DARPA’s “autonomous precision payload emplacement system,” or “that thing that puts stuff where you want it to be put.” Your days are numbered pizza delivery guy.
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I suppose the best argument for a war on drugs is that using narcotics is thought to lower IQ and if enough people in a society make themselves less intelligent, it puts that society at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. But here’s the problem with the prohibition of drugs: It doesn’t work. Not at all. Criminalizing something that consenting adults want to do just serves to enable a black market. And if people don’t have access to street drugs, they’ll abuse Oxycodone and the like. The war on drugs is not going to stop usage so we should stop the war on drugs. At Tom Dispatch, Lewis Lapham recalls his sole encounter with acid:
“So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual, and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.
Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.
Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.
Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I’d been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug — if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why — I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.
To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.”
Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Lapham
From the May 28, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Eastport, Long Island–While driving through the woods here yesterday, Theodore Tuthill, a resident of this vicinity, found an opossum, with nine young ones. The whole family was secured and Mr. Tuthill will receive $2.25 in bounties for the ears of the mother and the young.”
Tags: Theodore Tuthill
“I will be only 42 years old when I can bid you adieu and move forward into a bright and shiny future that I can enjoy alone, or with a pet or two.”
I fucking hate you
You small, low life piece of shit…Had i had even the smallest inkling that you were who you actually are i would have fled. You are exactly what shames real men. IGNORANT, POORLY BRED, PRACTICALLY ILLITERATE, NO AMBITION, NO CLASS, YELLING ALL THE TIME, SHITBAG, You SHOULD HAVE BEEN SKEETED OUT onto YOUR NO GOOD MAMA’S CHEST, as opposed to being born and not ABORTED. The slag whore who shit you out should have been placed at the top of a stairwell and kicked in the back, so as to tumble to the bottom, thus ending the trip with a MOST appropriate miscarriage. You should have slid down her filthy leg and into the gutter where you belong. I hate that i met you and fell for all the bullshit you shoveled….You were lying when you said that you were Someone. You were lying when you said you cared about politics and family and being better…. You lied about how you were raised and your education level, you were lying when you said you had had a good upbringing and that you intended to raise your children in the same way. I ended up with a no account loud asshole who is only good for a tiny paycheck and an annual tax refund that the poor are given. I FUCKING HATE YOU. I’m only here in this hell of a life until the kids are off to college and well clear of MY bad choice and your SELF. Fear not asshole, I blame me too, for my misery. I was lonely, I was stupid I didn’t listen to those who knew better and tried to warn me off you. I thought I was good enough and smart enough and strong enough to bring you into a place where we could build and be successful as a family…
Here’s the thing, it’s alright. Because the Best of you was combined with the best of me, sprinkled with grace or cell division or whatever, and two of the best, most beautiful, kind and wonderful people Happened AND they are SO worth all this small petty shit. An average lifetime for a woman is around 76, my youngest is already 12 therefore I’m looking at only 6 years which means i will be only 42 years old when i can bid you adieu and move forward into a bright and shiny future that I can enjoy either alone, or with a pet or two. Good luck with your future….
The kids hear you every time you swear and carry on and bring slang up in conversation, they, I’m sure notice, when you wear new clothes and have a haircut and Mom is running around in her Two good outfits, to parent teacher night and the honor roll ceremonies, and the speech therapist and the doctor’s appointments ad nauseum. The lucky part for you asshole, is that I will never, ever say words to them that makes them feel as though half of them is begotten by a hateful asshole. You, Dickhead, will forever be spoken of in positive and important terms…but you and I know the truth don’t we? Good luck in 10 years bitch!!!
You’re not allowed to shoot buffalo from speeding trains anymore, but you can see the Eiffel Tower from the window even if you’re traveling through the American Midwest. That’s thanks to augmented reality. It doesn’t look genuine enough to me yet, but still! From Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo: “The AR system, called ‘Touch the Train Window,’ is composed of a Kinect with GPS hardware, an iPhone, custom software, and a projector to overlay images on the window. Every time a passenger taps the window a new element is added, which is perfectly tracked into the passing scenery. It’s also a great way to get the most travel for your buck, letting you pass the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome, even Stonehenge, as you roll through the boring wheat fields of the American mid-west.”
