Summer Vacation?

6 Sep ’11 • Society • by
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PJ O’Rourke over at the WSJ vents his case against “summer vacation”:

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

This is nonsense. The little helping hands of farm children were needed during spring planting and fall harvest. (And they must have been more helpful than the little hands of today’s children, or our grandparents would have died of starvation.) Farm kids, if they went to school at all, went in midsummer and midwinter, when nothing much was doing around the barn.

Summer vacation is, in fact, based on horse crap. American urbanization predated the automobile. Horses and what they leave behind them clogged cities that were already insalubrious from coal smoke, industry and notional sewage systems. Come summer, it was vacation time because—if you had any sense, common or olfactory—you vacated.

I have to say, I love having the kids home from school but wow, it is a lot of work to keep them occupied and not at each other’s throats.

via the Wall St. Journal

Fence From Monmouth Battlefield

16 Jul ’11 • Culture • by
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Taken by yours truly.

Building The Titanic

30 Jun ’11 • Photography • by
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Amazing set of photos from the construction of the Titanic. When you look at these photos, you can’t help but think about how much work would be needed just to build the scaffolding to then build the ship. And to think that all that work would go, ahem, down the drain.

Via How to Be A Retronaut

Jefferson’s Library Books

22 Feb ’11 • Culture • by
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A significant collection of Thomas Jefferson’s library has been discovered at Washington University of St. Louis Library.

Those books were dispersed after Jefferson’s heirs reluctantly decided to sell them at auction in 1829 to pay off Jefferson’s debts; auction catalogs survive, but not a record of who bought the books. The retirement collection is the least known of Jefferson’s libraries and one in which classics were represented in disproportionately greater numbers than politics and the law. He cataloged all 1,600 books according to “the faculties of the human mind,” like memory, reason and imagination, and then classified them further. Many were in French or Italian.

“Currently Monticello and the University of Virginia have the largest concentrations of books from the retirement library,” said Kevin J. Hayes, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and the author of “The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson.” “This new find would put Washington University among them. The question I would like to answer is: Do they contain any marginalia? Sometimes Jefferson wrote in his books; his marginalia would enhance both the scholarly and the cultural value of the books immeasurably.”

A total of about 28 titles in 74 volumes were found in the library.  Not to be snarky, but isn’t the role of the library to catalog and know what books are in their collection?  A great find but kinda surprising that they have never been discovered until now.  Just makes you wonder what other hidden treasures are out there in plain sight?

I was down at Monticello back in November with my family. The existing collection of books in the home’s library was pretty amazing and really reinforced Jefferson’s obsession with books, reading and learning.  I look forward to hearing what interesting insights and details are discovered after researchers have had the chance to look through the collection

via NYTimes.com

Have A Coke And A Smile

16 Feb ’11 • Pop Culture • by
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The folks at This American Life appear to have stumbled upon the original recipe for Coca Cola. What I want to know is their motivation and resources to dig up the original 1979 article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they used as the basis for the story.

Who knows how legit this is. Of course, Coke is denying everything and saying its not the “go to market” formula for the iconic soft drink.

Audio History

19 Jan ’11 • Society • by
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As stunning as it may seem, we are in the 10th anniversary year of Sept. 11, 2001.  And as part of the acknowledgement of this somber anniversary, Brooklyn startup Broadcastr will partner with the National Sept 11 Memorial Museum to publish an audio history of that fateful day:

As part of Broadcastr’s debut next month, it will host over 2,000 interviews with eye witnesses and first responders about their experiences on September 11th, 2001. About a week after the site goes public, Broadcastr will offer both iPhone and Android versions of an app that will be able to associate geolocation data with uploaded stories.

via swtched

Robert Frost House in VT

16 May ’10 • Travel • by
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Twitter as History

15 Apr ’10 • Culture • by
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Twitter is making all of its content – all 55 million daily tweets – available to the Library of Congress so that all tweets can be part of recorded history.

The library reached out to the company a few months ago about adding Twitter’s content to the national archives, said Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications. He cited Twitter’s “immense impact on culture and history,” like its use as a vital communications tool by political dissidents in Iran and Barack Obama’s turning to Twitter to declare victory in the 2008 election.

So look out folks, twenty years from now, your kids could be researching a paper about life in the first decade of the millenium and stumble upon some of your more interesting posts.

A Different Era

7 Apr ’10 • Internet • by
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image

Saw this banner at an empty retail space which was once a CompUSA on 6th Ave in NYC.

Tri Boro Bridge Token Machine

1 Jan ’10 • Photography • by
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As seen at the NYC Subway Museum in Brooklyn, NY

Retro

4 Dec ’03 • Pop Culture • by
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Building on the Retro craze for all your lounge lizards out there, RetroModern.com is a neat site that has lots of mod-retro furniture and accessories.

A neat trend marketing site is Trendsetters, where I found the above retro-mod site, which is written by Michael Tchong, the former editor and publisher of Iconocast and “The Jacobyte” column, which I desperately miss!!

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