• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
These Japanese assassin’s teacups, known as “murderer’s manners”, contain hidden chambers and porous sides that allow poison to seep into the tea.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2019
Early Chinese Trick Photography Sent Chubby Babies Into Space
Inside a historian’s collection of endearing, goofy early 20th-century portraits.
The final frontier.
AT FIRST GLANCE, THE IMAGE seems set in space, or at least the set of a low-budget science fiction movie. A stubby Sputnik hovers in the background, next to a flat moon. A sleek metal rocket, labeled YI FENG 02, hangs in the foreground, but instead of an astronaut, it holds a serious-looking baby who gazes off in the distance, unperturbed by the lack of oxygen, zero air pressure, and freezing temperatures of space.
Fortunately for the baby, the image was taken in a professional photo studio. It’s a prime example of early staged and trick studio photography, which gained popularity in China in the mid-20th century. YI FENG 02’s rocket baby is one of more than 8,000 photos in the personal collection of Chris Steiner, an art historian at Connecticut College. Six years ago, Steiner started collecting examples of this kind of studio photography, on eBay and at special photo shows, to show his undergraduate students. But as his collection ballooned in size, he discovered some intriguing recurring themes. “Airplanes, balloons, people posing as fake cowboys, men posing with fake women,” he says.
Trick photography has been around almost as long as photography itself, long before Photoshop, as early as the 1840s, according to an overview from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on the practice, Faking It. Early methods of manipulation included painting photographic prints and negatives, making double-exposures, and bleaching parts of the photos. But Steiner felt drawn to a less technical kind of illusion that required no manipulation of the negative—only manipulation of the subjects and studio settings. “The photos you’re dealing with are not using double exposure, but instead props and painted backdrops, with some forced perspective and trompe l’oeil to create the ‘trick’ effect,” Christopher Rea, a cultural historian at the University of British Columbia, writes in an email.
Maybe not the most comfortable ride.
These commercial, quasi-trick photos first emerged in the United States in Europe around the 1890s, Steiner says. The most famous backdrop of these studio photographs is the paper moon (Steiner’s instagram is devoted to the subject). The earliest examples in Steiner’s collection depict people posing in fake boats. “Then in 1907, you start to see people posing in fake airplanes, fake balloons, fake trains,” he says. The theme is so prevalent that it makes up one of the largest subsections in Steiner’s collection, which he has accurately labeled: “People posing in fake modes of transport.” …
POINT OF INFORMATION:The United States of Europe is a thing, apparently.
"Squantagh", a long-forgotten dish similar to casserole, was considered an indispensable part of early Thanksgiving dinners. It is not served today for some very good reasons.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 22, 2018
Suffrage review: epic retelling of US women’s long battle for the vote
A century after the 19th amendment, Ellen Carol DuBois makes the familiar new and sheds light on a fight against injustice.
Suffragette Rosalie Jones leads a crowd of protesters up Pennsylvania Avenue after a march from New York in 1913.
It was a decidedly anticlimactic end to a life-changing campaign. The document was sent by train to Washington in the middle of the night. A government employee met the train and rushed it to the secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who signed the Proclamation of Ratification at dawn, three days after Tennessee became the 36th state to vote for women’s suffrage.
There were no photographers to record the moment, no suffragists to bear witness. It was 26 August 1920 and after a grueling 80-year battle, the 19th amendment to the US constitution, granting women the vote, was ratified.
In this centennial year, it seems a miracle the 19th amendment ever became law. The “longest revolution” began in earnest at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It survived the civil war and the first world war and dozens of failed state votes. Suffragists were jailed, their protests mobbed, their arguments mocked in the press, on the floor of the House and Senate and in every state legislature. Decade after decade, suffrage remained a hopeless cause that consumed the lives of brave, persistent and often brilliant women.
Ellen Carol DuBois has written a comprehensive history that deftly tackles intricate political complexities and conflicts and still somehow reads with nail-biting suspense.
With the current feminist movement now in its fourth wave, how many American suffragettes are household names, besides perhaps Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Thanks to DuBois, a UCLA professor and noted suffrage scholar, many more now spring to life. Her colorful cast includes the more prominent leaders – Anthony, Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Ida B Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Victoria Woodhull, Alice Paul – but DuBois gives supporting roles to many members of the “petticoat brigade” heretofore largely lost to history. …
How not to steal $1.5 million: Inside an Instagram influencer’s alleged debit card scam
STAY KAYGOLDI
Kayla Massa had more than 330,000 followers on Instagram, where she went by “Kayg0ldi.”
A brazen Instagram scam came to an end this week.
On Thursday (Feb. 13), federal authorities arrested Kayla Massa, an Instagram and YouTube “influencer,” charging her with conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. She and her accomplices allegedly recruited victims over Instagram, asking them to hand over emptied-out bank cards, with the accounts then being used to deposit large amounts of stolen money.
A complaint unsealed in New Jersey federal court contains details of an audacious scheme that prosecutors say brought in more than $1.5 million.
Social media platforms are filled with individuals hoping to find an easy mark, and the companies that run them have trouble keeping up with bad actors.