Tags: Andrew Liszewski
Mary Todd Lincoln suffered many losses in her life, and one of the bitterest was the 1871 death of her youngest child, Thomas, nicknamed “Tad,” when he was just 18. The cause of death was reported to be “dropsy of the heart,” but it could have been TB or some other cardiac illness. To put it mildly, Tad was a free spirit, and he is responsible for the origin of a White House tradition. Long before President Obama was pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving, the Lincoln child saved a similar bird. From Gilbert King at the Smithsonian history blog:
“However, the earliest known sparing of a holiday bird can be traced to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was presented with a Christmas turkey destined for the dinner table and his young, precocious son Tad intervened.
Thomas ‘Tad’ Lincoln was just 8 years old when he arrived in Washington, D.C., to live at the White House after his father was sworn into office in March 1861. The youngest of four sons born to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Tad was born after Edward ‘Eddie’ Lincoln died in the winter of 1850 at the age of 11, most likely of tuberculosis. Both Tad and his brother William ‘Willie’ Lincoln were believed to have contracted typhoid fever in Washington, and while Tad recovered, Willie succumbed in February of 1862. He was 11.
With the eldest Lincoln son, Robert, away at Harvard College, young Tad became the only child living at in the White House, and by all accounts, the boy was indomitable—charismatic and full of life at a time when his family, and the nation, were experiencing tremendous grief. Born with a cleft palate that gave him a lisp and dental impairments that made it almost impossible for him to eat solid food, Tad was easily distracted, full of energy, highly emotional and, unlike his father and brother, none too focused on academics.
‘He had a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline,’ wrote John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. Both Lincoln parents, Hay observed, seemed to be content to let Tad ‘have a good time.’ Devastated by the loss of Willie, and both proud and relieved by Robert’s fastidious efforts at Harvard, the first couple gave their rambunctious young son free rein at the executive mansion. The boy was known to have sprayed dignitaries with fire hoses, burst into cabinet meetings, tried to sell some of the first couple’s clothing at a ‘yard sale’ on the White House lawn, and marched White House servants around the grounds like infantry.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Gilbert King, Mary Todd Lincoln, Thomas Lincoln
From the February 11, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Danville, Ill.–Fannie Mann, Annie Lee, Douglas Cole, Jacob Grimes and wife, Charles Grimes and wife, were baptized by immersion yesterday, a few miles west of this city. The Rev. Mr. Hodge, of Caitlin, and John Lee, of this city, performed the ceremony.
A large hole had been cut in the ice, and the ministers took the thinly clad and shivering converts, one of whom is a chronic invalid and another a young mother, one at a time into the water, which was five feet deep. A blizzard and snowstorm was raging, and it was so cold that the ice formed on top of the pool and stiffened their garments as soon as they came out of the water. On completion of the ceremony they walked in their stocking feet a quarter of a mile through the fields to the nearest residence to change garments.”
Regarding Bob Costas’s gun-control comments in the wake of Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide:
- As difficult as it is to control handguns now, the advent of 3-D printers is going to make it virtually impossible to ban any physical object.
- An NFL player with money will have no trouble getting a gun in a capitalist society–or any society, really–if he wants one, regardless of law. There’s no sense in creating a black market that makes it even more difficult to track weapons.
- Costas and Jason Whitlock (whom he referenced) are correct in saying that the gun culture makes us less safe and can escalate violence. But the prevalence of guns stems from a myriad of social and cultural issues that is not going to be reduced by legislation. That doesn’t mean that the number of firearms among young people can’t be reduced, but you can’t erase manifestations without dealing with the underlying causes and influences. That requires a great deal of education, not the quick fix of legislation. Laws have had very little success in reducing drug use and handguns are no different.
