Mar 12, 2012
German artist EVOL works with stencils and spray paint on concrete walls, steel electrical cabinets, and plain cardboard boxes to create vast high-rise apartment blocks. For this installation in a Berlin parking garage, EVOL works a cross-beam into his creation as a crushing artistic blow.
Mar 11, 2012
This early twentieth-century advertising placard recommends drinking Georges Borman cocoa if you want to be big and strong.
Mar 10, 2012
Sunbeams break through gaps in dark clouds after an intense snow squall in Port Maitland, Nova Scotia. This is the sort of astronomical phenomenon that used to be used in ads for gospel albums by singers who are no longer with us, but it can occur any time that thick clouds blocking the sun get a little raggedy, most notably when the sun is low in the sky. This photo was taken 45 minutes before sunset last January 30.
Mar 9, 2012
Another visit with the chained beast of Manning Street, at the side door of a dress shop near Rittenhouse Square.
Mar 8, 2012
The desert of northern Saudi Arabia is among the most barren places on earth. But beginning in 1986, when water wells were drilled into deep aquifers, vast stretches of desert land have been irrigated for agricultural use. So much of Saudi Arabia is now farmland that the fields are visible from space, as shown here in this photo taken last week by astronauts on the International Space Station. The circular fields are each about one kilometer in diameter.
This is energy-intensive agriculture; it takes a lot of fossil fuel to pump water from so deep underground and to operate the center-pivot irrigation systems that keep the wheat fields and vegetable patches green despite bone-dry desert air. But Saudi Arabia has a lot of fossil fuel, and its desert agriculture is expanding rapidly.
(The water in the aquifers is itself fossilized, left over from the Ice Age, before this part of the world became so hot and arid.)
Mar 7, 2012
Dusk comes to the rooftops of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
Mar 6, 2012
In August 2004, during a family gathering on Peaks Island, Maine, to celebrate my father's eightieth birthday, some of the grandchildren spent many hours doing stuff with the rocks on the beach. Here we see Ted, Hank, Allen, Joe, and their cousin Nick.
If I remember correctly, shortly after this picture was taken, something catastrophic happened to the structure. The catastrophe was great fun for some of the boys, but not so much fun for Hank, who felt compelled to devote more hours to "fixing" it.
Mar 1, 2012
California's self-inflicted budget mess is no secret, making it no surprise that the state has begun closing down at least seventy of its state parks and recreation areas. Kevin Forrester, a parks-department supervisor, is shown here in front of the locked, shuttered, and recently boarded-up visitor center at Mitchell Caverns, a state park unit in the Mojave Desert that was closed a few months ago because it needed budget-busting repairs to its water system.
Burglars broke into the closed-down visitor center and stole all its copper wiring and plumbing fixtures, along with two-way radios, binoculars, and other emergency gear. Those same intruders or other vandals broke all the windows and glass exhibit cases and caused an estimated $100,000 worth of damage.
After welding shut the doors to the visitor center, Supervisor Forrester observed that the state will need to find a pot of money if it is ever "to bring this place back to life." What happened at Mitchell Caverns, predicts Forrester, will happen again and again around the state as more and more parks are closed to visitors.
A Californian who gave his name as John Houck read about the troubles and offered assistance. "I am 60 years old and very healthy and able," he wrote in a message to the Los Angeles Times. "I don't know where this e-mail will end up, but I hope it might be read by someone of importance.
"I am a builder in many crafts (new construction and maintenance). I am currently unemployed and have been for quite some time now. I am just looking for for some kind of work to give me something to do, and maybe be helpful at the same time. I am not looking to become rich, just helpful. If anyone of any importance reads this e-mail, please contact me....."
What's the matter with this country?
Feb 29, 2012
More than fifty walls, rooftops, and billboards high above Market Street, visible mostly from the elevated train line in West Philly, bear pictures and snatches of poetry by former graffiti artist Steve Powers; together they make up his "Love Letter" mural project, one of the city's most popular new tourist attractions.
"We share sheets," says the writing on the third-floor sidewall of a trackside rowhouse. "We share defeats," says the writing at the end of the block.
The message on the back wall of a warehouse is spelled out in what appear to be refrigerator-magnet letters: "If you were here, I'd be home."
Power says his style grew out of a trip to Northern Ireland, where the political murals on the walls of Belfast struck him as "powerful for all the wrong reasons." In his Love Letter murals, he says he's trying to retain the power but "use it in a really good way."
Feb 28, 2012
If you believe the banners in this ca. 1885 chromolithograph, the Standard Tip T.M. Harris & Co. boot comes with a double toe that is not only warranted and trade mark registered but also highest grade sole leather tip. It's not clear what the people frolicking in the ad have to do with double standard tip shoes, and it's not clear what a registered trade mark has to do with warranted highest quality, but what else is new. As my grandmother used to say: You believe that one and they'll tell you a bigger one.
The shoe factory in the background was a building on Cherry Street in Philadelphia that was originally built for manufacturing chandeliers.
Feb 27, 2012
Out of deference to the Oscar thing, today's g'mornin features an image by a photographer best known as a filmmaker, Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The panorama here shows part of a twenty-four-hundred year-old site in eastern Turkey dedicated to Nymphaios, the Greek god of rivers. For another example of Ceylan's still photography, see here.
Feb 26, 2012
This was Amersfoort, Netherlands, back in the day. The city has since grown to 24 square miles, with a population of almost 150,000, but its medieval center is said to be well preserved and legally protected. Known as Boulder City, Amersfoort is now 753 years old.
