Fairy Tale Friday--The Voice of the Bell

This tale of a bell, a baby, and a male curfew is from The Unmannerly Tiger and other Korean Tales by William Elliot Griffis.  I can't remember reading any other tale featuring a male curfew. I'd like to find others.

Folkwear Pattern

Baby Bell Pepper

"Romeo's New Plaything" or "Boredom Defeated!"

What will I do today?

I tire of the same old toys.

Hello!  What's this?

This smells just like Mommy's ears!

This is the most awesome toy ever!

I could watch it for hours....

...and then drop it into the water dish until the cotton bits come off.

Spooks at Work

Some of my co-workers put some effort into honoring Halloween.  I didn't dress up; shame on me.  Maybe next year.

A Miraculous Bloom

This plant has been in our office for years; then suddenly it decides to bloom.  JB freaks out and insists that I put it on my blog. Okie doke!

You'll Never Guess What I've Been Watching on Netflix Streaming...

...so I'll just tell you.  The Maze (1953) features a creepy old castle.  I'm a sucker for old movies featuring creepy old castles.  This castle is in Scotland.  The eponymous maze is part of the gardens and looks a lot like this one.

The family that has lived in the castle for generations has a terrible secret.  Many old families like this have a terrible secret, but this family's secret is goofy as well.  I will not reveal the nature of this secret; if you want to know it, watch the movie. (You could always fast forward to near the end.)

One Step Beyond  was a supernatural TV show running from 1959-1961.  I don't remember ever seeing it; perhaps it wasn't rerun the way Twilight Zone was.  (My parents wouldn't let me watch TZ when I was young. So they would've forbidden something as intense as OSB as well.)

Friends had suggested I watch Breaking Bad, since it was filmed in NM.  I put it in my Instant Queue, forgot about it, and remembered it last weekend.  I like it.  It's really dark humor.  For instance, in the second episode the main character has to choose between killing a drug dealer in cold blood or letting the guy go and risking his family's lives.  A lighter comedy would have him suffer moral pangs, abhorrence, and fear, but save him from making the decision by employing a goofy, unlikely accident to kill the drug dealer.  But BB doesn't coddle its characters.  It also does include bits of pretty NM scenery.

My Only Contribution

My only contribution to the mass of Marathon Bombing photos is this snap of Norfolk St. today (Saturday) taken as I walked to work.  As you can see, the Somerville police left some of their barricades.  The barricades were still there when I came home.

Yesterday I stayed at home like a rule-abiding citizen.   I noticed from TV coverage that some people did come out and talk to the media people at Norfolk St.

My neighbor was out of milk, so she called up Albert who lives above his store, Albert's Market, across the street.  While Albert was taking care of her, a friend from church came in to buy lottery tickets.

Then when they lifted the shelter-at-home-order you could hear millions of dogs barking as they finally got their walks.

Krampus Link

Reed discovered a wonderful site: krampus.com

Lunar Consolation

You will remember how piqued I was to learn that I missed being in the First Moon Flights Club.  In a moon-envy-induced frenzy I began collecting moony articles circa 1969 in all the newspapers we had available online.  A Los Angeles Times article* tipped me off to another moon souvenir worth having!  It seems that Trans International Airlines also capitalized on the moon-madness with a travel guide: Charters to the Moon.
"This booklet was prepared especially for the travel agent as a guide to use in planning, for his clients, future-out-of-this-world charter travel.  As the leading air charter carrier, TIA is proud to help travel agents to prepare for the future, just as we work together in the present."

A Google search located one of these brochures for sale.  For $30 I purchased my own moon souvenir!

More elaborate and goofier than the First Moon Flights Club card, this brochure lays out in detail the delights of lunar vacations."Enjoy your stay on the Moon, one of the most relaxing resorts in the Universe.  Its unique attributes include: smog-free atmosphere, no rain or snow, no breath of wind, and profound silence.  Your hotel, the Luna, is located in the Sea of Showers--which is, of course, not a sea (nor does the moon have showers)..."  "After your restful 63 1/2-hour trip by TIA '949' Super Spacecraft (you travel at speeds up to 36,000 miles per hour--six times the speed of the fastest bullet!), and after relaxation in your Luna luxery resort hotel, remember--Budget Rent-A-Mooncar serves all the Moon, with the latest model surface vehicles.  Offices: Copernicus Crater."   "For a unique experience, try a 'Moonhike.' The supporting strength of the lunar surface is much greater than previously suspected."  It goes on like that.  See large scans of the pages here for more excitement!

