It was on the first day in July 1912 when pioneering aviator Harriet Quimby made her final flight. The first American woman to receive a pilot’s license, Quimby had become famous for also being the first female to fly across the English Channel. But those achievements were no help during her last flight, in which Quimby flew a demonstration over Boston Harbor in her new monoplane. Everything went well until a sudden, unexplained pitch caused her and her passenger, William Willard, to be ejected from the craft and plummet from an altitude of 1,500 feet to their deaths. In the above classic photograph from the Bain Collection, Quimby sits in a monoplane in the year before she was killed. A section from her July 5, 1912New York Times obituary:
“Dr. Watson, who in speaking of the career of Miss Quimby, took a chapter from Revelation as his text, said, in part:
‘Her name is added to the long list of those who have freely given their lives in order that the world might be larger and better, in order that life might be greater and grander.
‘But in our sorrow to-night there rests still a joyous note of triumph. For we realize that through this death there has come progress and that, therefore, Miss Quimby’s life was a victory over those very elements which at the end brought on her tragic end. For through such as she was to do we reach nearer and nearer to the far-off goal of our hope.”
"Your identity would remain absolutely confidential."
MEN who have cheated needed for Art Work (Chelsea)
Hello, I’m a New York City based visual artist and photographer exploring a new subject matter through my practice. I’m interested in working around several ideas of liberation, guilt and the reconfiguration and reconstruction of social institutions such a marriage and commitment to a significant other. I’m looking for MEN who would be interested in collaborating with ME who have cheated on their wives, girlfriends, partners, etc. Your identity would remain absolutely confidential for this project intends to be CONCEPTUAL and NOT representational. Let me know if you would like to help.
"The presence of such an enclave of graceless pleasures in such an environment is so improbable that only science fiction can manage it." (Image by Matthew Field.)
I was looking at The Browser and came across a book about American deserts by the late architectural critic Reyner Banham, a British expat who adored the buildings of Los Angeles. A quote from this seemingly eccentric book that I’ve yet to get my hands on:
“Las Vegas is a symbol, above all else, of the impermanence of man in the desert, and not least because one is never not aware of the desert’s all pervading presence; wherever man has not built nor paved over, the desert grimly endures – even on some of the pedestrian islands down the center of the Strip! The presence of such an enclave of graceless pleasures in such an environment is so improbable that only science fiction can manage it; the place is like the compound of an alien race, or a human base camp on a hostile planet. To catch this image you need to see Las Vegas from the air by night, or better still, late in the afternoon, as I first saw it, when there is just purple sunset light enough in the bottom of the basin to pick out the crests of the surrounding mountains, but dark enough for every little lamp to register. Then – and only then – the vision is not tawdry, but is of a magic garden of blossoming lights, welling up at its center into fantastic fountains of everchanging color. And you turned to the captain of your spaceship and said, ‘Look Sir, there must be intelligent life down there,’ because it was marvelous beyond words. And doomed – it is already beginning to fade, as energy becomes more expensive and the architecture less inventive. It won’t blow away in the night, but you begin to wish it might, because it will never make noble ruins . . . .”
••••••••••
Previously posted, this playful 1972 BBC doc captured Banham in his favorite element: Los Angeles. There’s a fun passage in which Edward Ruscha opines on L.A. gas stations:
"Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses."
New Scientist has agreat article by Sally Adeeabout eyeglasses that help wearers accurately read the emotions of those they are looking at. It could be a boon for people with social development disorders and kind of frightening for all of us, since we have to fake our way through unpleasant situations in life in order to not offend people. What if our true feelings were laid bare at all times? How would that change who we are and how we interact?
Eventually you would think these glasses will be “worn” on the inside, as the progression for medical advancement is often external to internal.When pacemakers were first invented, they were external units that were the size of luxury sedans before becoming internal and tiny. It sounds like chips in our brains to go along with ones in our hearts. The opening of the New Scientist article:
“ROSALIND PICARD’S eyes were wide open. I couldn’t blame her. We were sitting in her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and my questions were stunningly incisive. In fact, I began to suspect that I must be one of the savviest journalists she had ever met.
Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses. The instant I put them on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong. That look of admiration, I realised, was actually confusion and disagreement. Worse, she was bored out of her mind. I became privy to this knowledge because a little voice was whispering in my ear through a headphone attached to the glasses. It told me that Picard was ‘confused’ or ‘disagreeing.’ All the while, a red light built into the specs was blinking above my right eye to warn me to stop talking. It was as though I had developed an extra sense.
The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard’s facial expressions. They’re just one example of a number of ‘social X-ray specs’ that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?”
Walter Cronkite anchors a look at the first Earth Day in 1970, with this segment focusing on New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. As Cronkite says, cities were thought of at the time as “major population and pollution centers,” when, in fact, populous cities are now known to bevery green.
Before the World Wide Web and Wikipedia, there was the Mundaneum, an attempt in the early twentieth-century by two Belgian lawyers and documentalists, Paul Otler and Henri La Fointaine, to collect all the important knowledge of the world in one place and create a sort of international utopia of the mind that was accessible and hyperlinked. Although it was not technologically possible at the time, Otlet ambitiously outlined plans that would allow everyone in the world to see the info through “electronic telescopes,” which would also enable users to send each other messages. The facility to house the information was to be built in Switzerland by Le Corbusier, but it never came to fruition. The collection, though, would up with 12 million documents. It lives on as a museum.
In his 1994 article, “Visions of Xanadu,” W. Boyd Rayward republished a 1914 pamphlet about the fledgling knowledge-sharing organization:
The International Centre organises collections of world-wide importance. These collections are the International Museum, the International Library, the International Bibliographic Catalogue and the Universal Documentary Archives. These collections are conceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects. Established according to standardized methods, they are formed by assembling cooperative everything that the participating associations may gather or classify. Closely consolidated and coordinated in all of their parts and enriched by duplicates of all private works wherever undertaken, these collections will tend progressively to constitute a permanent and complete representation of the entire world.•
Bill James, the statistics outsider who brought sabermetrics to baseball’s mainstream and helped deliver two world championships to a title-starved Boston Red Sox franchise, has an abiding interest that may be even deeper than the National Pastime: crime–why people commit evil deeds and why we’re obsessed with the topic. Chuck Klosterman of Grantland just interviewed James about his new book on the topic, Popular Crime, and they discussed whether everyone is capable of murder. An excerpt:
“OK, so tell me this: In 1984, O.J. Simpson had not (allegedly) killed anyone. But was he already a murderer? Did that capacity to kill already exist within him, a decade before Nicole Brown Simpson was dead?
I think the capacity to commit terrible acts exists in all of us, myself included. I think we could all do things we’d be very ashamed of. I’m sure that capacity was within O.J. in 1984, as it was in myself in 1984.
You’re speaking hypothetically, but I’m curious: What would have to happen in order to make you commit a murder? Can you picture a scenario where you kill someone?
For most of us who are living successful lives, we systematically steer away from those situations. We steer away from those stresses. But, you know … if the kids have to eat and there’s no money in the bank, who knows what you might do? So you try to keep money in the bank. You try to avoid that circumstance. If a woman drives you crazy, you’ll do things that you wouldn’t normally do — so you try to stay away from women who make you crazy. Or drugs: Any one of us can become a drug addict. And once you do, you will kill somebody to get drugs. So maybe that’s the way to think about this: Any real drug addict will kill you in order to get drugs.
Wait — are you suggesting the addiction to cocaine or heroin is greater than whatever internally stops us from committing murder?
Sure. But what I’m really trying to say is that this is probably how we need to think about these types of things: It is not as if we walk through one doorway and decide that murder is acceptable. You have to walk through many doorways. The first doorway leads to a party, where people are doing drugs and having fun. The second doorway leads to more partying. It’s a long, long series of doorways, until you end up in a room where a terrible thing happens. So the question is, ‘How many doorways away are you?’ It’s not a question about a person’s capacity to commit a murder. It’s a question of how many doorways we keep between ourselves and that situation.”
