Wednesday, August 27, 1924. Color photos over the wire.

AT&T announced that a color photograph had been successfully transmitted from Chicago to New York via Wirephoto.

The German built, due to reparations, USS Los Angeles made its first flight.

The Lost Angeles over Berlin, 1924.

She was the longest serving rigid airship, serving, with interruptions, until 1939.

Last edition:

Monday, August 25, 1924. Ratifying the Dawes Plan and questionable movies.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 at the Movies, Camping, Dawes Plan, Diplomacy, German Weimar Republic, Movies, Politics

Sunday, August 9, 1874. Camp Scene Near Blue River, Colorado. William Henry Jackson.

 

Last edition:

Monday, August 3, 1874. London baseball

Labels: 1870s, 1874, baseball, Blog Mirror, Cricket, London England, United Kingdom

Sunday, May 21, 1944. The West Loch Disaster.

 

The West Loch Disaster, caused by a mortar round detonating on LST-353 in Pearl Harbor, resulted in 163 men being killed and six LST's sinking.

LST 480 today.  Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jessica O. Blackwell.

Negative assemblers T/5 William Robertson, 19121160, Sig C, of Los Angeles, Ca., and T/5 Robert Christensen, 17069147, Sig C, of Ogden, Iowa, preparing developed negatives for printing.

The U453 was sunk in the Ionian Sea by the Royal Navy.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, May 20, 1944. Dismantling a V-2

1940s, 1944, Communism, Italy, Operation Diadem, Polish Resistance, World War Two

Thursday, March 16, 1944. Lucky Legs II

One of the most iconic photographs of World War Two was taken on this day in 1944, that being a rare combat action photograph.  The subject was M4 Sherman supported infantrymen on Bougainville.

From Sarah Sundin's blog:

Today in World War II History—March 16, 1944: US Air Transport Command begins airlift of 5th Indian Division from Arakan in southern Burma to reinforce besieged Imphal and Kohima in India.

The Japanese Indian Ocean Raid ended inconclusively with lackluster results, and Japanese atrocities.

The Tautoq sank the Shirakumo east of Muroran, Hokkaido.

M2HB being fired at Japanese installations on Manus Island, Admiralty Group.

US and British aircraft sank the U-392 in the Strait of Gilbralter.

President Roosevelt addressed Finland:

March 16, 1944

It has always seemed odd to me and to the people of the United States to find Finland a partner of Nazi Germany, fighting side by side with the sworn enemies of our civilization.

The Finnish people now have a chance to withdraw from this hateful partnership. The longer they stay at Germany's side the more sorrow and suffering is bound to come to them. I think I can speak for all Americans when I say that we sincerely hope Finland will now take the opportunity to disassociate herself from Germany.

 

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, proposed a jet-propelled transonic research airplane be developed, which would leads to the "X" series research airplane projects.

Bell X-1, which would first fly in 1946.

Last prior:

Wednesday, March 15, 1944. US Ninth Air Force in England begins pre-invasion tactical missions for Operation Overlord.

Saturday, February 19, 1944. Landing on Eniwetok.

Marines and Coast Guardsmen display a Japanese flag, Engebi, Eniwetok Atoll, 19 February 1944.

Marines land on Eniwetok in regimental strength.  Fighting is heavy.  Among the casualties is John A. Bushemi, noted combat photographer.  He was 26 years of age.

Landing craft  headed towards Eniwetok, February 19, 1944.

And also Cpl. Anthony Damato.

Corporal Anthony P. Damato

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with an assault company in action against enemy Japanese forces on Engebi Island, Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands, on the night of 19[-20 February 1944. Highly vulnerable to sudden attack by small, fanatical groups of Japanese still at large despite the efficient and determined efforts of our forces to clear the area, Cpl. Damato lay with two comrades in a large foxhole in his company's defense perimeter which had been dangerously thinned by the forced withdrawal of nearly half of the available men. When one of the enemy approached the foxhole undetected and threw in a hand grenade, Cpl. Damato desperately groped for it in the darkness. Realizing the imminent peril to all three and fully aware of the consequences of his act, he unhesitatingly flung himself on the grenade and, although instantly killed as his body absorbed the explosion, saved the lives of his two companions. Cpl. Damato's splendid initiative, fearless conduct, and valiant sacrifice reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his comrades.

