Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
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Front of card: "Vive La Difference."
(Purchased at a Brooklyn flea market for a quarter.)
Hi folks,
I have at least three of these women chasing me every nite.
I hope none of them catch me.
Never expected this trip to Miami Beach to be so nice.
Joe & Ann
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Tags: Mr. Rightnour, Mrs. Rightnour
New York’s original Penn Station, designed by McKim, Mead and White and inspired by Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, was probably the city’s most spectacular building. The rise of air travel during the 1950s left Penn Station underutilized and there was as of yet no Landmarks Preservation Commission to save it from the wrecking ball. Demolition took three years and outcry over the loss of the amazing edifice was global. This set of photos hint at some of its grandeur. Click on images for larger versions.
Penn Station's grand exterior in 1911.
Looking like a museum or cathedral in 1911.
Berenice Abbott's great photo of the soaring interior.
Penn Station still gleaming in 1962, the year before it would be torn down. (Image by Cervin Robinson.)
Larger than life on May 10, 1962. (Image by Cervin Robinson.)
Where is your God now? (Image by Cherie A. Thurlby.)
What were the searches that brought traffic to the Afflictor site this week? Below is a hodgepodge of some of the inspired and inane keyphrases that sent visitors our way. Each one is linked to the story that attracted the search.
Afflictor: Providing a safe haven for fish heads since 2009. (Image by Infrogmation.)
This cool video shows the inner workings of a KFC restaurant in Cairo which is run almost entirely by a hearing-impaired staff. Deaf customers sign their orders and hearing customers point to their choices on a counter-top menu.
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Human and gorilla skeletons.
It’s been worn twice! It’s a size 54 which is basically an XL. It’s worth almost $1,000. Here’s a link to the official vanson website if you don’t believe: http://www.vansonleathers.com/detail.aspx?ID=268. Mine is the limited edition with the with the bullet hole design in the front and back and blood exiting the bone in the back. I’m selling it for a quater of the prcie but I need cash so serious people only thanks.
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An 1866 sketch of the Bellevue morgue, the first morgue in New York City. (Image by Stanley Fox.)
If you were a patient at Bellevue Hospital in 1901, it was wise to finish your supper if the nurses ordered you to. That was the fatal lesson that patient Louis H. Hilliard may have learned. One thing for sure is that so-called “lunatics,” in general, take a beating in this jaw-dropping article from the March 1, 1901 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“The judge declined to find Jesse R. Davis, a Bellevue Hospital nurse, guilty of killing Louis H. Hilliard, a patient, in the hospital. Davis, with two other nurses, was charged, it will be remembered, with beating Hilliard brutally and strangling him with a sheet because he would not eat his supper. There is a widespread belief that the nurses in the charity hospitals are brutal and when Hilliard died and bruises were found on his body and one of the bones in his throat was broken, people were ready to believe that the attending nurses had killed him. The Grand Jury decided that the evidence against the nurses was sufficient to warrant charging them with the crime. But the trial jury, which heard both sides of the case and saw the witnesses for the defense and for the prosecution, concluded, as already intimated, that the crime had not been proved.
Bellevue Hospital a half-century later. (Image by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc.,)
The case of the prosecution depended on the testimony of two lunatics and of a newspaper writer, who had feigned lunacy for the sake of getting inside of the hospital to gather material for a sensational article. He has made sensation enough, but the jury has decided that it is like most of the sensations created by newspapers which depart from the legitimate business of printing the news to the business of making it. Scandals manufactured to sell extra editions do not bear examination. The newspaper writer told two different stories of what happened in the hospital. They could not both be true. The jury concluded that it would not believe either. The lunatics who testified gave their evidence in a simple straightforward manner. Though it is unusual to admit such witnesses to the stand it is not unprecedented and the Supreme Court of the United States has held that they ought to be allowed to testify, for otherwise attendants of the insane might do anything they chose with those under their care and escape punishment if they did it when none but the lunatics was around. The testimony of such witnesses, however, has to be sifted by the jurors just as that of the sane witnesses.
