Richmond Straight Cut No 1 Cigarette Cards

This advert is a dandy. Cigarette cards were not only used to lure in customers, but to add rigidity to the cigarette pack. Some early 'cards' were printed on silk mounted on card - I have one depicting a flower.

I'd love to get my hands on this complete set. What I like about cig cards is the: size, quality of print, and the interesting information found on the verso: I learn a new fact, read a quaint description, or learn how things were done in the not-so-distant, yet very distant, past.

Image: www.vintagraph.com

Wire - The 15th and Practice Makes Perfect

I had the pleasure of seeing Wire in 2002 at Lee's Palace in Toronto. It was easily the best live show I've seen. The album they played was 'Read and Burn'. They are experienced musicians and it shows: professional, talented, tight. Judd and I went to see them and we are two chatterboxes who didn't chatter once during the performance!

Pity I was too young to see them at Germany's Rockpalast (1979). The following videos are available on DVD and Wire's appearance on Rockpalast is excellent from beginning to end.

Wire are playing in Vancouver on October 16th, and I nearly had a heart attack from excitement.

What the?!

Not too sure what's going on with me either!

Caught between:

worry of unemployment

enjoyment of unemployment

final essay on theistic Darwins and the Free-Will Defence against the Problem of Evil

then study of final exam in October

Harold and Mabel story and 5 illustrations

history of photography

Winsor McCay mini-essay

looking at old photographs

creative blocks

study design i.e. Adobe CS 3 design premium?

immobility and neck strain

grey weather

in short, confusion is the cause of immobility.

Leonard Cohen - The Stranger Song

My mom recently sent me a newspaper clipping of an interview with Mr Cohen. It sounds like he will be playing Canada's west coast after all...sometime next year...

Astronomy

In grade 5, for a science project, I created a model of the solar system and wrote a blurb on each planet, the sun and the asteroid belt (regrettably no comets). This experience kept me thinking about space. It wasn’t until after my teen years that I thought about the solar system in more detail. I took a course on astronomy at the local university and vowed to buy a telescope. I didn’t have enough money then, and became distracted by other things. It wasn’t until 2004 that I showed my then ‘new’ husband some pictures from Photon Echoes. This piqued his interest and we invested in a small telescope. Viewing was not ideal in London, England; however, we could view Saturn and this justified the purchase 10-fold.

Now we are in Vancouver, Canada and the viewing is much better, we now have 3 telescopes: solar, refractor and catadioptric – thanks largely to my husband.

I feel it is a shame if someone does not have a basic understanding of where the earth sits, so here are some crude remarks on astronomy:

>Stars are fixed (constellations), they appear to move as though the earth is encased in a rotating cylinder. This illusion is due to: the earth revolves on an axis, orbits the sun and stars are very far away. So, constellations at different times of the year either appear in the daytime or at night, without super telescopes viewing is best in the dark.

>People in the northern and southern hemispheres see different parts of space. >Ancient astronomers noticed that some bodies move around the sky, they called these the wanderers i.e. the word planet is derived from Greek for ‘wanderers’.

>Retrograde motion took some time to figure out. This is when a planet appears to go back on itself i.e. opposite way of its usual path. What is happening is that the planets are orbiting the sun in an ellipse.

>Johannes Kepler was an amazing person. His discoveries shaped our understanding and opened our minds to conceive what space is. No small feat. Suggested reading is Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. Kepler's laws of planetary motion:
1. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the foci. An ellipse is characterized by its two focal points. Thus, Kepler rejected the ancient Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, and Copernican belief in circular motion.

2. A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time as the planet travels along its orbit. This means that the planet travels faster while close to the sun and slows down when it is farther from the sun. With his law, Kepler rejected the Aristotelian astronomical theory that planets have uniform speed.

3. The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axes (the "half-length" of the ellipse) of their orbits. This means not only that larger orbits have longer periods, but also that the speed of a planet in a larger orbit is lower than in a smaller orbit. Source for the laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_motion

>Aristarchus of Samos (310 BC – c. 230 BC) first postulated a heliocentric model of the solar system (opposed to geocentric). For many interesting, albeit wrong reasons, his theory was squashed until 1514 when this concept had an audience again via Copernicus. >We see the planets because light from the sun is reflected. Due to their proximity, planets may appear brighter than stars.