From Sarah Sundin:

Today in World War II History—February 19, 1944: The major Japanese air & naval base at Rabaul is officially neutralized by Allied forces as the last Japanese planes are moved to Truk.

The Luftwaffe hit London with 187 planes, the heaviest raid since May, 1941.

The Germans ended Operation Sumpfhahn against partisans in Belarus.

The U-386 and U-264 were both sunk by the Royal Navy in the Atlantic.

Billboard modified its "Most Played Juke Box Records" chart to rank records rather than songs.

Blog Mirror: Sergeant Dennis Fisher and Marine Corps Combat Photography in Vietnam

 

Sergeant Dennis Fisher and Marine Corps Combat Photography in Vietnam

Monday, June 25, 1923. Harding comes to Cheyenne and Laramie. The Ku Klux Klan came to Glenrock

The Tribune headlined with an auto accident that occurred in connection with Hardin's visit to Denver the day prior.

In Laramie, it was noted, but the focus was on his visit that would occur today.

He was stopped by Cheyenne as well, where the city gave him a cowboy hat, and he delivered a speech on the coal situation.

Glenrock had a different type of visitor:

The size of the demonstration is surprising.  I was not small.

The paper was silent on the lawlessness that concerned the Klan, but it was likely violations of Prohibition.  The KKK was a supporter of Prohibition.

An elevated train collapsed in Brooklyn, killing seven people.

The Progressive Conservative Party won provincial elections in Ontario.

Portland:

The death throws of the newspapers.

Back when I was in high school, I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist.

I was never very serious about it, it was only one of the possibilities I was considering.  In junior high and my first year or so of high school, I was fairly certain that I'd pursue a career as an Army officer, but already by that time that desire was wearing off. I liked writing and still do, so it seemed like a possibility.  I also liked photography, and still do, and it seemed like a career where you could combine both, although in that era press photographers were usually just that, photographers.  

I took my high school's journalism class as a result and was on the school newspaper.  Doing that, I shot hundreds of photographs of our high school athletes, as well as some really interesting events.  I did learn how to write in the journalist's style, which involves summarizing the story in the first paragraph figuring that some people will read no more than that, summarizing it again in the last paragraph, and filling in the story in between.  Good news stories still read that way, although I've noticed in recent years that is observed less and less.

During that year or so I had the occasion to tour the local paper, and the class had a senior, a young woman, who actually already worked there as a reporter.

That paper was no small affair.  The paper was a regional one, as well as the city paper, and it's building just off of downtown, still there was very large.  That large structure, with a massive open news floor and a big printing room, was at least the fourth locality it had occupied, outgrowing the prior three.  It would outgrow that one was well and build an absolutely massive structure just outside of town.

Last year, it sold it.

Now, the paper is headquartered in what was once a bar/restaurant downtown.  Much, much smaller.  It doesn't have presses anymore, it prints the paper in another state.  Far from having a large staff of reporters with dedicated beats, it's down to one or two writers who are always "cubs", just starting out.  It doesn't print newspapers at all on two days a week, right now, but relies on an electronic edition that mimics the appearance of a newspaper on your computer.

You can't pick up and thumb through a pdf.

This past week, it announced that it was going to quit printing a Sunday edition and quit physical home delivery for the three issues per week it will still print. Those will be mailed from the printing location in another state.

It's dying.

It's not surprising really, but it is sad.

At one time, it was a real force to be reckoned with, and people frankly feared it.  Everyone subscribed to it.  I know one family that sued it for liable due to what they regarded as inaccurate reporting on them.

