20th century dinosaur parks.
Maybe Edwin Poots and the lads have a point.
Category Archives: History
Rob Cross tweetz:
My restored and colourised May 1960 photograph by James O’Dea featuring a man pushing a steam locomotive round a railway turntable at Kilfree Junction in County Sligo.
Behold: the most famous manned voyage of the 20th century on its way home. To wit:
After proving that humanity has the ability to go beyond the confines of planet Earth, the first humans to walk on another world — Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — flew the ascent stage of their Lunar Module back to meet Michael Collins in the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. Pictured here on 1969 July 21 and recently digitally restored, the ascending spaceship was captured by Collins making its approach, with the Moon below, and Earth far in the distance. The smooth, dark area on the lunar surface is Mare Smythii located just below the equator on the extreme eastern edge of the Moon’s near side. It is said of this iconic image that every person but one was in front of the camera.
(Image: NASA, Apollo 11; Restoration – Toby Ord)
RIP: (the other) Big Fellah.
A new director’s cut by producer Joel Gallen of Price’s mind-melting guitar solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony for George Harrison.
In the unlikely event you’ve never seen it – Prince commences to rip about 3 and a half minutes into ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, performed with Harrison’s son Dhani, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Steve Winwood.
If you have seen it, watch it again for added Princeliness.
Anil Dash shared some extra details about the performance here (including what actually happened to the guitar Prince throws into the air at the end of the set) and a photo (top) of Prince heading unnoticed through the streets of New York for the rehearsal.
Behold: a rare 1940 index typewriter, the Toshiba BW-2112 – demonstrated here by New Orleans based Typewriter Collector – which uses horizontal cylinders with thousands of symbols to type in Japanese, Chinese and English.
In the mid 50s, when Toshiba switched to a Western style keyboard with Kana characters, the cylinder models were discontinued, making this a rare machine indeed. Of the device, which ordered characters in a manner similar to that found in a Japanese dictionary, Typewriter Collector sez:
They’re arranged phonetically by most common “on-yomi” (or kun-yomi in some cases) according to the kana syllabary (many homophones, of course)… Red characters help parse the readings. Last character to left of equal sign can be pronounced “kin” (exert) and the first character in next row “gin” (silver), then “ku” (suffer) in red followed by “kuu” (sky, empty), “kuma” (bear), “kun” (teachings, meaning [also the kun in kun-yomi]), “gun” (group), then “kei” (system) in red followed many, homophones of “kei”
Now for yiz.
Movie Nights
at
Or, as the Latin inscription in the top picture has it: ‘Hodie mihi cras tibi’.
17th century mourning rings from a collection at the British Museum via Kirsty Rolfe.
A 1985 ad for General Electric rightly identified by We Are The Mutants as having the most amount of 80s any ad from the 80s could possibly have. Imagine the film Krull starring Jon Bon Jovi in suede lace-up boots. You’re not even close. To wit:
Only in a decade as contradictory as the 1980s would one of America’s most respectable and historic companies spend nearly a million dollars on a commercial depicting new wave “adventurers” in a post-apocalyptic “third millennium” wasteland as part of a last ditch campaign to save its fatally outmatched consumer electronics line. The company was General Electric, and the commercial was aimed squarely, even obnoxiously, at the nascent MTV generation.
The late charming country musician and former Hee Haw host Roy Clark performs a lightning-fingered guitar cover of Euday Bowman’s ’12th Street Rag’.