- If you really want to protect football players in particular, present an editorial about how they should stop playing football or fans should not watch or attend the games. Brain-related injuries will damage and kill more members of the NFL than handguns will. Such injuries cannot be reduced by technological innovations because even helmets with space-age protection can’t stop the brain from being jarred within the brain fluid as a result of violent contact. There’s really no workaround for the NFL: It’s a killer.•
Tags: Bob Costas, Jason Whitlock
- Fast Food Restaurants Permitted Children: As hard as it is to believe, even though children were not allowed to drink alcohol or buy tobacco, they were permitted to eat in unhealthy fast-food restaurants. In fact, they were encouraged to do so, by advertising and family. Parents who loved their children and wanted them to grow to be strong and healthy would inexplicably take them regularly to dine on obesity-promoting food and beverages loaded with sugar and fat and salt. There were even special selections designed for minors (“Happy Meals,” some were called) that were akin to miniature packages of cigarettes that contained toys. These items helped hook them on unhealthy lifestyles from an early age. Eventually these restaurants were made off-limits to minors the same way bars were.
More Things About Us Future People Won’t Believe:
“I went broke to be honest.”
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Vacuums needn’t look as good nor function as well as James Dyson makes them, but for decades he’s been creating dust-busting appliances that rival Apple’s greatest designs. He probably won’t stop, even if you ask him nicely. From Shoshana Berger’s new Wired Q&A with the inventor:
“Wired:
Now that Dyson is a sprawling, multinational corporation, how do you keep the spirit of innovation alive?
James Dyson:
We try to make the corporation like the garage. We don’t have technicians; our engineers and scientists actually go and build their own prototypes and test the rigs themselves. And the reason we do that—and I don’t force people to do that, by the way, they want to do it—is that when you’re building the prototype, you start to really understand how it’s made and what it might do and where its weaknesses might be. If you merely hand a drawing to somebody and say, ‘Would you make this, please?’ and in two weeks he comes back with it and you hand it to someone else who does the test, you’re not experiencing it. You’re not understanding it. You’re not feeling it. Our engineers and scientists love doing that.
Wired:
Do they ever fail?
James Dyson:
Absolutely. It’s when something fails that you learn. If it doesn’t fail, you don’t learn anything. You haven’t made any progress. Everything I do is a mistake. It fails. For the past 42 years—I’ve had a life of it.”
Tags: James Dyson, Shoshana Berger
“9-9-9.”
An essential figure in the lives of stoners and pornographers alike, the pizza delivery guy is a revered member of our fat, dumb culture. One such worker just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit to talk about his hard-knock life, though he should be happy he isn’t a flight attendant. A few excerpts follow.
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Cities, wonderful though they are, can be scary and confusing, but they’re better imperfect than being completely smart and quantified, argues Richard Sennett in the Guardian. He would rather live in Rio’s welter than in Songdo’s planned perfection. An excerpt:
“The debate about good engineering has changed now because digital technology has shifted the technological focus to information processing; this can occur in handheld computers linked to ‘clouds,’ or in command-and-control centres. The danger now is that this information-rich city may do nothing to help people think for themselves or communicate well with one another.
Imagine that you are a master planner facing a blank computer screen and that you can design a city from scratch, free to incorporate every bit of high technology into your design. You might come up with Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, or Songdo, in South Korea. These are two versions of the stupefying smart city: Masdar the more famous, or infamous; Songdo the more fascinating in a perverse way.
Masdar is a half-built city rising out of the desert, whose planning – overseen by the master architect Norman Foster – comprehensively lays out the activities of the city, the technology monitoring and regulating the function from a central command centre. The city is conceived in ‘Fordist‘ terms – that is, each activity has an appropriate place and time. Urbanites become consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations of where to shop, or to get a doctor, most efficiently. There’s no stimulation through trial and error; people learn their city passively. ‘User-friendly’ in Masdar means choosing menu options rather than creating the menu.”