Newspapers reformed themselves after the introduction of radio.  That's something that tends not to be very well known about them.  Before radio, many newspapers tended to be some species of scandal rag and they were usually heavily partisan in their reporting.  You can think of them, basically, the way people think of Fox News today.  As radio cut into their readership, papers consolidated and adopted a new ethic that they reported objectively.

They frankly never really achieved full objectivity, as that may not be possible.  But they did strive for it.  The introduction of television reinforced this.  Newspapers became the place where you could, hopefully, get complete objective news and, hopefully, in depth news on various topics.  Even smaller newspapers had dedicated reporters per topic, larger ones very much so.  The local paper had local reporters that reported per topic assignment.  A big paper, like the Rocky Mountain News, had very specified reporters.  The Rocky Mountain News, for instance, had a religion reporter whose beat was just that topic.  A surprising number of local papers sent reporters to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War just to report on the war.

That's all long past.  For quite some time, reporters have become generalists by default, and as a rule, they can't be expected to have an in-depth understanding of any one topic. For that reason, they are frequently inaccurate, even on a national level.  Just today, for example, I read a national story which repeatedly referred to Communion Hosts as "wafers". That's not the right term.  Reporters on crime blindly accept the "mass shooting" and "high powered rifle" lines without having any idea what they mean.  Print reporters repeat in some instances, depending upon individual reporters, hearsay as fact, in part because they likely don't have the time to really investigate everything personally. 

Because we now get green reporters, the obvious fact that the local paper is dying is all the sadder.  At one time green reporters could at least hope to move up the ranks in their local papers, maybe becoming editors or columnists if they stayed there, or they could move on, as they often did, to larger papers.  They still move on, but papers everywhere are dying.  Ironically, the only papers that still do fairly well are the genuine small town papers in small towns. That's good, but that can't be a career boosting job for those who enter it.  

And with the death of the paper the objectivity that they brought in, back in their golden era, which I'd place from the 1930s through 1990 or so, is dying with them.  People are going to electronic news, which so far hasn't shown that same dedication, although recently some online start-ups actually do.  Television news has become hopelessly shallow, fully dedicated to the "if it bleeds it leads" type of thinking, or fully partisan, telling people what they want to hear.  Really good reporting, and not all of it was really good, was pretty informative, which raised the level of the national intellect.  People might have hated reporters, and they often did, but they read what was being reported about Richard Nixon and Watergate or what was revealed in the Pentagon Papers and had a better understanding of it in spite of themselves.  That helped result in Republicans themselves operating to bring Richard Nixon down and society at large bringing an end to the Vietnam War.

Now, in contrast, we have electronic propaganda organs on the net that feed people exactly what they want to hear, and that often is the same thing that comes out of the back end of a cow.

Not overnight, of course. This has been going on for decades, and indeed in some ways it started with the first radio broadcasts.  But radio was easier to adjust to.  The internet, not so much.

The death of a career, an institution, and unfortunately, also our wider understanding.

Sic transit.

Speed Graphic.

I just posted this photograph here the other day.

Saturday, April 7, 1923. Japanese Cherry Trees.

 Miss Yukiko Haraguchi, daughter of Major General Hatsutaro Haraguchi, military attaché of the Japanese embassy, at the cherry trees at the tidal basin Washington, D.C.

I posted the same photograph on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub.  As of right now, it has 677 up votes.  I'm often surprised by what is popular on the sub.

One thing that hadn't really occurred to me, and should have, is that this photo, and most of the press photos of that era, would have been taken by Speed Graphic type cameras, using 4x5" film. 35 mm cameras, which I'm quite familiar with, didn't become popular with the Press until the 1960s, which I really didn't realize, and the first 35 mm camera didn't come about until 1925 when Leica introduced them.  35 mm wouldn't even have existed at the time this photo was taken, which I should have known, as I discussed the history of cameras a bit here:

There were a wide variety of 35 mm cameras by the 1920s, and popular personal photograph got an enormous boost with the 1939 introduction of the Argus C3.  Through the lens reflex cameras made their appearance in the 1920s, but it wasn't until 1949 that the prismatic SLR was introduced, sparking a revolution amongst photography enthusiasts.  Nearly every serious camera maker soon introduced one, and they dominated in the serious photography market until the end of the film era.  My father bought a really good SLR Zeiss camera while serving in the Air Force, and the camea was so good that he used it hte rest of his life.

