For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry. His father Jorge Rodolfo Genaro Hopley Woolrich Sandoval was half-Mexican and half-Canadian; his mother Claire Attalie Tarler was, on her father's side, half-Judeo-Russian. (Her mother Sarah "Sadie" Viola Cornell's supposed old New York Dutch Cornell…
This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social…
A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours Jack Hanlon gives a rare insight into the fascinating lost world of the Smithfield Meat Trades Institute… The correct way to sharpen a knife From the twenties until the eighties, Britain’s foremost technical college for butchers operated in an unassuming building on the corner of Saffron Hill just round the corner from Smithfield Market. Opening in 1924 and becoming part of the London County Council’s broader technical education project, the…
Babrius 120 (tr. Ben Edwin Perry): That denizen of the swamps who likes the shade, the frog, who lives beside the ditches, once came forth on dry land and bragged to all the creatures: "I'm a physician, skilled in the use of drugs such as no one, doubtless, knows, not even Paean who lives on Olympus, physician to the gods." "And how," said a fox, " can you cure someone else, when you can't save yourself from being so deathly pale?" Ὁ τελμάτων ἔνοικος ὁ σκιῇ χαίρων, ὁ ζῶν ὀρυκτοῖς βάτραχος παρ'…
Today is a very special day because we officially adopted Quillomina from the Scottish SPCA! She is an African Pygmy Hedgehog who was relinquished by her previous owner. I’ve always been a bit hedgehog mad but I think you’ll agree she’s the cutest thing. African Pygmy Hedgehogs are smaller than their European counterparts and they also require warmer temperatures so cannot live outdoors. Indeed they require a heated vivarium as even indoors, especially in Scotland, would be too cold.…
Burda is a famous name in the sewing world. For over seventy-five years, the company has published a monthly fashion magazine with sewing patterns included. It was begun by Aenna Burda, wife of a German publishing magnate, in 1950. By the mid sixties it had a subscription base of over a million. During the Gorbachev reforms, it was translated in Russian and published in the Soviet Union, the first Western fashion magazine to achieve such a status. In 1995, the first Chinese edition was…
Beneath the elegant halls of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris is the fossil skeleton of one of the Pleistocene’s most formidable predators: Smilodon, the celebrated—and slightly misleadingly named—sabre-toothed cat.With its enormous blade-like upper canines, immensely powerful shoulders and muscular forelimbs, Smilodon looks like evolution became temporarily carried away while
Some 105 years ago, 18 July 1921, off the Virginia Capes Successive leisurely flights of land-based Army and Navy bombers dropped an assortment of bombs over the moored and abandoned 6,600-ton German Wiesbaden-class scout cruiser SMS Frankfurt, formerly of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, and (eventually) sank same. To help with aimpoints, she even conveniently had two round targets painted on her deck, fore and aft. From the Alfred A. Cunningham Collection (COLL/3034) at the Archives Branch,…
Adam Smith concludes Part #12 of his 1784 pamphlet (paragraphs 49 to 54 on pp. 45-47) with a series of timeless observations that are worth quoting in full. First and foremost (para. 49), Smith puts his cards on the table: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” (Smith 1784, p. 45, my emphasis) In other words, the economy should serve the people…
I knew Richard Viberg from volunteering at the Salem & Hillsborough Railroad in New Brunswick.
When the Lincoln Highway Association rerouted the Lincoln Highway between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso in Indiana in 1928, they simply moved it to US 30. This isn’t the US 30 that exists today. That US 30 is a four-lane expressway across the entire state, built in sections from about 1939 to about 1990. In most places, the original US 30 remains as a series of county roads. That’s a good thing for Lincoln Highway fans, as modern US 30 is heavily used across the state. Old US 30 is often a quiet,…
The just-set sun illuminates the clouds above King Harbor. キング・ハーバー 沈んだばかりの太陽が、キング・ハーバー上空の雲を照らしている。
Demolishing a historic building with a wrecking ball is sure to attract the attention of historic preservationists. Those loud, sign-waving villains are […]
From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 152-154: Putin’s address was aired on Russian television in the early hours of February 24, on the eighth anniversary of Putin’s decision to start the Crimean annexation in 2014. He expected the results to be as quick, decisive, and positive as they had been then. Putin concluded the speech with an appeal to Russian citizens: “I believe in your support and the invincible force rooted in love for…
Bild: Radwegende Hattinger Straße (2010). Von hier an gibt es weder Geh- noch Radweg. Bis heute nicht verbessert. Fachwerkhäuser prägten die Bochumer Altstadt bis zum Bombenangriff am 4. November 1944. Das Brauhaus Rietkötter hat als einziges Fachwerkhaus die Zerstörungen überstanden. Direkt nach der 90-prozentigen Zerstörung der Innenstadt hatte Stadtbaurat Clemens Massenberg1 (†1954) ein sehr fortschrittliches Verkehrskonzept entwickelt. Es orientierte sich an Fußgängern, ÖPNV und Fahrrädern.…
Part of the reason this blog exists is so I can infect the minds of my readers with knowledge of all the obscure video games I happened to play as a child, and today I want to tell you about a handsome yellow egg-shaped fellow named Blupi (pronounced Blue-Pea). To me and my siblings, Blupi was just as important and ubiquitous as Sonic the Hedgehog — after all, we had multiple games featuring him, most notably Speedy Blupi and Speedy Blupi II. (What a delightful egg. Image credit The Cutting…
Evolutie van twee bakken deze lente/zomer. Die kunnen goed tegen de hitte!
What is Football Matchday Blogs? Football Matchday Blogs is a series charting my matchday experiences watching Blackpool home and away. There’s also non league content, largely following Chasetown, where I was Match Secretary. How did Football Matchday Blogs come about? Football has been my muse since I first fell in love with the game during Italia 90. I still have the piece I wrote in my English class about the heartbreak of losing to West Germany on penalties. I began writing regularly about…
As I mentioned in a previous post (see here), Adam Smith surveys a wide variety of British mercantilist laws in Part #12 of his 1784 pamphlet, but he devotes most of his time and energy here to wool (see paragraphs 17 to 32 on pp. 29-38) and to artisans (see paragraphs 44 to 48 on pp. 43-45). We saw Smith’s critique of Britain’s ban on wool exports in yesterday’s post. Today, we will not only examine his substantive critique of the restrictions on artisans. We will also see another side of the…
One of the most famous cases of anti-semitism took place in Lincoln in 1255.On 31 July 1255, a nine-year-old named Hugh disappeared in Lincoln. A month later, on 29 August, his body was discovered in a well. The search for the murderer was on, and attention turned to the segment of society that was often blamed for criminal acts: Jews.John of Lexington, brother to the Bishop of Lincoln, imprisoned a local Jew named Copin, accusing him of the murder and offering him amnesty from execution in…
Some photos from a recent trip to Rome.
This week's Commando set includes a brand-new Harrier Squadron story and a wartime mystery in the Black Forest. Issues 5975-5978 are on sale today. Thursday 16th July.5975: Harrier Squadron: Ghost FlightIt is the mid-1990s and across a battle-scarred Europe, the forces of WESFED (Western Federation) and the Eastern armies of the ASBLOC (Asian Bloc) are in a delicate state of truce. But the