The Davis jurors did not believe what the lunatics swore to any more than they believed the man who had feigned insanity. Their action is not such as to encourage prosecuting officers to put lunatics on the stand. And this is fortunate, indeed. While the testimony of such people may be legally competent it ought not to be used save under such conditions as those which the Supreme Court has said justify recourse to it, namely, when none but lunatics have seen the things which it is desired to prove. And even then a jury ought to be warned by the court against a conviction on the uncorroborated testimony of those whose minds are diseased and who are not legally responsible for what they say and who may have no sense of moral accountability. The testimony of the lunatic is no better than uncorroborated circumstantial evidence, and should not be treated differently. The twelve sane men who tried Davis deserve the thanks of the community for declining to believe such testimony. And they deserve thanks, also, for refusing to believe that men in training for the care of the sick would kill a patient on no greater provocation than his refusal to eat his supper. There are many inhuman creatures in this city, but it is not credible that they are attendants in the hospitals. The nurses do use force in handling the insane. Indeed, they have to do it when the patients are violent, but it is incredible that Davis and two other Bellevue nurses are guilty as charged in the indictment. If it is necessary to call lunatics to make out a case against the other two nurses their trial might be better abandoned.”
Tags: Jesse R. Davis, Louis H. Hilliard
Anne-Louise Lambert, who played Miranda, still acts in film and television and is also a psychotherapist.
A beautiful enigma, Peter Weir’s drama, Picnic at Hanging Rock tells the story of a fin de siècle school outing in Australia that turns into a baffling, lingering nightmare.
On Valentine’s Day 1900, girls from a remote boarding school enjoy an afternoon excursion to Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation that’s one million years old. The stern headmistress describes the rock’s creation in almost sexual terms, stressing the viscous nature of the eruption. When a small group of girls and a teacher hike closer to the natural landmark, all is well. When they vanish without a trace, panic ensues. Rescue parties have limited success and return with further mystery.
“I’d give my head to know what happened up there,” says a doctor, who’s been brought in to make sure that a rescued girl hasn’t been molested and is still “intact.” But what chance does his head full of logic have against the intractability of nature, whether it’s ants encroaching on a picnic blanket, volcanoes erupting unexpectedly or the raging hormones of adolescence. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
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Tags: Peter Weir
Alain de Botton is filthy rich due to a trust fund.
The Swiss-born British-based philosopher Alain de Botton spent a week as writer-in-residence in the middle of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. It’s a loud, bustling place that wouldn’t seem conducive to writing, but oddly those are usually the best places to write. De Botton provides a pretty good explanation as to why it works this way. (Thanks to Boing Boing.) An excerpt:
“The best place I ever worked was Heathrow Terminal 5, where I had a desk right in the middle of the departures hall. I was invited to the airport to be a Writer in Residence (and later wrote a book about the experience, A Week at the Airport). The terminal turned out to be an ideal spot in which to do some work, for it rendered the idea of writing so unlikely as to make it possible again. Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.”
Tags: Alain de Botton
Bobby Van was born as Robert Jack Stein in the Bronx, New York.
I briefly got my paws on a copy of a 1971 Playbill for the Broadway musical, No, No, Nanette, which was originally produced in 1925. I’m not a world-class musicals expert, so my very limited knowledge of the show is that it may (or may not) have been the production that theater producer/Red Sox owner Harry Frazee financed by selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. (Recent evidence suggests that it was an earlier non-musical version of the show that was indeed responsible for the Curse of the Bambino.)