For all the attention that illegal immigrants from Mexico receive, one important factor has been missed: The flow of illegals from our Southern neighbor has markedly decreased–and probably not mostly because of tougher border enforcement. According census figures, more than half a million Mexicans were coming into the U.S. illegally as recently as 2004; the number has shrunk to around 100,000 today. Shifts in Mexico’s demographics, economy and education system seem the likely reasons. So the good news is that there will be a lot more jobs in American rendering plants for natural-born citizens. The opening ofDamien Cave’s New York Times articleon the topic:
“The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.
A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.
Here in the red-earth highlands of Jalisco, one of Mexico’s top three states for emigration over the past century, a new dynamic has emerged. For a typical rural family like the Orozcos, heading to El Norte without papers is no longer an inevitable rite of passage. Instead, their homes are filling up with returning relatives; older brothers who once crossed illegally are awaiting visas; and the youngest Orozcos are staying put.
‘I’m not going to go to the States because I’m more concerned with my studies,’ said Angel Orozco, 18. Indeed, at the new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering, all the students in a recent class said they were better educated than their parents — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.” (ThanksMarginal Revolution.)
"I have a theory that your staff is also just a bunch of extremely lost former customers." (Image by Calvin Teo.)
You’re just a fantastic maze of shit. (Red Hook)
Ikea, why do you do this to me? Why do you beckon me to come and waste three hours of my life inside of you, only to spend the last two just trying to get out. I have a theory that your staff is also just a bunch of extremely lost former customers. Also, stop trying to sell me cheap things with human names. I don’t need to come home only to have to comfort Billy the fucking bookshelf because it’s depressed about its generic exterior and lack of girlfriend. I am not a fucking furniture therapist.
That said I still feel attracted to your meatballs. Maybe we can work something out?
"He broke my windows with a sling shot and threw tomato cans at me." (Image by Ralf Roletschek.)
The tomato can was the Molotov cocktail of nineteenth-century Brooklyn, as this trio of articles from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle illustrates.
••••••••••
“Mrs. Klein’s Troubles–She Says They Lock Her Up and Throw Tomato Cans at Her” (November 23, 1886): “Mrs. Katrina Klein, an elderly German woman, lives at 461 Carroll Street. The boys in the neighborhood are more than usually mischievous and according to her statement, render her life miserable. On the night of November 10 a gang of youngsters fastened her door with a piece of rope and then threw stones through the window. When Mrs. Klein succeeded in getting out she seized upon Peter Sterling, a lad who lives next door, and gave him into custody. This morning he was arraigned before Judge Walsh.
‘Do you know this villain?’ asked the Court.
‘I do your Honor. He is the worst boy in the world. He broke my windows with a sling shot and threw tomato cans at me. Whenever I go out he calls ‘Klein, Klein’ after me.’
The judge gave Sterling a lecture and then allowed him to go, as he denied having broken the windows.”
••••••••••
“Much Trouble in the Flat” (August 7, 1901): “Interdomestic troubles in the flat at 117 Carlton Avenue occupied the attention of Magistrate Naumer of the Myrtle Avenue police court this morning. Mrs. Mary Deegan, who occupies an apartment on the third floor of this flat, was in the court as complainant against Charles, Thomas and John Dunn, inhabitants of the first floor. She charged that these three young men forcibly entered her room Sunday afternoon and brutally assaulted her daughter Jennie, a school girl, and herself.
"They alleged also that Mrs. Deegan dropped a tomato can on the head of Thomas."
Mrs. Deegan swore that Charles and Thomas first burst into the room; that Charles seized her bodily and threw her on the floor, while Thomas struck Jennie in the eye and cried out, ‘I owe you that.’ Then, she says, Thomas threw Jennie on top of her. Just as she was regaining her feet, so she says, John entered the room and slapped her face.
The three Dunns denied the charge and swore they had never been in Mrs. Deegan’s rooms in their lives. They said they had a quarrel with Mrs. Deegan on Sunday afternoon, but it was conducted from their respective windows and was the result of Mrs. Deegan spitting on their sister’s head while she was leaning out the window. They alleged also that Mrs. Deegan dropped a tomato can on the head of Thomas. Magistrate Naumer held the boys under $200 bail each for the Court of Special Sessions.”