Now I need to find some way of preserving and displaying both sides of this brochure.




*Hulse, Jerry You May Be Man on the Moon, LA Times, June 15, 1969, pgH6.
Also mentioned in Moon Trip, Schenectady Gazette, June 16, 1969, p. 13. Found in the Google News Archive.

My Favorite Bookplate

Many zillions of years ago I checked out a book with the infamous Widener bookplate.  (It wasn't the following book; I'm just using it as an example.)

Read the second bookplate.

[from Twenty-Six Historic Ships]

I was rather shocked, because I didn't know the story behind the infamous bookplate:

"In 1931 Joel C. Williams, A.M. '09, Ed.M. '29, a former instructor at Groton and a former high-school principal, was caught with 2,504 stolen Widener books at his home in Dedham, Massachusetts. He said he was preparing himself for a college professorship. His thieving had begun eight or 10 years before, but had stopped a year and a half before he was caught when, according to a newspaper account, "extraordinary steps were taken by the Harvard authorities to prevent students 'sneaking' books out of the library without permission. A turnstile was erected at that time and suspicious bundles were ordered examined." An editorial writer in the Boston Post said that the case "suggests impaired mentality." When the books came back to Widener, librarians had an acerbic bookplate printed and affixed to each volume. It reads, "This book was stolen from Harvard College Library. It was later recovered. The thief was sentenced to two years at hard labor. 1932." A security measure of sorts."  From Harvard Magazine.  The Crimson article.

Note that, though literally true, the text of that bookplate is misleading.

Despite the security measures, the thieving continued.

[from A Source Book in American History to 1787]

Victoriana, etc.

I'm reading The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders.  I picked it up because I loved Judith Flanders's earlier book Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.  JF writes intelligent, funny, fascinating social history.  One of the more fascinating facts from TIM is that well-off Victorians collected Staffordshire figures of murderers and victims.

Potash Farm, the home of murderer James Blomfield Rush

.
The barn where William Corder (at the door) murdered Maria Marten (at the left).

The Victorians united the charmingness of porcelain with the grisliness of murder!

New Year's Eve Brunch

I went to Cafe Luna this morning with some of my buddies.

 Julie and Dave,

 Lynn and Sue,

 and my special friend Mr. Banana-split French Toast.

 Sue passed along another novelty candle: a teapot with a maple-leaf raised design.

It was proudly designed in San Diego, CA, USA; but made in China.

The All-Seeing Mechanical Eye

Today’s  topic is Mechanical Remote Viewing, (as distinct from ordinary Remote Viewing).  MRV devices allow an operator to view scenes live at a great distance without the intermediary of a spy satellite, helicopter, or surveillance camera.  Some MRV devices can even see through fog, walls, and mountains, and some can also pick up audio.  MRV turns up in science fiction and action shows with a hi-tech component. 

I was thinking about this recently as I watched the wonderful 1950 classic Radar Secret Service.  The cops in this movie had “tele-meters” which allowed them to watch their colleagues clash with bad guys out on the roads just as if they were watching a movie.  The miracle of radar made this possible.  (Did you know that radar started out as an acronym for radio detection and ranging?)

Of course, Captain Video was the king of MRV with his Opticon Scillometer.  Check out some of the episodes here, here, and here.

The Martian Spaceship of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians had a MRV screen that a clear view of various Santa Clauses on the city streets of Earth.

The scientists in Riding With Death manage, in the 2^nd half of the movie, to come up with a remote-viewing TV that allows the female lead to watch the male lead’s activities in a bar and parking lot.  The movie’s writers felt obligated to explain scientifically the male lead’s ability to become invisible at will (radiation accident), but the remote-viewing TV is pretty much taken for granted.