Tags: Richard Sennett
“Hadn’t had on a pair of pantaloons for six months.”
Legendary Texas Ranger John Coffee Hays wasn’t wearing any pantaloons when he was informed that he had been elevated to a commander of the frontier forces in the 1830s, so it didn’t start with Petraeus. From an article in the May 18, 1848 Brooklyn Daily Eagle in which Hays recalled his early career:
“Among the many incidents in the narration of which the usually taciturn young Ranger was accustomed to beguile the long anf laborious night rides of General Lane in pursuit of the guerillas, I recollect the following which may not be uninteresting to your readers.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ said he one night, as we were riding toward Matamoras in a drizzling rain, ‘about my being appointed commander of the forces of the frontier, by the Texas congress?’
‘No–how was it?’
‘Well, when I was fourteen years old, I got in the habit of going with out spies and following trails to find the camps and villages of the Comanches. In a short time I used to go on alone, when the spies would go no further, and sometimes succeeding in finding the enemy and leading our Rangers to their camp. Very soon the officers employed me as a regular trailer, and from that time I was almost always in the woods in pursuit of the Comanches; and for a whole year I have not slept in a bed, and but twice inn a house. Things went on in this way till I got to be about 18 or 19 years old. One day, after an absence of several months, I came into the settlement. Hadn’t had on a pair of pantaloons for six months–‘
‘No pantaloons–what did you wear?’
‘Oh, moccasins,’ said he. ‘A handkerchief was tied around my head–I’d lost my hat three months before–“
‘Lost your hat–how’d you lose it?’
‘Why, six Comanches happened to see me one day and chased me so close my hat came off in the race–when they stopped pursuit I went back, but they had found it. Well, when I got into the settlements they gathered round and began to tell me I had been appointed to command all the forces to be raised for the protection of the frontier. Of course I supposed they were poking fun at my looks and dress, and I was getting mad fast, when some one handed me a letter containing official notice of the appointment.’
‘I shouldn’t have been more surprised,’ he modestly added, ‘if I’d been chosen President of Texas.'”
Tags: General Lane, John Coffee Hays
I trust almost no one for basic competence in day-to-day life, but I don’t worry much about dying a fiery death when I’m on an airplane. I readily put myself in the hands of the crew, even though they’re probably a bunch of horny wiseasses judging us harshly. Let someone else be responsible of my continued breathing for awhile; I’m exhausted from the task. But writer A.L. Kennedy is, like many people, terrified of flying. From her new Aeon essay on the topic:
“I am not superstitious. Magical thinking is an open well of nonsense into which we fall at our peril, it leaves us prey to charlatans and all that is self-defeating about human psychology. I use tapping and listening to music to induce positive states as a kind of self-hypnosis, I don’t believe I’m performing magic… I don’t believe in magic… Yet as soon I get within sight of an airport I know that reality is, in some ghastly way, porous or sensitive at great heights. Some deep, irrational urging, some remnant of young hominids’ anxieties around over-tall trees, tells me that nature itself is able to feel my thoughts at any altitude from which a fall would prove fatal. The higher I get, the more clearly my conscious mind’s emanations will invite attention. It will lean close, like a startled mother bending in over a baby she suddenly realizes is not a baby, but merely a baby-shaped monster swapped for her beloved by evil elves and likely to bite her at night if she doesn’t throw the appalling thing clear out of a window right now. To be precise, the more I fill with fears, the more the universe will attend to and believe my fears, thus making them real. And down will come baby, cradle and all.”
Tags: A.L. Kennedy
“I believe there are lasers in the jungle somewhere,” a poet of despair once cautioned, but just as surprising are the tethered flying bots that can spy on you indefinitely in the suburbs. From Endgadget: “A new venture from an iRobot co-founder called CyPhy Works has borne fruit in the form of two flying drones dedicated to surveillance duty. The first, called Ease, is a mere foot in diameter by 16-inches tall and can fly safely in tight spaces or through open windows or doors, thanks to its petite size and ducted rotors. It packs a pair of HD cameras along with a thermal imager and can stay aloft permanently, in theory, thanks to a microfilament tether attached to a ground station — which also makes it impervious to weather, tracking and interception at the same time, according to CyPhy. The second drone, an insect-like quadrotor called Parc, is designed for higher flying missions thanks to its larger size and maximum 1,000-foot altitude.”
