Wedding party, 1920

The unusual tailoring of the pageboy's blouse generates a bit of visual ambiguity...

Via Vintage Photography.

Smog in a thermal inversion

Photo of Almaty, Kazakhstan (credit).  A reminder of why clean air standards are important.

What vehicle does the Grim Reaper drive?

Photo credit (and location of sign) at Hairpin.

Target targeted for "open carry" demonstration

Photo from Mother Jones.

Evolving popularity of chess openings

Based on the study of "a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century," this graphic depicts the first three moves of the games.

Found at Randal S. Olson, where there are separate graphic depictions of the evolution over time of White's first move alone, and White's first + Black's first.  Via Kottke.

How to remove siding from a house

Place the house under a hailstorm, like the one that hit Nebraska yesterday (photo credit).  The advantages of this method is that it also removes windows, downspouts, and nearby vegetation.  Salon has a slideshow of some representative hailstones and the damage inflicted on automobiles.

A late spring arrival (Papilio polyxenes)

Our first Black Swallowtail eclosed this week; it had spent the winter in a chrysalis in our screen porch.  On the day it emerged, a Giant Swallowtail cruised through the garden and we saw an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail up in the trees, giving us the uncommon Swallowtail Trifecta.

Obama requests $1,000,000,000 to boost U.S. military in Euroope

Standing with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Obama said the U.S. plans to send more military equipment and rotate additional American troops into the region. He called on lawmakers back in Washington to provide the funding to sustain the effort.

"Today, I'm announcing a new initiative to bolster the support of our NATO allies here in Europe," Obama said at Warsaw's Belweder Palace. "Under this effort, and with the support of Congress, the United States will preposition more equipment in Europe."

After arriving Tuesday morning in Warsaw, Obama and Komorowski mounted a display of military solidarity as they greeted each other in front of F-16 fighter jets in an airplane hangar.

Right.  Because the 28 member countries of NATO can't be expected to expend their own resources to counter the perceived threat of a bellicose Russia.  Fortunately we don't have any other practical use for a billion U. S. taypayer dollars.

It never ends.  Every presidential administration pulls this kind of stunt.  I'm tired of it.

Meet Slenderman (or don't...)

The news was all over the 'net this morning:

Two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls charged as adults in connection with stabbing of girl, 12

The headline is striking in its own right, but the storyline was even more curious:

According to a criminal complaint, the girls had been planning to kill their friend for months and finally made the attempt in a park on Saturday morning, after a slumber party...

One of the girls told a detective they were trying to become "proxies" of Slender Man, a mythological demon-like character they learned about on creepypasta.wikia.com, a website about horror stories and legends. They planned to run away to the demon's forest mansion after the slaying, the complaint said...

The other girl said she sees Slender Man in her dreams. She said he watches her and can read her mind and teleport.

I found basic information about Slenderman at Wikipedia, and also at What Culture:

Of course when Victor Surge first created him, he was just a creepy picture with minimal back story. Now he is a cultural phenomenon and terrorises the dreams and thoughts of many...  Now he has become a part of internet pop-culture. A tall man that lurks in the shadows with a blank face and dressed in a suit...

Myths are important to us and fundamental to our society. We always have to feel like there is something bigger than us, something unexplained. This is called “The Big Other’. It can manifest into religion, aliens, conspiracy theories, unexplained phenomenon and creatures... 

Being the complex creatures we are, we have started creating our own myths. We know Slenderman is fake. We know he isn’t standing behind us now right now. But I bet after an episode of Marble Hornets or playing a game of Slender, you still double check. As scary as you might or might not find him, you want  him to exist. We want our world to be a mystery and bigger than us. We need it to be. We need Slenderman.

More at the link.

Benghazi fatigue

From The New Yorker.

A superb online map resource

The topographic maps of the U. S. Geologic Service are available online, and as far as I can see, all of them are now free to download.  This includes historic maps, going back at least to the 1950s - a great resource for those interested in the history of their community (the embed above is a screencap from a map of Madison, Wisconsin in 1959).

Just go to this link - USGS Store - navigate to your desired location, switch to "mark points" to add a marker, then click on the marker to bring up a pull-down list of available maps.

Is Target using a "shrink ray" ?

"Some settling may occur."

That excuse may be valid for cereals and other bulk-packaged groceries, but not for individually wrapped portions like these granola bars.

There's no deception in the labeling of the package, which did, as advertised, contain six pouches of two 1.5 oz bars each, but the package is inappropriately large.  The most common explanation would be that Target subjected their product to a "grocery shrink ray."  Alternatively it may be that the product used to be sold in boxes of eight, or that a surplus of unlabled boxes of that size were available and were used rather than discarded.  We'll see if the package shrinks with time.

Addendum:  Reader mehughes124 provides the explanation in his comment.

Can you spot the problem?

Nearly all of the measles cases this year have been associated with international travel by unvaccinated people. “The current increase in measles cases is being driven by unvaccinated people, primarily U.S. residents, who got measles in other countries, brought the virus back to the United States and spread to others in communities where many people are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, assistant surgeon general and director of CDC’s National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases...

Measles is still common in many parts of the world, including countries in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Worldwide, an estimated 20 million people get measles and 122,000 die from the disease each year.  Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, meaning that there was no longer continuous measles transmission for more than 12 months.

Via The Dish.

What did these famous men have in common?

Other than the fact that they are famous authors -

J. M. Barrie
Arthur Conan Doyle
P. G. Wodehouse
H. G. Wells
G. K. Chesterton
Rudyard Kipling
A. A. Milne

Answer: They were all members of the Allahakberries* - apparently one of the worst cricket teams in history.

I learned this while listening to a podcast of No Such Thing as a Fish.

* named in the mistaken belief that Allah akbar meant Heaven help us in Arabic (rather than God is great).

Richard III was not a hunchback

YouTube link.

The last Plantagenet king did have significant mid-thoracic adolescent-onset idiopathic scoliosis, but not enough to generate a "hump," as the video explains.

The attribution of a hunchback deformity is of course a legacy of pro-Tudor biases incorporated in Edward deVere's famous eponymous 16th-century play, in which Richard is described as a hunchback who is "rudely stamp'd," "deformed, unfinish'd."

Further information at Medievalists, where you can view a 3-D reconstruction of the spine.