••••••••••
“Who Threw the Tomato Can” (December 15, 1891): “Patrolman Horahue of the First Precinct had some trouble with a number of young men on Tillary Street, near Lawrence on the night of the 8th. Somebody threw a tomato can at him and it struck him on the bridge of the nose. Shortly afterward he appeared at the Adams Street Station with Peter Dolan of 163 Tillary Street and James Cleary of 33 Main Street as prisoners. He had thumped them both on the head with his club and both required the services of an ambulance surgeon. This morning Justice Walsh tried Dolan on a charge of assault preferred against him. The prisoner’s head was still bandaged and he looked weak. Horahue swore that Nolan threw the tomato can, but when he was cross examined his evidence on that point was somewhat hazy. Dolan, who is a plumber in business for himself, and a pretty good fellow, his neighbors say,denied the charge. Justice Walsh discharged him with the comment that the evidence against him was not satisfactory and that Dolan had been punished enough in his judgement.”
In 1970, Life magazine published an article about the environmental movement that had shocking predictions that proved wildly inaccurate–at least so far. An excerpt:
“Unless something is done to reverse environmental deterioration, say many experts, horrors lie in wait. Others disagree, but scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support each of the following predictions–
In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution
In the early 1980s air pollution combined with a temperature inversion will kill thousands in some U.S. city
By 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half
In the 1980s a major ecological system–soil or water–will break down somewhere in the U.S.
New diseases that humans cannot resist will reach plague proportions
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will affect the earth’s temperatures, leading to mass flooding or a new ice age
Rising noise levels will cause more heart disease and hearing loss. Sonic booms from SSTs will damage children before birth
Residual DDT collecting in the human liver will make use of certain common drugs dangerous and increase liver cancer
There have long been rumors that in 1973Jackie Gleason accompanied President Richard Nixonto Homestead Airforce Base in Florida and was shown what were supposedly the pickled bodies of extraterrestrials who had reached Earth. Perhaps it was a payoff for Gleason supporting Nixon in 1968.
“But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.
However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. ‘We are herd animals,’ he says. ‘These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving.’ Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will ‘bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.’
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”
"In 1926, attracted by the building boom, three or four Caughnawaga, gangs came down." (Image by Detroit Publishing Co.)
From “The Mohawks in High Steel,” Joseph Mitchell’s 1949 New Yorker story about a Native American tribe’s contributions to NYC bridges and skyscrapers:
“Sometime in 1915 or 1916, a Caughnawaga bridgeman named John Diabo came down to New York City and got a job on Hell Gate Bridge. He was a curiosity and was called Indian Joe; two old foremen still remember him. After he had worked for some months as bucker‑up in an Irish gang, three other Caughnawagas joined him and they formed a gang of their own. They had worked together only a few weeks when Diabo stepped off a scaffold and dropped into the river and was drowned. He was highly skilled and his misstep was freakish; recently, in trying to explain it, a Caughnawaga said, ‘It must’ve been one of those cases, he got in the way of himself ‘ The other Caughnawagas went back to the reservation with his body and did not return. As well as the old men in the band can recollect, no other Caughnawagas worked here until the twenties. In 1926, attracted by the building boom, three or four Caughnawaga, gangs came down. The old men say that these gangs worked first on the Fred F. French Building, the Graybar Building, and One Fifth Avenue. In 1928, three more gangs came down. They worked first on the George Washington Bridge. In the thirties, when Rockefeller Center was the biggest steel job in the country, at least seven additional Caughnawaga gangs came down. Upon arriving here, the men in all these gangs enrolled in the Brooklyn local of the high-steel union, the International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Iron Workers, American Federation of Labor. Why they enrolled in the Brooklyn instead of the Manhattan local, no one now seems able to remember. The hall of the Brooklyn local is on Atlantic Avenue, in the block between Times Plaza and Third Avenue, and the Caughnawagas got lodgings in furnished‑room houses and cheap hotels in the North Gowanus neighborhood, a couple of blocks up Atlantic from the hall. In the early thirties, they began sending for their families and moving into tenements and apartment houses in the same neighborhood. During the war, Caugh nawagas continued to come down. Many of these enrolled in the Manhattan local, but all of them settled in North Gowanus.”
