15 December 2010

Yule Be Fine




Photos by me.

Best Holiday Wishes to all and sundry ~ and may the New Year grace you with adventures, opportunity, and unsuspected fun.  See you again in 2011!


14 December 2010

Roundies

I am a nut for all things round: planets, lightbulbs, pearls, globes, any sort of round sport ball; you name it.  No doubt there is something deeply mystical about the perfection of roundness.  But it's just fun to see a round thing.


Dorodango
(handmade mudballs)



Info on how to make these can be found at this link and at this one.



Phone Dials







Planets







Doors










Making of


10 December 2010

Beauty From Afar

Every now and then an image takes my breath away!


Glacier Park, MT: Apgar Mountain



06 December 2010

Funny, to me at least


I won't presume that the comics I like are liked by others.  Here are a few that I find regularly amusing. (p.s.  Please note: These are not necessarily "for kids." )









[from the Wondermark website] "Wondermark is created from 19th-Century woodcuts and engravings, scanned from my personal collection of old books and also from volumes in the Los Angeles Central Library. Most of the books are bound volumes of general-interest magazines such as Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s and Punch, but my collection also includes special-interest magazines such as Scientific American, Sears-Roebuck catalogs, storybooks, and primers."















02 December 2010

Seeing Into the Past


I've been working on a book manuscript about a late 19th/early 20th century author.  Part of the research has been looking at/for images, information, and time lines of that time.  It's been exceptionally fun when I come across videos of film footage of the era: movie making technology was in its infancy then.

Here's some of what I've found.


[from the Library of Congress American Memory project] "Scene from the New York stage comedy, The widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896." You can view this short movie here.



[from Library of Congress American Memory project] "Edison kinetoscopic record of a sneeze, January 7, 1894 / W.K.L. Dickson." Short movie can be seen here.




San Francisco, before the 1906 earthquake. This movie was made in 1905 or 1906, depending on your sources.



Old London Street Scenes (1903) -- [from the YouTube description] "Made over 100 years ago, this footage shows a number of scenes shot around central London, taking in locations such as Hyde Park Corner, Parliament Square and Charing Cross Station. We see crowds of people disembarking from a pleasure steamer at Victoria Embankment, pedestrians dodging horse-drawn carriages in Pall Mall, and heavy traffic trotting down the Strand.

There are plenty of famous landmarks to spot here, including Big Ben, the National Gallery and the Bank of England, and it is fascinating to see the similarities between the customs of "then" and "now" - the dense traffic (mainly horse-drawn, with the occasional motor car) is highly reminiscent of today's London rush hour, whilst advertising on public transport is clearly no new phenomenon - in one scene, an advert for Nestlé's Milk seems to be plastered on every other vehicle."

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