>The sun rotates on its axis about once every 27 days, it rotates counter-clockwise as seen from the northern hemisphere.

>Finally, we only see one side of the moon due to: the moon rotates on its axis once a month, it orbits around the earth once a month and the earth also rotates on an axis every 24 hrs and orbits the sun once a year. All this motion produces this phenomenon. Plenty of times I’ve held an orange and cherry trying to replicate the process.


Top image: Johannes Kepler, 1610

The Hyena

I love hyenas. They are amazing animals and have haunted my thoughts since childhood.

Claudius Aelianus (c. 175 c. 235), On the Nature of Animals:
"The hyena, so Aristotle says, has a soporific power in its right paw, and creates a stupor by its touch alone. Anyway, it often enters stables when the attendant happens to be asleep, approaches stealthily, and puts its soporific paw, so to speak, to his nose; so that he can be dragged about and suffocated more and more, and seems to be insensible. And it roots up the ground with its head so as to make a hole large enough for him, and his throat appears supine and naked; then the hyena grasps him, and strangles him, and drags him to its hole. And it puts an end to dogs in the same way.
"And whenever the moon is full, after it catches the radiance, it throws its shadow on the dogs, and silences them at once; and having thrown a spell on them as if by poison [magic], it drags them away silenced, and does whatever it pleases with them."

Source
http://www.wayward.com/animal.htm

Strindberg, Schopenhauer on repentance

The idea of repentance and obligation towards others has interested me for quite some time—here are two ideas. Both I think are sound, however I lean towards less egocentric ideas – responsibility to act for the betterment of ourselves in order to be good towards others (compassion and so on).

August Strindberg says:
"To repent is to criticise Providence, who imposes sin upon us as a form of suffering in order to purify us through the disgust engendered in us by a bad deed."

Strindberg seems to say that it is better to suffer for our sins. In other words, sin is Good, it is present to improve us morally. Presumably, he feels that through ‘disgust’ we should learn from our mistakes so as not to repeat them.

Schopenhauer says:
"Pangs of conscience over past deeds are anything but repentance; they are pain at the knowledge of oneself in one's own nature, in other words, as will."

Pangs of conscience are the moments when we see something in our make up, that we don’t like (our shadow self). Schopenhauer defines repentance as new knowledge of something one did. In hindsight, with new knowledge, one realizes they had acted against their true will. For Schopenhauer 'will' is non-material, it is one's mind, it lies outside of time and change. He believed that the will can never be changed. "Therefore I can never repent of what I have willed though I can repent of what I have done, when, guided by false concepts, I did something different in what was in accordance with my will." So we cannot repent the “I”, but we can repent a bad deed.

Sources: Strindberg's Inferno and Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation V1 (p. 296)

Image: Ex-Voto, 'Nauseous'

Air Raid Precautions, Wills Cigarette Cards

An unnerving piece of British history. Air Raid Precautions - An Album to contain a Series of Cigarette Cards of National Importance.

"In 1937 the Home Office published the first edition of the Air Raid Precautions Handbook with 100 pages, 18 photographs and numerous illustrations and in 1938 a series of fifty cigarette cards was produced and distributed in various cigarette brands by Imperial Tobacco. The album to hold the cards had an introduction by the then Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, commending the cards. All this was happening at the same time as local councils were beginning to recruit volunteers to the newly formed ARP services...."

About 10 cards are missing from the album I have.

Text Quote: Remembering WWII's First Volunteers

anti-alcohol, temperance poster

Interesting stuff re dose, dem, dere, drunkards.

Source: http://www.tululuka.net/alco/

Autochrome

Autochrome. Man with bike.