The investigation began in July 2018, when the US Postal Service learned that 53 blank money orders had been stolen from the Berlin, New Jersey post office. Thirty of them had been deposited in various bank accounts, all for either $990 or $995. Investigators saw that the money orders were missing a clerk ID, and the date, zip code, and dollar amounts were all printed in the wrong font.
Postal inspectors identified the bank accounts into which the stolen USPS money orders were deposited. One of them belonged to a Barrington, New Jersey resident identified in court filings only as “J.K.” Two of the money orders had been deposited into J.K.’s two accounts at PNC Bank, both for $995. …
Weird As Hell Realities Of Living In These Major Cities
At a certain level, major cities start to feel the same: congestion, pollution, noise, “Dear, God, what’s that smell?” and the like. We’ve all been there. But for all the similarities, some cities have bizarre problems that are uniquely their own. Look at how …
5. Dhaka Has Killer Sewers
Dhaka is the biggest city you probably don’t think or hear about much. It’s the capital of Bangladesh, and with a population of nearly 9 million packed into 118 square miles, it’s the most densely populated city in the world. This has led to some hellish problems, such as being too crowded for the dead. There’s no room for new burials, so they stack new burials on top of old ones (without telling the deceased’s family) like a morbid version of Jenga. But what really makes life rough is monsoon season.
All of South Asia gets intense monsoons, and with them comes the obvious problem of flooding, but Dhaka also has to deal with having a tiny drainage basin. That might not sound that bad until you think about what kind of water runs beneath a city: sewage.
During the monsoon season, the city basically becomes a flushing toilet bowl, as sewers turn into swirling vortexes of shit that can actually suck people in. In 2008, the city suffered a rough wet season and dispatched seven workers to fix the sewers. Normally they’d use ropes for safety, but this crew was new and inexperienced. The surging water sucked them down, killing four and seriously injuring three. A common sight is people waste-deep in shit-water scooping it out by hand to help the city drain. The situation is so frequent that the main newspaper runs sadly resigned headlines like “Dhaka Underwater Again” and “It’s The Same Old Story.” …
Searching For Mackie
Seven years ago, a young woman from Tache, British Columbia, went out for the evening and never came back. Her family won’t stop looking for her, and they deserve answers.
A portrait of Immaculate, “Mackie” Basil in Peter and Vivian Basil’s home in Tache, British Columbia.
As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.
“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie asked Peter, referring to her 5-year-old son.
“Yup,” he replied.
Mackie trailed Peter to the living room and sat next to him on the L-shaped couch, under high school graduation photos of herself and her sisters.
“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie repeated to Peter.
“Yeah, geez,” he responded. “Should I be worried? Are you coming back?”
“I’ll be back,” Mackie promised.
Although Mackie seemed troubled, Peter didn’t think much of the exchange at the time. A few days later, Mackie, Peter, and Peter’s wife, Vivian, went to a nearby community to buy a cake. THANK YOU DADS, it read, next to an image of an eagle. They picked up a few groceries and stopped to check for mail. Because she had lost her ID, Mackie asked Peter to purchase two bottles of vodka for a party later that night, then they went home.
Mackie showered and sat next to Vivian. She rolled on her gray “stretchies,” Vivian said of Mackie’s leggings, and pulled on a blue T-shirt and a black hoodie with a little maple leaf logo. In photos from the time, she has black hair that fell neatly below her shoulders, a youthful face, and a playful smile.
Mackie, who went nowhere without her music, grabbed her iPod and a bottle of vodka. She promised Vivian she would be back by the next day; she planned to take her son and nephew to the park. She left before dusk and later walked to where locals were having a party. When Mackie came home a few hours later, she took the second bottle of vodka and headed up a trail, next to the house, that led out of town. Peter cracked the front door open and looked out.
“Goodbye, bro. I love you,” Mackie called back to him.
In that moment, now frozen in his memory, Peter watched Mackie walk away. He lingered at the door as she climbed the path. He spotted a man waiting for her farther up the trail. Something was not quite right. Why, Peter asked himself, would Mackie have said goodbye in such a way if she were coming home? Then he wondered if, perhaps, this would be the last time he’d see her. …
Cod wars to food banks: how a Lancashire fishing town is hanging on
When I grew up there, Fleetwood was a tough but proud fishing port. It’s taken some knocks in the years since, but not everyone has given up on it.
Fleetwood, Lancashire.
My parents moved to Fleetwood on the coast of Lancashire in the years when the British fishing industry was beginning its dramatic decline. In 1976 the North Sea trawlers had lost the rights to fish the Icelandic waters where the majority of Fleetwood’s cod was caught. Cod fishing had been vital to the town’s economy, and remains part of its identity: a person from Fleetwood is a “cod head”– a term used as an insult by our neighbours but as an endearment by us. The supporters of Fleetwood Town FC are the Cod Army. The town’s biggest manufacturer is Lofthouse, makers of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, which were first concocted in Victorian times to relieve the colds that deckhands would catch from working days and nights in the freezing wet.