Quintessential New York writer Tom Wolfe actually has quite a history on the West Coast as well. From Michael Anton’s excellent City Journal consideration of Wolfe’s California experiences, the moment Wolfe recognized the richness of Left Coast subcultures:
“It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom car show—phoned it in, by his own admission—but he knew there was more to the story. Temporarily without an income, he pitched a story about the custom car scene to Esquire. ‘Really, I needed to make some money,’ Wolfe tells me. ‘You could draw a per diem from the newspaper writers’ guild, but it was a pittance. I was in bad shape,’ he chuckles. Esquire bit and sent the 32-year-old on his first visit to the West—to Southern California, epicenter of the subculture.
Wolfe saw plenty on that trip, from Santa Monica to North Hollywood to Maywood, from the gardens and suburbs of mid-’60s Southern California to its dung heaps. He saw so much that he didn’t know what to make of it all. Returning to New York in despair, he told Esquire that he couldn’t write the piece. Well, they said, we already have the art laid in, so we have to do something; type up your notes and send them over. ‘Can you imagine anything more humiliating than being told, ‘Type up your notes, we’ll have a real writer do the piece’?’ Wolfe asks. He stayed up all night writing a 49-page memo—which Esquire printed nearly verbatim.
It’s a great tale, but, one fears, too cute to be strictly true. I ask him about it point-blank. ‘Oh, yes, that’s exactly what happened,’ he says. ‘I wrote it like a letter, to an audience of literally one person’—Esquire managing editor Byron Dobell—’with all these block phrases and asides. But at some point in the middle of the night, I started to think it might actually be pretty good.’
That piece—’The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’—represents the first time that Wolfe truly understood and was able to formulate the big idea that would transform him from an above-average feature writer into the premier cultural chronicler of our age. Those inhabiting the custom car scene were not rich, certainly not upper-class, and not prominent— indeed, they were almost invisible to society at large. Wolfe described his initial attempt to write the story as a cheap dismissal: ‘Don’t worry, these people are nothing.’ He realized in California that he had been wrong. These people were something, and very influential within their own circles, which were far larger than anyone on the outside had hitherto noticed.
‘Max Weber,’ Wolfe tells me, ‘was the first to argue that social classes were dying everywhere—except, in his time, in England—and being replaced by what he called ‘status groups.’ ‘ The term improves in Wolfean English: ‘Southern California, I found, was a veritable paradise of statuspheres,’ he wrote in 1968. Beyond the customizers and drag racers, there were surfers, cruisers, teenyboppers, beboppers, strippers, bikers, beats, heads, and, of course, hippies. Each sphere started off self-contained but increasingly encroached on, and influenced, the wider world.
‘Practically every style recorded in art history is the result of the same thing—a lot of attention to form plus the money to make monuments to it,’ Wolfe wrote in the introduction to his first book. ‘But throughout history, everywhere this kind of thing took place, China, Egypt, France under the Bourbons, every place, it has been something the aristocracy was responsible for. What has happened in the United States since World War II, however, has broken that pattern. The war created money. It made massive infusions of money into every level of society. Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles.’ If Wolfe’s oeuvre has an overarching theme, this is it.'”
Tags: Michael Anton, Tom Wolfe
“I won’t sex every one.”
Rats, live or frozen–100!!! – $175 (Pick up Queens)
- Offer ends 7:30 p.m.
- 50 medium
- 50 small
- different sexes…no, I won’t sex every one. package deal only!!!
- First come, first serve basis!!!
- Firm no exceptions!!!