The musical comedy, set in Atlantic City, was created by Irving Caesar, Otto Harbach and Vincent Youmans. It may be best known today for introducing the song “Tea for Two.” The 1971 staging featured the talents of Ruby Keeler, Jack Gilford and Bobby Van. Van was apparently known to most Americans as an amicable guy who hosted and guested on game shows, but theater was his passion. He sadly died in 1980 at age 51 from brain cancer. Here’s an excerpt about him from the Playbill:
“Bobby Van says he ‘never took a dance lesson in my life.’ Both his father and his mother were performers who worked regularly in vaudeville; so young Bobby learned all facets of the performing arts at an early age–so early, in fact, that he was doing a comedy act at 16. To comedy he added singing and dancing which later became his forte. An offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lured him to the film capital where he appeared in such films as Kiss Me Kate, Small Town Girl, Because Your Mine and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis in which he played the title character. He is no stranger to TV, appearing as a guest on all the major musical variety shows. He will soon be seen in the Universal film The Last Flight, in which he co-stars with Lloyd Bridges. Mr. Van is married to the very attractive actress Elaine Joyce, regularly seen on the Don Knotts weekly NBC-TV series. Mr. Van received a nomination for a Tony Award for his role in No, No, Nanette. Bobby’s ambition is stay on the Broadway stage forever.”
______________________________
Bobby Van hosting Make Me Laugh in 1978, with special guest Frank Zappa.
Yes, it’s come to this. (Thanks Reddit.)
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Pink crosses memorialize women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. (Image by iose.)
According to an article from an Australian news service, a 20-year-old criminology student has been named Chief of Police in a Mexican border town near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent city, simply because no one else wanted the job. It may sound like an offbeat human-interest story, but the violence in that city, particularly against women, has long been horrific. An excerpt:
“A 20-YEAR-OLD female criminology student has been named police chief of a northern Mexican border town plagued by drug violence because no one else wanted the job.
Marisol Valles became director of municipal public security of Guadalupe ‘since she was the only person to accept the position,’ the mayor’s office of the town of some 10,000 people near the US border told local media yesterday.
Ms Valles is studying criminology in Mexico’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, some 60km west of Guadalupe.
Raging turf battles between rival drug gangs have left some 6500 people dead in Ciudad Juarez alone in the past three years.
Much of Chihuahua state has suffered from the spiral of drug violence, including in Guadalupe, where the mayor was murdered in June and police officers and security agents have been killed, some of them beheaded.”
Tags: Marisol Valles
Bed of nails, India, 1907. (Image by Herbert Ponting.)
Yes, you heard right. It’s a large 4′ X 4′ table, that is also a bed of nails. The glass rests above the nails and is supported by pylons. Not intended for laying on!!!!
The table can either be used as a coffee table or as a large table to sit around depending on the length of the legs. Most recently I used it for a kitchen table. So to use it as a coffee table, you could shorten the legs.
This is a really odd table that was my first (and only) attempt at building something artistic. However, now that my wife is pregnant, this table is too dangerous to keep at home with a baby running around. So I’d love to give it to somebody who will appreciate it.
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Ronald McDonald: Spraying people with his DNA. (Image by M.Minderhoud.)
The New York Times’ John Tagliabue has filed an interesting article about McDonald’s high-tech attempts at crime prevention at one of their Rotterdam restaurants. It involves employees activating an alarm that sprays criminals with DNA and alerts police that a crime is in progress. (Thanks to Gizmodo.) An excerpt:
“At this McDonald’s the DNA liquid is contained in an orange box the size of a large paperback book, mounted over an entrance door. ‘You don’t smell it; you don’t see it; nobody knows it’s there,’ said Jean-Paul Fafie, who has managed the McDonald’s for the last 12 years.
The system and the all-important warning sign seem to have successfully warded off any potential robbers. But there were kinks to be worked out.
‘In the beginning, it went off many times, even when there was no robbery,’ Mr. Fafie said. ‘And the police came every time.’
The false alarms were caused by employees who forgot, or never knew, about the protocol for secretly activating the system — removing a 10 euro bill from a special bill clip kept behind the counter.
‘We didn’t train our counter people properly,’ Mr. Fafie said sheepishly. As for a potential thief, he said, “we hope he’ll think twice before coming in.’”
Tags: Jean-Paul Fafie, John Tagliabue
The Blossom Restaurant, photographed by Berenice Abbott.