By about 1907, the first practical colour process was being used: the Autochrome (additive process). Minute starch grains stained in red and blue--with lampblack to block light that would otherwise go through the starch grains--were mixed with a sensitive emulsion. This mixture was rolled onto a glass plate and put under great pressure, so the emulsion was only one starch grain thick. This screen was then coated with panchromatic silver halide. When exposed to light, the starch grains acted as filters on the film. Auguste and Louis Lumiere created these delicate autochromes, which produced dusky-looking colours. Later, the German company Agfa used dyed resin beads instead of starch grains; these deformed when rolled under pressure, so the lampblack was not required. This process made the colour quality slightly better.

Source: A nook of photos

William N. Jennings - photos of lightning

William N. Jennings (b. England, lived in Philadelphia 1860-1946) has been credited as the first person to take photographs of lightning (1882). His photos show that lightning does not travel in a zigzag pattern, a once common notion. Nature is beautiful and Jennings captured the mystery and power of atmospheric electrical discharge. Jennings is an interesting person to read about: his experiments with photography aided the development of flash photography and x-ray photography.





Source: Johnson, Rice and Williams, (2002) 1000 Photo Icons George Eastman House, Taschen.

Recovered old photo album - amateur photographer

The following photos are from a wonderful album I found at Spitalfields Market, London in 2005. I had leafed through it and let it sit at the stall for a further 3 months. When I went back, it was still there. I was really surprised and thought that I better buy it this time around (I have a phobia of spending money esp. on things I really want). There is about 250 photos in total. Most of the photos are of 'things', architecture, landscape and so on. I do wonder who the photographer was. The last two photos are of the same 3 people. I imagine they are the wife and children of the photographer. Unfortunately, the delicate yellow/sepia tint to the photos is not reproduced well digitally. The composition of the photographs are note-worthy.

Microminiatures

I had the pleasure of viewing Mr Sandaldjian's creations in Toronto, in 1999. It was a strange experience walking into a bare room with a plain table, with about 15 boxes on it. I had peered into the first box via its microscope and could not believe my eyes. Another world, so enchanting. In the last box was a strand of hair, which the artist wrote 'may all your dreams come true'. It was very touching and I will never forget the experience. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Taken from the book The Eye of the Needle, with an essay by Ralph Rugoff, published by The Museum of Jurassic Technology, the following outlines the great skill required to create microminiatures:
"[Sandaldjian says] 'Working through the microscope requires not only control of the hand and of one's breathing, but of the entire nervous system, the slightest misdirected movement can destroy the very form being shaped in a fraction of a second.' Since even a pulse in his fingers could cause an accident, Sandaldjian ultimately learned to apply his decisive strokes only between heartbeats."

Hagop Sandaldjian [1931-1990] human hair, motes of dust and glue.

Micro artists are very rare indeed, the following are some samples of the Micromosaics of Henry Dalton [1829-1911] using diatoms and butterfly scales.

Source, the always delightful: The Museum of Jurassic Technology http://www.mjt.org/index.html

Hummingbirds!

Keep watching...close to the end is footage of the hummingbird's ability to hover, it is quite incredible.

Thanks to Ravinspirit.

Stoveburner.com - be still my beating heart

source

www.stoveburner.com

Wilhelm Hammershøi - interiors, back, melancholic

Wilhelm Hammershøi [1864-1916] was born, lived and worked in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was primarily a painter, but also a draughtsman. He used muted tones of gray and desaturated colour in his paintings: portrait, architecture and interior (some landscapes). His work is largely devoid of people, it took me a minute to figure out why I am so drawn to his work, but this is probably why...I generally take photos, and so on, of things, not people or animals--it does not come to me naturally to work with living things.

Cloverdale antique market stall

Yellow

Blue

Green

Pink

Lovely stall. I like colour separation, great display, I was pretty excited. Found some great old photos on this day too. And one of the photos is of Alexandra Bridge, Spuzzum, BC. Spuzzum....what a great name...more about THAT later.

Florrie's autograph book...1909 - 1929

"My album is opened, come and see. 'Whah' won't you waste a line on me, write but a thought, a word or two, that Memory may remain to you."

F. Hopkins, 317 Pine Avenue. Ms Hopkins' autograph book holds memories from 1909-1929. I believe she lived in Vancouver, Canada and had relatives in Australia. Here are the drawings Ms Hopkins and friends drew. It's funny how these things land in others' caring hands.