 Zeiss Contraflex.

Lens barrel for Contrafex, which fixed the existing lens on an extension for a telephoto effect.  I never actually saw this in use, and it does strike me as difficult to use.

My father also had a Yashica 120 mm camera. These cameras used big film for a finer detailed photograph, much the way "full frame" digital cameras due today (while most people don't use full frame digital cameras, the lack of one is a source of ongoing angst for Pentax fans, as Pentax does not make a full frame DSLR, just their regular DSLR).  It was a nice, if cumbersome, camera and my father used it less over the years, probably due to that.  And film became very difficult to obtain.

 Yashicaflex with lens caps on and viewer closed.

 Viewer cover opened.

Top of camera, with viewer opened.  You viewed the object through the top of the camera and saw the image reversed.

Digital photography seemed likely to put a big dent in SLR cameras, and it did at first, but now they've revived, particularly in the form of Canon cameras in the US.  But most of the old SLR manufacturers, save for Zeiss and Leica, which dropped out of the SLR market, still make one, and a couple of makers have entered the field who did not make film cameras.  But, just as I suppose more photos were taken with Kodak disposable and compact 35mms back in the day, more now are probably taken by cell phones.

Still, what a revolution in photography, even if things remain familiar.

The common press camera of this era was a large affair. This photo, of press photographers from the 20s, gives a good idea of what they were like.

Press photographers, 1920s.  The two on the right have some variant of Speed Graphics, although the size of their cameras is obviously different.

Massive cameras, they shot 4×5 inch film typically, although some shot larger or smaller film.  The quality of the film was excellent, which is what lead to this thread, as the quality of the photo posted above was heavily discussed.

I'm so used to 35 mm cameras, this didn't really occur to me.  It should have, as in old film you see the Speed Graphics as a prop all the time.  It frankly didn't occur to me that they'd had such a long run, however.

Speed Graphics were an American camera (hard to believe there even was such a thing) that was made by Graflex from 1912 until 1973.  They loaded with one massive negative, making them, in essence, the film equivalent of the full frame digital camera of today.  The quality of their b&w images was superior to any digital version of the same now produced.  Not surprisingly, therefore, they still have a following, even though they are huge, cumbersome, heavy, and take single negatives.

They were, however the press camera of their era, having nearly a 60 year run.

The camera was issued to U.S. Army combat photographers in World War Two as the PH-47.

Even by World War Two, however, the 35 mm was making some inroads, albeit mostly with private photographers.  A notable exception was famous photographer Robert Capa, who carried several Zeiss Contax cameras with him, including one that used 120 mm film and one that used 35 mm film.  He, of course, was a private press photographer.

Signal Corps photographers?  Speed Graphics.  

And most press photographers too.

Related Threads:

Cameras

Thursday, January 25, 1923. Auf Widersehen

The remaining U.S. troops in Europe, fresh off occupation duty in Germany, abandoned, most likely, their German sweethearts, girlfriends and good beer, and boarded the U.S. Navy transport the St. Mihiel, which departed thereafter from Antwerp following a simple ceremony.

The St. Mihiel, AP-32.  The ship would serve through World War Two, becoming a hospital ship.

Ah well, what could go wrong with the US turning its back on Europe, eh?

For those who might consider my initial comment too flippant, most US occupation troops in Germany were very late war conscripts, although not all of them were, who notoriously had a difficult time grasping the Germans as having been enemies.

French troops on the same day battled mobs in the Ruhr and dealt with a regional railway strike.

The Asahi Graph (アサヒグラフ, Asahi Gurafu, The Asahi Picture News) founded.  The photo magazine ran until 2000.

