One implication of a larger eruption with a greater ash ejection might be an alteration in the earth's albedo or at least a partial shading of the surface, reversing global warming. If we start heading toward a nuclear winter, it might become incumbent on everyone to start creating more greenhouse gases. What happens to the value of your carbon credits then??
While we are on this subject, the photo above comes from a gallery of volcanic ash sunsets at The Guardian, showing a colorful sunset at Edinburgh. It reminds me of the theory that Edvard Munch may have painted the sky red in his iconic painting, The Scream, because he remembered the sunsets after the explosion of Krakatoa ten years previously.
New York City circa 1905. "Bridge of Sighs." Named after a similar span in Venice, this covered passage connected the Tombs prison and Manhattan Criminal Courts building. 8x10 dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
I just love looking at photographs of cities in the pre-automobile era and imagining what it must have been like to walk down the middle of broad avenues and smell manure rather than exhaust.
Found at Shorpy, where you can search a jumbo-sized version of the photo in vain looking for a morbidly obese person...
Perhaps this is why the Oklahoma bomb is not as centre stage in America's collective memory as it should be. When Al Gore was interviewed about the extreme right by Larry King recently, there was no mention of Oklahoma. Coverage of last month's arrests of militants belonging to an offshoot of the same Michigan militia that McVeigh belonged to omitted to mention the bomb, days away from its 15th anniversary. There is extreme awkwardness around this enemy within, but also current concern about reverberations of McVeigh's cause: war against the American government...
When I started TYWKIWDBI, I wrote 14 posts in a "name that animal" series. This critter would have fit well into that category, because I have never seen one - even in a zoo. Pictured above is a curly-coated Mangalitza [Serbian "hog with a lot of lard"], commonly referred to (for obvious reasons) as a "sheep-pig."
‘The woolly coat makes them very hardy and helps them to survive in the harsh winters in their native Austria and Hungary. In the summer it helps protect them from sunburn.’
This is an no-holds-barred presentation by Matt Taibbi, journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. I have previously cited his views on health care reform and on Goldman Sachs' questionable practices in world financial markets. In this interview he offers a scathing indictment of the financial team put together by the Obama administration.
I know (or believe) that most readers of this blog are Obama supporters and will not like what Taibbi has to say, but I blog from the center, and I believe Taibbi's comments here are worth hearing.
Today is an unbirthday of James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States, the only sitting member of the House of Representatives to be elected President.
Garfield was assassinated about six months after taking office. "Alexander Graham Bell devised a metal detector specifically to find the bullet, but the metal bed frame Garfield was lying on made the instrument malfunction. Because metal bed frames were relatively rare, the cause of the instrument's deviation was unknown at the time.... Most historians and medical experts now believe that Garfield probably would have survived his wound had the doctors attending him been more capable. Several inserted their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, and one doctor punctured Garfield's liver in doing so."
Chris Van Allsburg is a Caldecott-Medal-winning illustrator and author of children's books. This past week I read his 1984 book, "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick," which consists of about a dozen images such as the one above ("Under The Rug"), and only the title and one sentence to go along with each picture (in this case "Two weeks passed and it happened again.")
You could read this book in five minutes, but that would defeat the purpose. The idea is to ponder the illustration and the minimal text and then dream up a story of your own. This would best be done by reading out loud in the company of a small child, so if you're going to read the book and don't have a child - borrow one.
TYWKIWDBI has had about a million visits during the past year, which is about a 300% increase from the previous year. I would guesstimate that over half of those are one-time visitors reading a specific post, which influences the <2 minute average time on site. The visitation pattern has always been cyclical (with nadirs on weekends), but in the last several weeks I can see that it is becoming even more so...
...as the regular visitors adapt to the new once-a-week posting pattern.
This illustration shows an Ezo Wolf (a.k.a. Hokkaido Wolf), which is believed to have gone extinct in the late 19th century (after this illustration was made). The animal is seen here with its paw on a human skull.
Long ago, a man with massive testicles reportedly made a living as a sideshow attraction at Mt. Satta, on the old Tokaido Road near the city of Shizuoka. His scrotum is said to have measured about a meter across.
The illustration shows a middle-aged traveling monk from Nagano prefecture who would bathe in hot springs without removing his leggings. If anyone asked him why he did not fully undress before entering the water, he would show them the holes in his shins, which contained snakes. The man was born with snakes in his legs as punishment for misdeeds in a previous life.
The Kaikidan Ekotoba is a mid-nineteenth century hand-painted scroll depicting 33 Japanese legends, several dozen of which have been assembled at Pink Tentacle.
Gilbert: "There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."
Göring: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
1880, an electric “chain” in a belt connected to a “suspensory” for a man’s vitals.
This electrical stimulus was supposed to cure all manner of unspeakably lingering medical tragedies, including spermatorrhea, exhausted vital energy, female complaint, inflammation of the prostate gland, seminal weakness, kidney disease, cramp, lost manhood, paralysis, indigestion, dyspepsia, spinal complaints, nervous debility, and of course the “debilities of sexual self-pollution” (“the sexual sin (which) is the most destructive of all human vices…the greatest outrage against Nature’s sexual ordinances that man can possibly perpetrate”.
Isaac Pulvermacher’s (which is German for “gunpowder maker”) electrical medico-contraption was popular for several decades in the mid/late 19th century.