The Netherlands doesn't have very many boulders, but there used to be a big one, weighing more than nine tons, out on the moors south of town. In 1661, however, a couple of Amersfoort's leading citizens got to drinking and wagering, and then wouldn't you know it, one of them rounded up 400 neighbors to push the rock into the center of town.
The rock-pushers were rewarded with beer and pretzels, but Amersfoortians soon discovered that they really didn't much like being known far and wide as boulder draggers. They didn't like that their city's reputation was all about the stupid rock in the main square. In 1672, they buried the boulder.
More than two centuries later, in 1903, the buried rock was rediscovered and again put on display. Pranksters have moved it again from time to time, presumably with heavy equipment, but the city has now mounted its nine-ton token high on a pedestal for all the world to see.
Feb 25, 2012
German painter Gesine Marwedel offers her services for people who want to look especially splendid for a special event.
Feb 24, 2012
Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer takes scissors to old books–also scalpels and tweezers and other surgical instruments–to reveal a sort of alternate reality deep inside. Nothing in the book is altered, he says; nothing is relocated or added. He just cuts out the words and pictures and stuff that are in the way of the words and pictures and stuff he wants the world to see.
Dettmer especially likes to slice up volumes of old encyclopedias or illustrated dictionaries, works with numerous and varied illustrations. "The book's intended function has decreased," he says; old books are "still linear in a non-linear world." By twisting the spine and cutting the pages, he exposes cast-off words and pictures to new kinds of appreciation.
Feb 23, 2012
He had a balloon and an inflatable Popeye, but still the 1938 Rice Festival Parade in Crawfordville, Louisiana, just lasted too long.
Some of the signs in the store window appear to be advertising items of clothing for 10 cents, or even 5 cents. That can't be right, but I have no alternative explanation.
Give that baby some spinach, and he'll come round.
Feb 22, 2012
Members of the Canadian Snowbirds Association gathered last month for "Fish Fest" at an RV park in Llano Grande, Texas.
Canadian Snowbirds winter mostly in Florida, south Texas, and Arizona. Along the west coast of Florida, Canadians are so numerous in the wintertime that the St. Petersburg Times devotes a couple of pages to news from around Canada. The Snowbirds Association operates a website for Canadians considering buying real estate in the Sunbelt, but mostly it's a social organization
Feb 21, 2012
As the vegetation suggests, winter weather is usually a good bit milder than this along the beachfront promenades of the town of Split, on Croatia's Dalmatian Coast. This winter has been particularly cold and snowy throughout much of Europe and even as far south as North Africa; temperatures have bounced back now, however, and this week Split enjoyed sunny afternoons with highs in the upper 50s.
Feb 20, 2012
The judges assess the form of this ski jumper as he flies past the referees' tower during last week's Team Tour World Cup competition in Klingenthal, Germany. No winners were named; high winds forced an early halt to the event.
Feb 19, 2012
Boys playing marbles in May 1940, in Woodbine, Iowa. I don't know when exactly American children gave up marble-playing, but by the late 1950s, when I was a serious student of childhood fun in America, nobody played with marbles any more.
They still rode bikes, however. And there were other games in which you could lose all your stuff, such as flipping baseball cards.
In 1940, Woodbine, Iowa, was a relatively prosperous place, center of Iowa's apple-growing industry, which was the second-largest in the nation. But a freak blizzard in the early fall of that year, about six months after this picture was taken, froze the trees before summer's new growth had hardened off; all but the very oldest trees turned black and died, and Woodbine never really recovered economically.
Feb 18, 2012
Were it not for cellphone cameras, this fact would probably be even littler known.
Feb 17, 2012
The sun sank in the west, and then it was dark in Yosemite Valley.
Feb 16, 2012
Another hour's work, and Bernard Zike will have the seat of this chair completely restored. People from all over New England bring worn-out old chairs to Bernard's workshops in Warren and Portland, Maine, where he and his partner, Marion Puglisi, work centuries-old caning and rushing techniques, often with reeds they've harvested themselves from local ponds.
Would-be apprentices from all over the country seek them out in hopes of mastering the craft, though many will give up their dreams when they learn how much patience is required. After more than twenty-five years of experience with traditional tools and all kinds of natural seating, it still takes Bernard almost a full day of work to repair a single chair bottom.
This is one of Bernard and Marion's winter chairs; it will spend the winter in their shop. It belongs to some of Maine's summer people, who drop off broken chairs when they close up their summer homes in the fall, with the expectation that when they reopen their summer homes next spring, they can reclaim the chairs, and they'll be good as new.
Feb 15, 2012
Even back in 1905, most towns didn't put nearly as much Disney into their post offices as did Saginaw, Michigan.
The building survives today, though now it's a museum, officially the Castle of Saginaw County History. The current Saginaw post office, shown below per Google Maps, is just a post office.
Feb 14, 2012
Valentine's Day is all about the stuff that blooms in the garden of life. Or something. Best wishes to all.
Feb 13, 2012
The electrical engineers of the navy frigate USS Ingraham pose for their official cruise portrait. From left to right: EM3 Huggins, EM3 Miller, EM1 Nkwanga, EM3 Acostasoto, EM1 Gillespy, EM2 Genaovargas, Ensign Stein.
The Ingraham left its homeport of Everett, Washington, last September for a six-month deployment with an international force trying to suppress drug trafficking in the waters off Central and South America.
The thing around Acostasoto's neck is an electrical shore power cable.