My Dad was visiting in mid-October, and we watched the new Hawaii Five-O.  At one point McGarret needed to know if there were any people in a boat on the deserted wharf, so he calls up a Navy friend who pushes a button and retrieves a thermal image of said boat showing one person inside.  She didn’t have to wait for a spy satellite or surveillance chopper.  It had to be Remote Thermal Viewing
.
Perhaps the audiences of the 50s were prepared to accept MRV because of precision bombing during WWII. Paul Fussell explains that "precision bombing" was something of a misnomer: "The fact was that bombing proved so grossly inaccurate that the planes had to fly well within anti-aircraft range to hit anywhere near the target, and even then they very often missed it entirely.  As the war went on, 'precision bombing' became a comical oxymoron relished by bomber crews with a sense of black humor.  It became obvious to everyone except the home folks reading Life and The Saturday Evening Post that although you could destroy lots of things with bombs, they weren't necessarily the things you had in mind."*   But civilians believed that each dropped bomb landed exactly where it was meant to. If you could drop a bomb precisely from 7 miles up without worrying about wind, then why not MRV?

I found a precision bombing propaganda pamphlet that Fussell mentioned and  scanned it.  Here's one image from it:

 Please check out the pilot I have pointed the green arrow at.  Tell me what you think: "Dude looks like a lady," "Dude, that is a lady," "Other."

*Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, New York: Oxford UP, 1989, p 14.

Dummy v. Dummy

Barb told me about this interview on the O'Reilly Factor.  Neither Mr. O'Reilly nor the president of the American Atheism Society was listening during science class when they talked about the tides.

Gorey Hallelujah!

Yesterday was commencement day, an extra holiday for me and my library buddies.  So Sue, Julie, Laureen, Lynn, and I decided to see the Gorey exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum.  I'd never been there before.

Sue, Laureen, Lynn, Julie

Inside, photography was strictly forbidden, so you will have to take my word that the exhibition was awesome, or buy the exhibition catalogue.  My favorite items were the envelopes young Gorey used to mail letters to his mother when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.  He decorated them with weird watercolor pictures.  He must have been well-known by the post office.

Next we visited the Granary Burying Ground, which is visible from Athenaeum windows.

 

Note that the woman buried on the left was named Silence.  Talk about Puritan names.

Next we backtracked and ate lunch at Zen Grille and Sushi Bar.  I had noodles;  I don't eat anything raw.  The sushi was very attractive.  Take a look at Julie's lunch.

Next we stopped to look at a Memorial Day installation on Boston Common.

Now go to Youtube to see our  our Swanboat ride.

We Interrupt Our Regular Blogging For a Special Post...

I've been watching old movies again.  The Hideous Sun Demon confirmed my belief that the sun is our enemy.  But what a great surprise I had while watching Appointment with Danger, in which Alan Ladd played a hard-boiled postal inspector investigating the murder of another postal inspector.  In the opening scene, two very familiar-looking thugs lug the dead inspector to an ally.  They were the very young Jack Webb & Harry Morgan, who would later portray the iconic pair Sergeant Friday & Officer Bill Gannon in Dragnet!  Wow!  And what was really cool was what baddies they were is this film:

UPDATE:  Ranald has pointed out that bronzed baby shoes are not as heavy as this clip implies.  However, I'm willing to allow them poetic license.  The bronzed shoes are a load on the poor hood's heart.

Is He Mad?

JB put a lime on a cubicle divider and left it there for the longest time.  When asked why he did not throw it out, he said it was a experiment to prove the hypothesis that the lime wouldn't rot and that some clementines would look pretty next to it.

Sounds fishy.  Does he think limes are immortal?  Are the clementines supposed to be brides of the lime?

A Miracle of Nature

Rot-O-Lantern

Chris pointed out this shot: an aging jack-o-lantern on a Thayer Hall lintel.

And variations.

An Invention Worth Blogging: The Clock-Comb

This Was Chuck's Idea

I'm on a scanning binge. I'm going to make a Picasa album of old photos. Watch this site for thrilling updates!