"Would you happen to have a spare boat sitting around?" (Image by Tomasz Sienicki.)
Help bring me independence (Anywhere)
My dream is to have a boat, something upon which I could sail – whether in the Hudson, or when I have time to go down to the semi-permanently sunny side of the earth.
Would you happen to have a spare boat sitting around? I love sailboats, and my dream has always been to own a sailboat, but I would take anything that floats.
If it needs some fixing, this is fine, I will fix it; if it needs love, I will love it; if it needs a family to take it out, I’ve a family – and they all say thank you.
From a post on i09 about pigeons and their fierce, unforgiving memeories for humans who’ve mistreated them:
“It turns out crows aren’t the only birds with fiendishly powerful memories. Pigeons are also capable of spontaneously remembering which humans mistreated them, and even an attempt to disguise the identity of their one-time abuser can’t fool them.
Thankfully, pigeons aren’t as mean about all this as crows, who are known to hold five-year grudges. But once a pigeon recognizes a human as a threat, it appears there’s no way of convincing them otherwise. That’s the takeaway from experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Paris. The team worked not with laboratory-bred captive pigeons, but instead with feral birds who had received no special training or instructions. Despite this, the pigeons displayed an amazing aptitude for recognizing human faces.”
“Another company that is doing pretty groundbreaking stuff in the AR sphere is CrowdOptic, a real-time crowd behavior monitoring tool underpinned by augmented reality technology.
CrowdOptic lets fans at events such as concerts and sporting fixtures point their smartphones at an athlete or performer and view real-time information about the target, such as coaching insights and stats, and also receive exclusive invitations, ticket discounts, marketing promotions and more.
For example, if you’re at a concert or football match you might point your phone’s camera at the action. If a few hundred other spectators do the same thing, using triangulation and GPS data, CrowdOptic detects where the crowd’s attention is at any given moment, relaying the data back to the event’s organizers.
By knowing what is being photographed or videoed, this gives the organizers a mechanism for monetizing these insights in real-time during the live event.”
From “Hacking,” a 1996 Wired article by the excellent reporter Ted Conover about Roy Eric Wahlberg, a Minnesota drug dealer who surreptitiously became a tech millionaire while spending 17 years in prison for a vicious murder:
“The year was 1975 and the place was Ely, Minnesota, near the Canadian border in the region known as the Iron Range. Cold and insular, the range is a land of deep woods and open-air mines, brought down from boom times by the decline of American steel. Wahlberg, 23, sold milk during the day for his parents’ dairy distribution company and at night sold drugs: LSD, speed, cocaine, PCP, tranquilizers. ‘I celebrate every Saturday night,’ he told the court during his trial; that Saturday in March he celebrated with beer, rum and Coke, speed, marijuana, and, right before attending a party in a trailer home with his girlfriend, Roxanne Ahlstrand, some LSD.
The LSD annoyed Roxanne, who said it left Wahlberg ‘hard to get along with … hard to communicate with.’ His drug use occasionally led to rages-smashed windshields (usually his own) and trashed apartments (sometimes Roxanne’s). Roy and Roxanne argued at the party, and after several mixed drinks, he left with her younger sister. Fights between them were common, in part because Wahlberg fooled around on the side-often with underage girls. Once, caught naked in the back of a car with a minor, he had been thrown into jail.
At one point that evening Wahlberg passed through a local bar at the same time as a recent high school graduate named Jeff Goedderz (pronounced GED-derz). It was Goedderz’s 19th birthday, and he, too, had been drinking, beginning with a celebration before dinner at his sister’s house in nearby Babbitt. Trial testimony indicated that Goedderz had made a date that night with an Ely woman but it skipped his mind; at the jukebox in the bar he was soon making time with a college student home for the weekend from Duluth. When they and another couple went for pizza down the street at 1 a.m., Goedderz offered her his class ring.