Big-box stores, with their savage price-cutting, created a monster they can no longer control: consumers who refuse to pay anything above deep discount. Armed with smartphones, they go to stores to sample items, reach for their iPhones and order the goods from Amazon for a smaller price. From a Megan McArdle Newsweek piece about the category-killers attempting to reinvent themselves on the fly, unlikely as that seems:
“To survive, stores like Best Buy will need to kill their own category, remaking themselves into what might be called ‘small-box stores’: more intimate, accessible, with a unique mix of products and expert personal service that the Internet simply can’t provide. Other retailers have shown that it’s still possible, even in this day and age, to get people to buy things in stores. But can the giants of yesteryear cut themselves down to scrappy, nimble competitors? Can Goliath transform himself into David before the money runs out?
To find out, I went to see the place where Best Buy is reinventing itself. Earlier this year, the firm announced that it would be closing 50 stores, while opening 100 smaller ‘mobile’ locations. It’s also undertaking extensive renovations on remaining stores to refocus them around personal service—the one thing that Amazon can’t deliver via UPS. ‘With things like home appliances, people are going to want the things we offer, for example, the delivery to service and install. Or Geek Squad: thousands of people sitting in homes, doing installations, across all the platforms,’ says Stephen Gillett, the digital wizard who helped lead a turnaround at Starbucks before joining Best Buy eight months ago. ‘If you’ve got a Kindle, a Samsung television, an Android phone, good luck getting service for that at Amazon.’
The idea is that nicer-looking stores and better service will help combat ‘showrooming’—the act of visiting a store to look at a videogame console or fancy television before you buy it, cheaper, on the Internet. The trend has been gathering steam for years, but over the past 18 months, smartphone apps like RedLaser and Amazon’s Price Check have made it as easy as, er, stealing display space from a big box: just scan the item’s bar code and the app shows you whether you can get it cheaper somewhere else.
Usually, you can.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Megan McArdle
From the August 23, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“For the first time in the memory of the police of the Fifth Precinct an Italian committed suicide in that section of the city yesterday afternoon when Joseph Sanagora, 21 years old, of 67 South Second Street, shot himself in the mouth with a .38 caliber revolver. The only apparent reason Sanagora had for committing the rash act was the fact that his parents refused him 5 cents with which he wanted to buy a package of tobacco.”
Tags: Joseph Sanagora
People feel unloosed from norms and mores when driving or flying because the odds of violent death increase so they have an excuse to regress. Otherwise nice people flip you off on the turnpike and seemingly average folks want to bang in a can 30,000 feet in the air. A flight attendant just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, and who better to testify on reductive on-flight decorum? A few passages follow.
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Ben Schott has a really fun piece in the New York Times about the “Shifters,” a mysterious pyramid scheme that spread virally among Flappers in that decidedly pre-Internet year of 1922. It promised “something for nothing,” but worked inversely to that credo as all pyramid schemes do. An excerpt:
“By mid-March, the press was reporting who it thought the Shifters were and what it guessed they were up to — though the picture is fragmented and contradictory.
For example, The Providence Evening Tribune asserted that “the fad started at Hanover in the room of an ingenious minded Dartmouth student of psychology,” whereas The News Sentinel blamed ‘Boston high school debutantes,’ and The Pittsburgh Press blamed high school students in New York.
What is clear is that the Shifters had no structure, no leader and no politics — other than an apparent sympathy with another nebulous group of convention-defying jazz-age women: the Flappers. (The Shifters were often classified as a subspecies of Flapper.)
Central to the Shifters’ rapid growth was a pyramid scheme of enrollment and enrichment that was encapsulated by the Shifter motto,’Get something for nothing.’
A Shifter would tempt a victim into joining, swear her to secrecy, make her pledge to ‘be a good fellow’ and demand an initiation fee of anything from 5 cents to $6. The newly minted Shifter was then dismissed to find fresh victims and make good her investment.
According to The Border Cities Star, ‘down in New York one stenog. cleaned out 1,200 persons in the Woolworth building offices during her membership campaign, and naturally collected 1,200 dollars.'”