30¢
25¢
Men who loaded up on food at the Blossom could head to the Sig. Klein Fat Men’s Shop, which sold “underwear to fit any size man.”
20¢
15¢
10¢
5¢
The Walk of Ideas in Berlin. (Lienhard Schulz.)
The excellent writer Luc Sante has an interesting article, “The Book Collection That Devoured My Life,” in the Wall Street Journal, about his compulsive book-collecting. Sante isn’t a bibliophile with a yen for first editions; he’s just a guy who loves the printed word and can’t keep his hands off of anything with two covers, even if it’s a volume he’s unlikely to read. Sante also comments on the digitization of books and the ascension of e-readers. An excerpt:
“These days it may appear that books, per se, are doomed. The electronic readers are ever lighter, smaller, and more sophisticated. Google is undertaking to scan and digitize every book in the world — not without some resistance. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that even the reading devices are pointless, since according to him nobody reads anymore, at least not in the sense of sequentially taking in long and complex works. I have nothing against the readers, and may find myself buying one eventually — they’d come in very handy on trips, the way the iPod does. I’m all in favor of the comprehensive digitizing of the world’s books, since that would very much ease small points of research (and I’m not worried about losing control of my copyrights, since it’s unlikely many people would read entire books online that way). As far as the decline of reading goes, I am nervous, but also believe that matters of taste and inclination do swing around on long orbits.
But I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can’t remember the quote I’m searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too–the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.”
Tags: Luc Sante, Steve Jobs
This two-minute clip taken from the 1967 short documentary “1999 A.D.” reliably predicts the future of Internet shopping–yet still manages to be antiquated in a wildly sexist way. The movie was produced by Philco-Ford, which was a pioneering battery, radio and TV manufacturer.
Opium den in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1880s. (Image by Louis Philippe Lessard.)
I knew that there were people in the 19th-century who were opium eaters, but I wasn’t aware that it was a competitive sport. According to this odd article in the June 15, 1887 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, you could win championship medals for cooking opium in national competitions. Also: Montana was apparently an opium hotbed in the 1880s. Who knew? An excerpt:
“A confirmed opium fiend has been discovered among the performers at a Coney Island music pavilion. He is the possessor of two championship medals for cooking opium, won in national contests among opium eaters. Word was brought to Police Headquarters on Wednesday that an opium den was in operation at Frank Reeber’s on the Sea Beach walk. Officer James Boyle went to the place and found that Charles Sheppard was the only opium smoker in the place, and that he had his ‘layout’ in his bedroom. He and the layout were taken before Justice Newton, and Sheppard was let go by his own recognizance. Yesterday morning, with hollow eyes and shaking limbs, he appeared before the Justice and begged for the return of his layout, saying that without it he felt as if wild horses were tearing him apart. The Justice told him he might take a cell and ‘hit’ the pipe, and he eagerly agreed to give up liberty for the boon of smoking. He was not allowed to do this, however, but later in the day upon his explanation that he must have the opium and that he was lessening the dose to cure himself gradually of the habit, his layout was returned. He went directly to his room and lying on his bed in a mild ecstasy of anticipation began preparing and cooking the pellets. He is but 19, and contracted the habit two years ago in Montana.”
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"If it shoots, stabs or goes with it, I'll buy it." (Image by Kafziel.)
Do you have old rifles (any long-barrels: muskets, flintlocks, breach-loaders, etc), swords, bayonets, flags, uniforms, medals, helmets or ANY war stuff collecting dust in your house? Grandpas WW2 relics? Nazi stuff that’s just too creepy to display? Great Uncle’s string of ears he cut off at Okinawa that scares your kids? Hitler’s personal mustache comb? Dad’s massive collection of guns that he collected for fighting “commies”? Pile of rusty shotguns in your garage? Propeller of a Viet Cong plane stuck in your attic?
Sell it to me! I’m not a store, so there’s no waiting on paperwork and arguing, I don’t need to know why do you have a Romanian WW2 tank in your basement collecting dust, I just want it!
