After all, if you can't believe what you find on the internet, what can you believe?

A taxi driver and his passengers

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Ryan Weideman is a New York based taxi driver and photographers. For years he's taken pictures of the passengers in his cab. He's published a collection of his photos in the book In My Taxi: New York After Hours.

From the Publishers Weekly blurb about his book:

A self-described ``photographer-taxi driver,'' Weideman presents duotone portraits of punks, white- and blue-collar types, prostitutes, club kids and others who rode in his cab before plunging back into New York City's anonymous throng. After migrating east from the California Bay area in 1980, Weideman began driving a spacious Checker cab--capable of accommodating seven passengers--on a 5 p.m.-5 a.m. shift. In a terse, mercurial introductory essay evocative of the city's intensity, he tells tales of life as a cabbie, explains how he captures his subjects on film and reveals their myriad reactions, from enthusiastic to wildly negative. The motley New Yorkers here exhibit many attitudes: some glare menacingly yet comply, some seem exasperated, still others smile, attempt sexy poses or appear blase. Weideman occasionally sets up the camera so that his countenance8 dominates the foreground, separated from the action behind him. These transitory glimpses of radically dissimilar individuals are a sincere, blunt, affectionate document of New York's multicultural night life. 

Via Vintage Everyday.

It's Good To Be King

Sad news about Tom Petty. He suffered a heart attack and is now off life support with no brain activity. He is not expected to survive. RIP Tom, you were a king for sure.
   

Engravings of 19th Century China

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The book China, in a series of views : displaying the scenery, architecture, and social habits of that ancient empire was published in 1843. As the title implies, it was a guidebook to China when it was still largely unknown and mysterious to Westerners.

These, and the images after the jump, are some engravings from that book. They are particularily fine examples of plates from travelers' books of the time. The scans are from Old Book Illustrations. Enjoy.

The Do Nothing Machine

From the YouTube description by CaptainHarlock999:

The Do Nothing Machine, built by Lawrence Wahlstrom, plus stationary engines by Rudy Kouhoupt at the end. Craftsmanship Museum, Carlsbad, CA.

From the museum website at www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com - According to a newspaper article (paper unknown) from about the early 1960's, the inventor of this engineering marvel was Lawrence Wahlstrom, a retired clock maker. He worked in the newspaper business and for the telephone company, while also acting as caretaker and landscape gardener for a Beverly Hills estate for 40 years. He always enjoyed tinkering with clocks and had attended a clock school to learn about their repair. Somewhere along the line he acquired a fascination for gears. After coming across a surplus WWII bomb sight containing a complicated cluster of gears, he got it working again. He also realized that people prefer to be entertained rather than educated, so he began adding more and more gears to his assembly over a 15-year period starting in about 1948. The first known publicity photo of it appeared in 1950.

Over the years, the number of gears continued to grow, reaching either 744 or 764 depending on which account you read. Like the motion of the machine, the actual figure is somewhat fluid. It attracted a lot of media attention over the years, appearing in magazine articles and on TV shows. It was seen on both the Art Linkletter show and the Bob Hope show. The family archives also contain a telegram arranging for Mr. Wahlstrom to appear on the Garry Moore show in November, 1954. Life Magazine gave it a full page in the April 20, 1953 issue, and Popular Mechanics gave it ½ page coverage in the February, 1954 issue. In February, 1955 it was also featured in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. There were also many other newspaper and magazine articles documenting its constant evolution.

Called by its inventor variously a "Flying Saucer Detector" or other nebulous and facetious descriptions, his goal was to add at least 50 gears each year to the constantly growing project. As noted in Popular Mechanics in 1954, "We all know someone who works harder doing nothing than most of us work doing something, but we can't possibly know anything that works harder at nothing that a machine built by a California hobbyist. The machine has over 700 working parts that rotate, twist, oscillate and reciprocate—all for no purpose except movement."

At some point after the Do Nothing machine came into the possession of the Antique Steam and Gas Museum in the Joe Martin Foundation's home town of Vista, CA. It was put up for auction, where Mr. Wolf purchased it in about 2003, repaired it and for years took it to several shows a year for the public to enjoy.

 

96 Tears (& The Gallopin' Gaucho)

Get ready for a liquid weekend with the Religious Knives and Mickey Mouse.
 

Watercolors of WWII airships

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During WWII airships were used by the U.S. Navy for antisubmarine patrols. These are illustrations by the artist Adolf Dehn of those LTA craft. They are taken from Travel for Aircraft's post Adolf Dehn and WW II’s LTA Aviation in Watercolor. More are at the link.

Making a Rover Imperial motorcycle

This early silent film documents the making of a Rover Imperial motorcycle. It starts with casting the engine block and goes through to test driving the completed motorcycles.
 

A crime scene?

“Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America
 

Gangsta's Paradise

Get ready for a weekend of hardcore ukulele rap with Les Ukulélés Girls.
 

Celebrities of yore

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These images are a series of covers from the magazine Motion Picture. The magazine covered Hollywood and its stars. The covers are from the beginning of the industry through the late 1940s. That was at the height of the movie studio system, so the images of the stars were carefully controlled and you don't see the sort of celebrity buffoonery featured on the covers of current celebrity magazines.

The images are from MagazineArt. There are more after the jump, and many more at the site.

Pessimism and Optimism

Stream Of Life by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
  

Electricity

Whoo-hoo! Captain Beefheart to commemorate the return of power. Take that Irma.