No one remembers whether Goedderz and Wahlberg spoke at the bar; it is uncertain whether they even knew each other. But sometime after 2:30 a.m. they met up on the streets of Ely, two of the last people still awake on a cold night in winter. Goedderz, in poor condition to drive with a blood alcohol level later measured at 0.17 percent (almost twice the limit allowed by many states), let Wahlberg take the wheel of his Plymouth Gold Duster and climbed in back to sleep. They were joined by Wahlberg’s friend Red Nelson, a shoplifter and vandal who sold drugs to kids. The police theory was that Wahlberg murmured to Nelson his suspicion that Goedderz, who declined to take drugs besides alcohol, was a narc. (Nelson also suggested, years later, that Wahlberg was jealous of Goedderz, the outsider who was starting to date local girls.) As Goedderz slept, the two friends picked up a hatchet at Wahlberg’s truck and a stolen bowie knife at Nelson’s house. They drove to a remote logging road 8 miles north of town; the killing began when Goedderz stepped out of the car to pee. His last words, according to Nelson, were ‘Oh, no! Don’t do that!’
Goedderz’s car was found six days later under melting snow in the parking lot of the Ely Co-Op. Police noticed blood dripping into a puddle beneath the car and popped open the trunk to find Jeff Goedderz. Almost no blood remained in his body. According to officials, Goedderz died of loss of blood from multiple wounds. There were two long gashes to the head, both of which penetrated the brain, made by a hatchet. There were knife wounds to the face, arm, and neck. A knife blow to the left cheek had entered in front of the ear, broken the jaw, and knocked out two front teeth. And, in what the pathologist called a ‘defensive wound,’ Goedderz’s left thumb was missing: hair stuck to the hand indicated that Goedderz had probably had his hand to his head, trying to ward off blows. He said Goedderz had been alive when placed in the trunk.
As the people last seen with Goedderz, Wahlberg and Nelson were prime suspects in the murder, but it took 17 months of investigation before the case went to a grand jury. During those months Wahlberg freely talked with the lead investigator; parrying with the police as they tried to trip him up was like playing ‘mental chess,’ he later said. But Wahlberg lost the game when things he told the investigator confiicted with statements he made to others. Based on strong circumstantial evidence, Wahlberg was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.”
••••••••••
In 2000, Conover discussed working as a Sing Sing prison guard with that kindly warden Charlie Rose:
Americans have always been paranoid about intruders, believing that there are Russians, Martians and Kenyans among us. Maybe the burden of an immigrant nation is that we’re never completely sure about our neighbors–or maybe it just gives us a handy scapegoat for what ails us internally, as individuals and collectively. Certainly the paranoia has only increased post-9/11, when it became clear that there really were malignant sleeper cells.
On a 1977 episode of In Search Of…, Leonard Nimoy looked at U.S. citizens who believed they’d sighted flying saucers. The host wonders if there really are UFOs. Of course there aren’t, you fucking idiot. Incredibly ridiculous and amusing. And some awesome incidental music.
"I will pay top of the market prices for your hair."
Your hair needed (NYC)
I am a professional wig and toupee designer and I need your help. I will pay top of the market prices for your hair. All lengths and colors are welcome, but hair over six inches in length will receive bonus pay. I will send you a prepaid hair collection kit that you will use to ship the hair to me after it is cut. No dyes please. Please call Scott to discuss.
One literary outlaw opined on another in Terry Southern’s 1964 pieceabout William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. An excerpt:
“The element of humor in Naked Lunch is one of the book’s great moral strengths, whereby the existentialist sense of the absurd is taken towards an informal conclusion. It is an absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy. No one, for example, has written with such eloquent disgust about capital punishment; throughout Naked Lunch recur sequences to portray the unfathomable barbarity of a “civilization” which can countenance this ritual. There is only one way, of course, to ridicule capital punishment—and that is by exaggerating its circumstances, increasing its horror, accentuating the animal irresponsibility of those involved, insisting that the monstrous deed be witnessed (and in Technicolor, so to speak) by all concerned. Burroughs is perhaps the first modern writer to seriously attempt this; he is certainly the first to have done so with such startling effectiveness. Social analogy and parallels of this sort abound in Naked Lunch, but one must never mistake this author’s work for political comment, which, as in all genuine art, is more instinctive than deliberate—for Burroughs is first and foremost a poet. His attunement to contemporary language is probably unequaled in American writing. Anyone with a feeling for English phrase at its most balanced, concise, and arresting cannot fail to see this excellence.”