Russian Imperial or German pre-1945 items are always bought at top price! US Propaganda ww2 posters, original photographs, even coins, I’ll give you an offer on ALMOST EVERYTHING!
If it shoots, stabs or goes with it, I’ll buy it. I come to you anywhere in NY, always pay in CASH and I am discreet and professional.
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It's hard to imagine 1970's American cinema without Shelley Duvall and Louise Fletcher.
Often unfairly consigned to the middle or back of the Robert Altman catalog, Thieves Like Us is a stellar Depression Era drama that’s low-key, atmospheric and sometimes funny, even if it lacks many of the director’s trademark touches. There’s no ceaseless patter or cross-cutting plots, but the relatively straightforward film is undeniably rich.
T-Dub (Bert Remsen), Chickamaw (John Shuck) and Bowie (Keith Carradine) are a trio of cons who form a Deep South crime spree during the 1930s. The guys might not have any money in the bank, but they don’t mind helping themselves–at the point of a gun–to whatever happens to be lying around in the vault. But these aren’t men with merely crime on their mind–they’re also lovers. The youngest con, Bowie, for instance, finds romance with a strange girl (Shelley Duvall) who chain-smokes cigarettes and inhales Coca-Cola. Just as Bowie considers getting out of a life of crime, he may not have that option. As their infamy grows and the fellows become sloppy, it’s just a matter of time until they’ve made their final withdrawal.
Thieves Like Us manages to be very much a film of it’s time, with great supporting turns by ’70s stalwarts like Duvall and Louise Fletcher, as well as a film with an authentic feel for the era in which it’s set. But like the best of Altman, ultimately, the movie feels timeless, like a wave of ideas and emotions that exists in a realm all its own. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
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Tags: Bert Remsen, John Shuck, Keith Carradine, Robert Altman
"Redfish Lake, Idaho--Sawtooth National Forest. The lake is on U.S. 93 in the Sawtooth Mountain Range. Mount Heyburn on the right is over 10,000 feet elevation. Camping and lodge facilities are available."
(Purchased at Brooklyn flea market for 25 cents,)
“Dear Pee-paw and Mee-maw,
Thought you’d enjoy seeing where we went camping last week. We rented a trailer and spent two nights here. Had a marvelous time! The area is so beautiful–we also visited a couple of mining ghost towns. Very interesting. Drove home through Sun Valley. It was a relaxing two-day vacation and we sure hated to come home. Hope this finds you both well!
Much love,
Susan and Bruce.”
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Tags: Mr. Jay Groff, Mrs. Jay Groff
Woodrow Fucking Wilson. (Image by Pach Brothers.)
What are the search engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor over the last couple of weeks? Below is a list of some of the sublime and ridiculous requests linked to the stories that attracted them to our humble site:
Afflictor: Making our readers proud to show their faces since 2009.
If he keeps thinking so much, Kwame Anthony Appiah's head will explode. (Image by David Shankbone.)
In a recent Washington Post article (“What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?“), Cosmopolitanism author Kwame Anthony Appiah pinpoints contemporary behavior that he believes will be seen as shameful in the future. He settles on four topics. An excerpt about one troubling area:
“Our Prison System
We already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we’re inclined to avert our eyes from the details. Check, check and check.
Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China’s rate is less than half of ours. What’s more, the majority of our prisoners are non-violent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering.)
And the full extent of the punishment prisoners face isn’t detailed in any judge’s sentence. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. Our country holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation in so-called supermax facilities, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture.”
Tags: Kwame Anthony Appiah
"It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things."
Werner Herzog, one of the most quotable people on the planet, delivered a mostly improvised speech in Milan, Italy, which is called “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and the Ecstatic Truth.” During the lecture he addressed how new technologies diminish our understanding of reality–but how there’s no going back. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.) An excerpt:
“When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly afresh.
What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelve-year-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?
History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.
Tags: Werner Herzog