Tags: Ben Schott
“It was well known that the divorced lonely ladies were there.”
Where the horny old ladies at? (Eltingville)
Remember Kent’s East on Forest Avenue across from the Staaten? When I was in my twenties that was where I went to get laid. It was well known that the divorced lonely ladies were there. Then for the next twenty years it was Hedges/The Bistro for horny older women.
Now “older” ladies are my age, and I don’t know where they go anymore.
This tragic tale from the January 29, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle has it all: a dealer of animals with poor judgement, a drunken trick elephant, a killer python, etc. An excerpt:
“The desire for strong drink indirectly added another victim to the long list of those who have died from such causes yesterday morning. The deceased, however, does not belong to the genus homo, but is a young elephant from Burmah, aged 18 months, owned by W.A. Conklin, an animal dealer of 40 Vesta Avenue. The elephant’s name was Baby, and he was a trick elephant.
For some time past he had been suffering with a severe cold, for which he was treated by Keeper Frank Gleason with generous doses of quinine and whiskey, the medicine being kept in a large demijohn in the room with Baby. Baby soon became very fond of his medicine, and, shortly after midnight this morning broke his chain and attacked the demijohn, emptying it in short order. It was not long before he became quite joyous, and, in his peregrinations, upset and broke into the snake cage, containing two large Indian pythons. One of those reptiles resented the elephant’s assault and attacked the beast, and after a short struggle succeeded in injuring it to such an extent that it died about a half hour later. The struggle also caused the snake’s death.
Keeper Gleason yesterday sent the elephant’s body to B.G. Wilder, at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., to be mounted and the skeleton articulated. The snake’s skin will adorn the wall of a Brooklyn shop.”
Tags: B.G. Wilder, Baby, Keeper Frank Gleason, W.A. Conklin
A lot of twentieth-century America was written into the life of Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who went from backwater tent revivals to Los Angeles megachurch media maven in short shrift. She was a feminine icon, progressive on matters of race before her country was, deeply charitable and in possession of a genius for broadcasting. She also had the type of sizable public missteps you would expect from a larger-than-life figure.
In the above classic photograph from the Los Angeles Daily News, the evangelist, left, prepares holiday baskets in a pantry. From H.L. Mencken’s 1930 writing about her in the American Mercury:
“For years she toured the Bible Belt in a Ford, haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas. It was a depressing life, and its usufructs were scarcely more than three meals a day. Often, indeed, there was too little money to buy them, and she had to depend upon the charity of the pious. She was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic mortgage sharks in that direction, and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi, and thousands of them had nothing to do save gape at the movie dignitaries and go to revivals.
Aimée piped a tune that struck their fancy and in a short while she was as massive a local figure as Sid Grauman or the Rev. Bob Shuler. In five years she had a plant almost as big as that of Henry Ford, with an auditorium seating 5300 customers, a huge Bible School, a radio broadcasting station, a flourishing publishing house, three brass bands, three choirs, two orchestras and six quartettes. She is today the most prosperous ecclesiastic in America and her annual net takings exceed those of Bishop Manning.
But, as I have said, I doubt that she is happy in the homely secular sense, though the grace of God is undoubtedly in her. I detect a far-away look in her eye, an I detect a heavy heart in her book, despite its smooth, glad air of a Y. M. C. A. secretary. Certainly the attempt to jail her on perjury, a year ago, left some scars on her.
Connoisseurs will recall the outlines of the case: she alleged that she had been kidnapped, and the Los Angeles police alleged that she had been on a protracted week-end party with one of her male employees. She won in the end, but only after a long and nerve-wracking trial, in the course of which she had plenty of chance to observe that Moronia could punish as well as applaud. The trial, indeed, was an orgy typical of the half-fabulous California courts. The very officers of justice denounced her riotously in the Hearst papers while it was in progress, and she says herself that she was almost asphyxiated by the smoke of photographers’ flash-lights in the courtroom.”