Issue from 1937.

The Japanese, like the Germans, took a very early interest in photography and the magazine had a reputation of being sort of a Japanese version of Life.

Friday, January 23, 1943. Chinook.

A Chinook wind caused an increase in temperature in Spearfish, South Dakota, in which the temperature went from -4F to 45F in two minutes.  It ultimately went up to 54F over two hours, then dropped back below 0 in 30 minutes, all of this in a single morning.

Papua was liberated from the Japanese, becoming the first territory they had captured from which they'd been completely expelled.

Japan's losses on the island were 13,000 in number, compared to 2,000 for Australia and 600 for the United States.

On the same day, the British 8th Army took Tripoli.

According to many sources, today, not yesterday, was the date on which the Germans lost their last airfield at Stalingrad.

French police and German forces began the Marseilles Roundup, the gathering and deportation of the city's Jewish population.  The action would result in the deportation of 1,642 people, the displacement of 20,000 and the arrest of 6,000.  The Old Port district was destroyed.

Margaret Bourke-White flew in a U.S. bombing mission over Tunis in the B-17 Little Bill.  The photographer and reporter was the first woman to do so.

Bourke-White was already a famous photographer by that time, having photographed extensively during the Great Depression and having photographed the Soviet Union prior to World War Two.  She died at age 67 in 1971 of Parkinson's Disease.

Franklin Roosevelt dined with Moroccan Sultan Mohammed V, during which he expressed sympathy for post-war Moroccan independence.

Roosevelt was always solidly anti-colonial, a fact that became an increasing problem for the British as the war went on and which would impact the immediate post war world.

Tuesday, September 12, 1922. Episcopal Church removes "obey" from wedding vows.

The Episocpal Church in the United States voted to change the Book of Common Prayer requiring the bride to obey her husband, by omitting that verb.

The USGS was at Rainbow Bridge on this day in September, 1922.

Thursday, August 31, 1922. Flying cameras, murderous Communists, economic reprieve, drunk driving criminals, Russia of the recent past.

 

The Untied State's military was experimenting with areal cameras and gun cameras on this day in 1922.

Both would become airborne staples in future years.

Mongolian Prime Minister Dambyn Chagdarjav and his successor Dogsomyn Bodoo were executed, a fate common to early Communist who were often murdered on trumped-up charges by their own regimes.

Germany was granted a six-month reprieve of reparations payments by the Allied Reparations Commission.

Al Capone was arrested for hitting a taxicab while driving drunk.  He had also threatened to shoot one of the witnesses.

Life came out with an American Russian edition.  It'd be interesting to know what the contents of that issue were.  It depicted a Russia that was now in the past.

Winchendon, Massachusetts, July 10, 1922.

 

Wednesday, February 18, 1942. A bad day at sea.

It wasn't a good day for the Allies. 

February 18, 1942: 80 Years Ago—Feb. 18, 1942: Japanese land on Bali, cutting ferry link from Australia to Java.

The above item from Sarah Sundin's blog shows how menacing the Japanese advance was becoming to Australia, constituting, at least from an Allied and Australian prospective, a real threat to the Australian mainland.

On the same day, the Japanese began to murder Chinese in Singapore that they regarded as a threat in the Sook Ching operation.

Chiang Kai-shek met with Mahatma Gandi in Calcutta, in one of the odder  tête-à-tête's of the war.

The USS Truxton and the Pollux ran aground at Lawn Point, Newfoundland, in a storm, resulting in over 200 deaths.  On the same day, the Free French submarine Surcouf may sank off of Panama after colliding with the US freighter Thompson Lykes.

The Sucouf might be described as, frankly, weird.  It was a huge submarine that featured two 8 in deck guns.  It's entire crew of 130 went down with her.

Some submarine hit the Truxton, at any rate, although her crew thought it was a U boat and some still think that may be the case.  She may have actually been sunk due to friendly fire from a Catalina cruising the area, or another US aircraft doing the same.