"The cannon exploded, tearing off Kaiser's leg." (Image by Joseph Furttenbach.)
A quartet of cautionary tales about July 4th, a wonderful and dangerous holiday, from the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
••••••••••
“The Cannon Exploded” (July 5, 1889): “La Grange, Tex.–The Fourth of July celebration at Round Top was marred by a terrible accident. J.G. Kaiser and two other men named Schiege and Gingel were firing off a cannon. It seems they loaded it with seven pounds of powder and filled it with wet clay and moss so as to make a loud report when fired. The cannon exploded, tearing off Kaiser’s leg and seriously wounding Schiege and Gingel. Kaiser is not expected to live.”
••••••••••
“Died of Lockjaw” (July 12, 1900): “The Fourth of July celebration claimed another victim yesterday, when Frederick Detlefsen of 6 Sullivan Street died of lockjaw, at his home. He was the son of Charles Detlefsen, a well known builder, of the Twelfth Ward. The boy was not quite 16 years old, but was powerfully built. On the evening of the Fourth he received a wound in his left forefinger from the premature explosion of a blank pistol cartridge. A local physician dressed the injury and nothing further was thought of the matter until Tuesday morning, when the boy complained of a soreness in his throat. That became worse rapidly and when a physician was summoned, he at once diagnosed the case as tetanus. The wound in the finger was opened and disclosed two greased wads embedded in the flesh. Spasms soon developed and and despite frequent injections of morphine, the boy suffered the most intense agonies. Death terminated his sufferings at noon yesterday.”
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“Inspected a Giant Cracker” (June 30, 1902): “The Fourth of July celebration was inaugurated in Greenpoint last evening by a small number of boys, who set off fireworks during every intermission of the rain. Naturally both pyrotechnics and boys became damp. James Connolly, 10 years old, of 70 Sutton Street, finally found himself endeavoring to light a giant firecracker which refused to explode. At last he put his eye at one end of the cracker, with the result which might be expected. It went off then. Young Connolly will probably lose the sight of his left eye, while his features will be disfigured for life with powder marks. He is recuperating in the care of Dr. Detsch at the Eastern District Hospital and receiving all the care and attention due the first hero of the fire cracker season.”
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"The body of little Conrad was found behind the counter burned to a crisp."
“Baby Con’s Fatal Fun” (July 2, 1893): “A shocking accident, the exact cause of which will probably never be known, occurred at 4:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon in the store kept by Frank Winkenbach, at 899 Liberty Avenue, in the Twenty-sixth Ward. Mr. Winkenbach keeps a small candy shop, but in anticipation of a busy Fourth of July had stocked his place with fireworks. Yesterday afternoon about the time indicated Mr. Winkenbach had occasion to visit the rooms above the store and he left his 4 year old boy Conrad downstairs. He had no idea that the child would have access to any matches. Suddenly the father was startled by the noise of a loud explosion and hastening downstairs, he found the store on fire. The entire stock of fireworks were exploding. Firecrackers were sputtering and Roman candles and pinwheels were wasting their substance all around. He did not see the child as he looked into the store, but, fearful that he was there, he attempted to reach the place where he was supposed to be. It was impossible to do so.
The neighbors sent out a fire alarm and soon the engines were on the ground. It seemed as if the entire front of the store was in flames. The firemen were rapidly at work and soon the fire was extinguished. The body of little Conrad was found behind the counter burned to a crisp. His clothing had been entirely consumed, and all that remained was the charred corpse with the little shoes still adhering to the child’s feet. The body was taken to the living rooms of the family and Coroner Creamer was notified to hold an inquest. The flames had consumed the front of the shop and it was boarded up last night. A crowd of curious neighbors hung around. A rosette of white crepe and streamers on the door told of the tragedy.
From the fact that there was a loud explosion at the outset it is believed that the child had dropped a lighted match among some gunpowder which formed part of the stock. The front windows were blown out by the shock and the store was utterly wrecked. It was impossible when the fire broke out to rescue the child, but Mr. Winkenbach had hoped that Conrad had escaped. It was only when his disfigured body was found that the father abandoned the idea that the boy had managed to reach the street.”
