“The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus Discovered by Alexander the Great”, Folio from a Falnama (Book of Omens)

Posted: July 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: painting, pictures | Leave a comment

from the Met.  If you don’t know about the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus then fool there’s no helping you.

The Met claims it came from Qazvin, Iran.  What does Qazvin look like, I wonder?  In 1921 it looked like this:

 

 

from the Life Magazine set of photos entitled “A Squirrel’s Guide To Fashion”

Posted: July 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: photography, pictures | Leave a comment

Life’s website explains:

In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a woman named Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’ back yard.

“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.”

They do? At any rate, LIFE went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”

“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”

And so it begins … a series of at-once touching and creepy photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the quiet adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker the squirrel.

Pick your motto!

Posted: July 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Clubs, London | Leave a comment

Wikipedia helpfully provides a list of London’s livery companies and their mottos:

The Livery Companies are listed in alphabetical order, rather than by precedence. Note that most are double entendres or puns about their Company’s purpose.

h/t our Chestnut Hill office, which got us started with an article about Doggett’s Badge & Coat.   Good detail:

While anything remotely related to sports is being smothered with news coverage these days in Olympics-saturated London, there were very few here in the way of news media and spectators. This was just as well, as the young victor of the six-man rowing race, a 23-year-old named Merlin Dwan, was a bit far along in his celebration.

“You’re way too late,” a friend warned a reporter, as the sole camera crew on site attempted fruitlessly to conduct an interview.

Picture above is of Fishmongers’ Hall.

Finis Mitchell

Posted: July 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: adventures, heroes, mountains, writing | Leave a comment

One thing led to another and I got to reading about Finis Mitchell:

In 1906, as a young boy, Finis came to the Wind River Range [in Wyoming] with his father in a boxcar along with the rest of his family… Not bowing down to the fierce obstacles wielded by a stark and barren land with winters lasting 9 months a year, Finis spent the next 7 years carefully carrying five-gallon cans of water and wild trout on horseback over steep rugged trails to more than 300 remote Wyoming lakes. Due to the glacial topography of the upper mountains, these lakes had no native populations of fish. These isolated lakes, which had never seen a trout before, began to team with these newcomers. Miraculously, as though knowing the way, these fish migrated to over 700 more lakes in the upper mountains. With his life-long friend and wife Emma, he carved a life in this unknown wilderness.

Here’s a photo, from this Forest Service website, of Finis and Emma:

During the Depression, he and his wife stocked lakes in the Wind River Range with over 2.5 million trout. He served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1955 to 1958. At the age of 67 he retired from his job as a railroad foreman and dedicated himself full-time to exploring and writing about the Wind River Range of mountains…

…At the age of 73, while on a glacier, he twisted his knee in a snow-covered crevasse. He hacked crude crutches out of pine wood and hobbled 18 miles to find a doctor, and was able to resume climbing until the age of 84, when further injury to the knee from a fall put an end to his solo climbing career.

Here’s a quote from Finis:

A mountain is the best medicine for a troubled mind. Seldom does man ponder his own insignificance. He thinks he is master of all things. He thinks the world is his without bonds. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Only when he tramps the mountains alone, communing with nature, observing other insignificant creatures about him, to come and go as he will, does he awaken to his own short-lived presence on earth.

The Wind River Range:

Finis Mitchell is of course not to be confused with Finesse Mitchell:

David Milch quote of the day

Posted: July 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: writing | Leave a comment

“Recur, now, to Kierkegaard’s formulation and think of the Super Bowl as an expression of the self resting transparently in the spirit which gave it rise.  Not impossible, right?”

Request

Posted: July 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: adventures, Ireland, mysteries, photography | Leave a comment

Now that my readership has doubled 10,000, I would like to ask for everyone’s help.  Summer before last, in the legendary harsh Twelve Bens wilderness of western Ireland I met these people, and took this lovely picture.  I would like the Internet’s help in sending the picture to the photographed heroes.  Their names are Rob and Lou, and they live in Belfast.  Lou at one time worked in the schools of Kankakee, Illinois.  Those are all the clues I can provide.

Early Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders

Posted: July 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: painting | Leave a comment

“Early color illustration of psychiatric treatment disorders,” says wikipedia, re:

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