The Japanese photo magazine Ashai Graph, which oddly published its name in English and Japanese, featured Japanese tanks in Singapore on its cover.

I'm surrounded by electronic communications devices. . .

 and I don't like it.

Richmond and Backus Co. office, Detroit, Michigan, 1902.  This is obviously a law office.  A set of CJS's are on a rotary shelf.  On the window sill are a set of corporate seals.  The bookshelves on the left are barrister cases.  The office is sort of a mess, like most real law offices are.  Missing, however, is the dread telephone.

This week I started using an iPad.

This isn't because I love the latest and the greatest in technology,  I don't.  Not at all.  In fact, I tend to be a contrarian on it.

This is partially as I just view tools for their utility.  I don't understand, for example, why people trade in perfectly functioning cars they own for new ones. The old one would have gotten you from point A to point B just as well in lots of instances.

"Well, it's new!"

Yeah, so what?  You spent money on something you didn't need to get a job done, something you already owned did.

M'eh.

But I have a computer in my home.  Two actually, as I have my own laptop that I got for work purposes back during the first part of the pandemic.  I already had a work issued one, and I frankly can't really tell you know exactly why I thought I needed my own, but I did.  It might be because things were really topsy-turvy at the time, and a person with a good workplace laptop risks somebody purloining it for a temporary purpose that become permanent, or in some instances you actually need to in order to run things for trials.  Indeed, I took my own and my issue laptop to a trial in August in Denver and I mostly used my own in my hotel room, not my issue one.  My issue one I took to court each day with me, but I didn't use it much there.

Anyhow, I never saw need for an iPad, even though my daughter has one and loves it.  She uses it for school.

Then, one of my younger confederates at work, upon whom I depend a great deal, bought a surface and started using it as a notepad.

A high-tech notepad.

I was impressed, to say the least.

I'm pretty much afloat in paper all the time, and it's easy to take notes and not recall where they were or memorialize what you need to do from them.  This can address this problem pretty efficiently.

And so now I have one, and I used it for the first time yesterday, the day I got it.

It is an improvement, although it reemphasizes my horrible handwriting.

I'd gone to fountain pens due to my poor handwriting, and they do help. This takes me back to writing too fast, so it's retrograde in that fashion.  But it's an improvement nonetheless.

And once I figure it out, and I will, it'll do a lot more than that.

When I started practicing law, we didn't even have computers.  We got them the first year I practiced, and it wasn't even super clear what we were using them for. They didn't have internet connections, and while the internet existed, it was dial up and all that.

Shortly after that, we did get dial up internet and soon after that, I got a computer myself, with an internet connection.  It was actually my second, as I'd had one without a dial-up before that, although why is really an open question.

Soon after that, the "Blackberry" came in, which served various functions for those who had them.  I never did, but I did have something similar that was passed down to me by a more senior lawyer who had upgraded to something else on the Afghan Warlord Principal.^[1]   I can't really recall what the thing did, other than that it stored contacts.  It wasn't a phone.

Soon after computers came in I started to type out my own work using them.  There was huge resistance to this and I was repeatedly ordered to dictate my work.  I did quite a bit of it, but I ended up abandoning that soon after we had computers.  Indeed, when I dictated I tended to write out, by hand, what I was going to dictate, first.  Anyhow, I was the first in the office to abandon the Dictaphone.  Now, I think, there's one semi retired lawyer left who uses a variant of one.

Dictaphones replaced direct dictation, which had been common before that.  With direct dictation the author dictated to a secretary who could take shorthand notation by hand, and then that person, usually a "she" in later years, transcribed it using a typewriter.  Before that, when secretaries were still "he's", that person usually wrote the document out by hand. People who did that were called "scrivener's" and were hired for their good handwriting.  Even today in the law we use the term "scrivener" as a substitute for author, because it's fun.

For notes, lawyers wrote everything out by hand on long yellow legal pads.  Many of us, myself included, still do.

But those days are ending.