My parents, originally from Gloucestershire, had moved to Fleetwood for their first teaching jobs when I was two years old. They found it forbidding at first, living at the end of a narrow peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. “It was so empty,” my mother told me. “Walking along the prom when we arrived in November was like looking out at an old painting of a storm. It felt like we were completely cut off.” When I started school, my new friend Mike asked me: “Why do you talk like Prince Charles?” (I had rhymed grass with arse.) At which point I started to speak like a northerner.
I grew up with the sea at one end of my street, with a view across Morecambe Bay towards the mountains of the Lake District. When the tide was in, the sun on the water under a clear horizon, I would feel energised and free – although on an overcast day in winter, with the tide so far out you can’t see it, the landscape can look empty, bleached, abandoned.
There is almost nothing left of Fleetwood’s fishing industry now, and the area, like many northern towns, has high unemployment and voted to leave the EU, driven in part by the promise to “take back control of our waters”. Last year, two wards of Fleetwood featured separately in a list of the 10 most depressing places to live in England, based on GP figures for people being treated for depression. I had left the town a month after I turned 18 to go to university in Birmingham, and stayed away. Even so, I bristled with defensiveness at the idea of my hometown being some kind of hell. I’ve always hated lists of crap towns compiled by people who live in cities, and while this list, published by the House of Commons library as an index of mental health problems, had nobler aims, I wanted to remind myself what living in Fleetwood feels like to the people there, and what life might be like if I had stayed. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
“#Crushing: A Success Podcast for Winners,” hosted by Ronny Chieng and featuring Roy Wood, Jr., will supply you with the knowledge, motivation, and vitamin supplements you need to become an epic one-man success machine.
Introducing The Daily Show Podcast Universe, a five-episode miniseries, each episode a parody of a popular podcast or podcast genre. Subscribe here or search for “The Daily Show Podcast Universe” to hear them all: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
A self-taught artist with a background in physics, David C. Roy has been creating mesmerizing wooden kinetic sculptures for nearly 40 years. Powered solely through mechanical wind-up mechanisms, pieces can run up to 48 hours on a single wind.
To learn more about Roy’s work, visit his website at http://www.woodthatworks.com/
Obama will abandon complex policies on emissions, clean coal and refocus on achievable goals like applying deodorant daily, learning what to say when you burp.
Ed. “But we hope to inspire all of America to band together and make our nation a little bit less of an embarassing disgusting shit hole.” And then we somehow got Trumped.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
I continue taking a fascinating look at the lives of various animals in this special wildlife series.
最新型まるホイホイのご紹介です。The latest Maru Trap.
Newfound evidence suggests that the first Pilgrims were aided not by a tribe but by a transportation cooperative, a commercial entity whose role in Native American society was similar to that of Lyft or Uber today.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 22, 2018
FINALLY . . .
The History of Race, Performance, and Drag Intersect in a Rare Photo of Thomas Dilward
Dilward performed with all-white minstrel troupes that otherwise excluded black people.
A portrait of Thomas Dilward in the Brady-Handy Collection of the Library of Congress, originally taken in the 1850s or 1860s.
TODAY IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, the southwest corner of Court Street and Remsen Street is home to a vitamin store, a law office, and a pizzeria. But in September 1862, during the second year of the Civil War, the corner was home to Christy’s Opera House, a theater that put on minstrel shows in which white men blackened their faces with burnt cork in a racist caricature of African Americans. Christy’s troupe of 16 had one notable exception: a black performer named Thomas Dilward, who used the stage name “Japanese Tommy.”
Dilward was one of the first African-American performers to tour with white minstrels, who typically excluded African-American performers from their shows, John G. Russell, a cultural anthropologist at Gifu University in Japan, writes in an email. Dilward often performed in drag, according to Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre. He made history as a member of these all-white troupes, even as he inherited the troubling history of a genre built on racist caricatures and exclusion. A rare carte de visite of Dilward wearing a ruffled dress, white gloves, and a bonnet was sold to a private collector by Cowan’s Auctions on February 20. “I have seen this carte de visite a long time ago at the Harvard Theatre Collection,” Krystyn Moon, a historian at the University of Mary Washington, writes in an email.
Dilward (who sometimes appears as Dilverd or Dilworth, among other permutations) was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1830s. He was a little person, standing approximately three feet six inches tall, and first began performing with Christy’s Minstrels in 1853, according to Moon’s book Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. The all-white troupe was formed in Buffalo but performed throughout New York City, once running for a seven-year engagement at Mechanics’ Hall on 472 Broadway in Manhattan, which is now a six-story condo.
This rare photo of Thomas Dilward in drag, which recently sold to a private collector, was taken in 1866.
“How and when Dilward got the name ‘Japanese Tommy’ is unclear,” Russell says. “Some suggest he adopted [it] when delegates of the first Japanese Embassy visited the U.S. in 1860, but it appears he was already performing under that name with Christy’s Minstrels as early as 1853.” Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan to American trade in 1853, leading some scholars to suggest that occasion might be the origin of Dilward’s stage name, Moon says. …
Towards the end of the war, Hitler had become so paranoid that he forced his advisors to stage puppet shows depicting an Axis victory
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 22, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Perhaps, perhaps.
Be careful what you wish for. I'll make sure you don't get it.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 21, 2020