Dictaphones have gone away, for the most part, and nobody is employed as a scrivener any longer.  The era of the true secretary, whose job was taking dictation and doing transcription, is over as well.  Scrivener's as an occupation no longer exist.^[2].    

Where all this leads I can't say, but I really don't like being tied to electronics so much.  I do like being able to publish myself, as in here, but I'm at the point, I think, where I'd rather not have to be on the constant office cutting edge of technology.  Some people love it, even tough, long term I worry it'll be our destruction.  I'm not one of the ones who love it, even though I've been a fairly heavy adopter of it.

On that, however, it's odd how the initial adoption sometimes came by force, and then sometimes obliquely.  My first home computer was really a toy from my prospective.  I probably played Solitaire on it more than do anything else, but it came with games.  My justification for getting it was that it would be a great home word processor and much better than a typewriter, all of which is true.

The internet at home was the same way.  It was a toy.  Now I have to have it due to work.

I resisted smartphones at first, but at some point it was no longer possible not to have one.  How many I have had by now I couldn't say, but it's quite a few.  I've adopted to the text world, and I'm glad that it lets me keep up with my kids in college, sort of.  And I like having, oddly enough, a little pocket camera, which of course it also is, all the time, something that's reflected on these blogs.  And I really like the iTunes feature, oddly enough.  Indeed, I had a little iPod before I had an iPhone that I used for music.  I think that I started listening to podcasts after I had my first iPhone, and I really like them.

But, given it all, while I don't like romanticizing the past, if I could place me and those I love back a century, before all this stuff, I'd do it.

I'd probably be the only one I know, however, who would.

I wonder, if I ever retire, what of this stuff I'd keep?  I don't think I'd keep it all.

Footnotes

1.  "The Afghan Warlord Principal".  Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan.  They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys.  The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle.  One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.

He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.

He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else.  Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.

2.  To my surprise, although I shouldn't have been, it exists as a last name, however.  

Makes sense.

Friday December 30, 1921. Cheyenne gets gas.

Brattleboro, Vt. from Mt. Wantastiquet.

 

On this day in 1921, the Rock Springs newspaper published reports of the recent big raid in that town.

In Cheyenne, the exciting news was that natural gas, an abundant resource in the state, was coming to the city.

The University of Wyoming, October 1908.

University of Wyoming.  October, 1908.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXIV. The Female Edition.

Bringing the photographer to heel

Chinese fashion photographer Chen Man has issued an apology to the Red Menace, ummm. . .  rather the Chinese government.

For what, you might ask?

Well, the real reason is likely twofold.

I don't follow fashion photography whatsoever, and I certainly don't associate it with Red China.  But the fact that the Chinese government feels it has to bring the boot heel down on a Chinese fashion photographer, and that there even is such a thing, really says something.

I had to look the photographer up.  Most of her work is extremely Western looking, as in scantily clad women in improbable outfits at improbable locations. But the subjects are Chinese.  That says something about Western culture intruding, even eroding, the Chinese Communist culture which, not all that long ago, only tolerated uniform clothing for men and women.  A woman wearing a Mao suit says one thing.  One posing in lingerie in a restaurant, something else.

Beyond that, however, part of her work is frankly outright subversive.  It's no wonder she's in trouble.  There's a bunch featuring women in traditional Chinese attire who look like they've been beat up, and that they're now deranged and mad.  That's some sort of slam on Chinese culture in regard to women. And she recently did a photo set for Dior entitled "Young Pioneers", riffing off of the Communist youth organization of that name, which features scantily clad women in front of Chinese cultural icons, and which are a little salacious and frankly a bit weird.

It's the ones that showed what one Chinese daily called "spooky" and I agree with the comment depictions of female Chinese that really drew the flak, however.  While none of the brief commentary I saw on it mentioned it, it was impossible not to conclude that many of the women depicted had makeup on which made it looked like they'd been hit in the eyes.  Some of the women looked fit to kill.  Some had freckles, which is also apparently also upsetting to the Chinese as it doesn't fit with their "standards of beauty", which probably misses the point that generally freckles are a Caucasian thing, and if you are Chinese and have them, you probably have some European heritage.

And so the erosion of a heterogeneous, pure Chinese Communism begins.

Brave fashion.

On the above, Christian Dior dropped an image that was "pandering to the West". 

Does Dior do anything that can't be defined as pandering?

This does present an opportunity, however, for social justice. With their big season coming up, boycott Christian Dior. . . forever.

Old exhibitionist

While China was busy suppressing a young fashion photographer, an old American exhibitionist was being photographed topless once again.

This would be long passé chanteuse "Madonna", who came up in music not so much through her pipes but her appearance, which when she was young was sort of Marilyn Monroe like.  She got famous appearing, really, as sort of a dirty version of Monroe, an image aided when it was revealed that she she in fact shared something of Monroe's history in that she'd been photographed nude before she was well known.  Society, however, didn't display the degree of modesty it had with Monroe's failings.

Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful, and tragic, figure.  Madonna has now lived well beyond the years allotted to Monroe, and now has the appearance of a well-kept woman in early old age, which is what she is.  A person could grow into that with dignity, rather than repeat the sins of your youth publically.

Or not, I guess.

The Swedish Short Goodbye

Magdalena Andersson became Sweden's first female prime minister on November 24, and then resigned on November 24.

There was a reason for that, which was that her party's budget failed to pass, and instead a budget advanced by an opposition party that included anti-immigrant aspects passed instead. She resigned as a matter of conscience.  The government was a coalition government.

She's a 54-year-old Social Democrat and avid outdoorsman and mother of two.  By profession, she's an academic economist.  Hopefully she'll be remembered as more than a peculiar political footnote.

No babies

The British Parliament has instructed Stella Creasy to quit bringing her infant with her to the House of Commons.

This is interesting in multiple ways but most of all, perhaps, in that the evolution of the industrial society took men out of their homestead, in the ancient sense of the word, first but starting in the 70s, women.  Feminist celebrated that but at the same time came to regard tiny humans, which we'll call babies here, as the enemies of that development, which they regarded as one that would lead to "fulfillment".

It didn't lead to fulfillment but has meant that most women must now work.  The industrial solution has been to warehouse infants, but a lot of women find that upsetting, and who can blame them?  It's completely contrary to people's natural instincts.  Therefore, the logical step is to bring the infant into work, which in turn causes, as we can see here, a certain element of horror.

But why? 

Well, that's probably not even going to be thought out.  To do so would require a certain acknowledgment that we've built a pretty inhumane world.

Turkeys

Lara Trump claimed on Fox News that the rise in the price of turkeys is a Democratic plot to wipe out shared traditions.

Lucky

Eleven-year-old Liel Krutokop , a volunteer archaeologist in Israel found a coin of pure silver minted in the Second Temple period.  It would date to the year 67 or 68 or so, during the First Jewish-Roman War.

Gender Blind Music

The BRIT Awards, which honor British musicians, have dropped their best male and best female performers awards in favor of just one best.

Lots of people are unhappy about this.

Friday, November 25, 1921. Horses in town.

President Harding and his secretary, George Christian went horseback riding in Washington D. C.

I'm not a big Harding fan, to say the least, but the thought that he did this, raises him up a little bit in my esteem.

Harding, fwiw, was 55 years old at the time these photos were taken, giving us an insight into how people of that era frequently looked considerably older to us than those at the same age today.  He was just two years away from dying at age 47 at this time.

Negotiations between Irish representatives and English ones broke down over "the oath", i.e., the British requirement that Ireland be made a dominion and that members of its parliament take an oath of allegiance accordingly.

The United States began the withdrawal of its occupation forces in Germany.

Crown Prince Hirohito became the Regent of Japan, occupying the position in light of his ailing father's inability to do so.

Arnold Genthe, well known portrait photographer, who also frequently tended to photograph portraits of young women wearing little in the way of clothing, took a nice portrait of Miss Elanor Clack.