The Boxcar Library: A Bookmobile for a Logging Camp.
It was 1917. Miss Ruth Worden, a librarian at the Missoula Public Library in Missoula, Montana, wanted to bring a world of knowledge and literature to lumberjacks at logging camps in her area. So she carted a few books into a camp operated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company…
What a beautiful idea – read a full description over at Neatorama.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
On my Facebook wall appeared a question thrown out serendipitously:
“What movie could you watch over and over again?”
Had this been reddit, the post probably would have hit the front page. People chimed in from everywhere, and I decided to compile a list. What I discovered was that many of the ones mentioned were also on my best-beloved list (marked with a star) and that now I have an entire raft of ones I need to see, so I can judge for myself.
(You and I, we know the secret to life. It’s butter.) (One does not tamper with perfection.) (both versions) (Yes, I even like the prequels. Sosumi.) (That’s alright, Cap’n, we always knew you was a whoopsie.)And a collection of others from my own favorites (certainly not complete, but for no good reason):
The beautiful, 160-year-old Lebeau plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.
The same plantation after a group of brain-dead “ghost hunters” invaded the place to investigate reports of the place’s being haunted. Finding no ghosts, they decided to get wasted on cheap weed and cheaper beer, and ended up setting the place on fire.
No punishment meted out to these ragskulls will bring back the historic building which pre-dated the Civil War, but felony charges may deter the next group of morons. You can get a few more details at Fox8.
The Old Wolf is sad.
Growing up – or even being grown up – and dealing with body image issues is difficult enough in the absence of an impossible standard. Unfortunately for everyone, the advertising industry is responsible for holding up a zenith of beauty which is impossible for anyone to attain – even the beautiful models themselves.
The two shots below were captured from a video that shows model Sally Gifford Piper being photographed and then photoshopped.
This is the photo of Sally before the photoshop work was done. Yes, she’s had hair work and makeup and lighting for this shot, but she’s a beautiful woman just the same.
This is the “after” version – she’s been given body work and cosmetic surgery to give her Barbie proportions, something no human could ever hope to approximate.
Watch the process in the video below:
And as a followup, an interview with Piper herself, courtesy of CNN.
This reminds me of the Dove makeover video, that is worth watching at any time.
The advertisers should be ashamed of themselves for promoting such unattainable standards, but of course they won’t be, because the result is far too lucrative, at the expense of the self esteem of people everywhere – largely women and girls. The more exposure this kind of douchebaggery can get, the better off humanity will be.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
From Napoli: La cittá parla. Circa 1969.
This popular image was predated almost by 100 years by the 1922 edition below, found at Shorpy:
Washington, D.C., circa 1922. “Boy and dog.” Feel free to construct your own narrative. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.
Dogs are like that.
Here’s one of the best ones I’ve ever known.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Grammar is like the pirate’s code. As Captain Barbossa said, “The Code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”
Living grammarians and prescriptivists and editors just had an apoplectic fit; the dead ones are now spinning in their graves with such vigor that if you could hook up an armature to each one, you could power New York City for free.
As a career linguist, I have the right to say that, but note that saying so doesn’t make me right. It’s just my opinion. Spend enough time studying various models of language and you come away with the feeling that some things *”just not allowed are” unless *”Yoda you happen to be.” No, there’s a place for everything and everything must be in its place. On the other hand, spend enough time studying historical linguistics and the mechanism of language change, or watch the transformation of Vulgar Latin into the family of Romance Languages, and you learn something else: usage trumps Strunk and White every time.
Now, having had a traditional preparatory education, I struggled through multiple years of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, learned to execrate Reed-Kellogg diagrams, and spent most of my time drawing things like this in my notebook:
And, I learned how to use English properly. A couple of language and linguistics degrees later, I still support the need for correct grammar as a means of facilitating communication and avoiding chaos, and while I cringe just as forcefully as the next person when seeing a grocer’s apostrophe or a confusing of “lose” and “loose,” I am much less committed to the concept that everything has to be just so, best beloved.
Linguistic patterns are pretty well established by the time we become adults, and it takes a powerful force to make us change our way of speaking or writing, or at the very least, a conscious effort – but the former is difficult to come by, and the latter implies awareness of that which is correct and that which is incorrect, and the prices and benefits of making certain linguistic choices.
I don’t, like, you know, change how I talk or write with, you know, like, every new fad. *gag* That said, there’s one little bit of popular speech that I have latched on to as a very useful and concise way of expressing a much more complicated concept, and that’s the use of a noun as the object of the subordinating conjunction because, where typically one expects an entire clause.
Because Japan.
The picture and sentence (it is a sentence, despite the lack of anything remotely resembling a subject, verb, or predicate) suffice to convey a significant amount of information in a very compact manner. To translate this into traditional grammar, one would have to say something like:
“This picture of people bathing in a giant pool of wine is very unusual, but since the picture is taken in Japan, where many things are so different that foreigners have no hope of understanding the rhyme or reason behind certain cultural phenomena, everything is just as it should be, and you should not expect anything else.”
In a previous post about escalators, you will find this picture:
I could have just as easily captioned it “Because America,” the meaning being “You will only find escalators being used to reach a fitness center in America because people are so fat and lazy that they miss the entire concept and holy hqiz isn’t that ironic.”
Just how long this particular linguistic quirk will last remains to be seen. I have no illusions that it will be mainstreamed (that verb didn’t exist 20 years ago, by the way), but the whole point is that you never know what’s going to become popular or accepted down the road. In the meantime it’s swell, and I’ll probably use it until people start looking at me as though I had grown a third eye.
Because usage.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
PS: Atlantic has a similar article which is worth reading as well. Because corroboration.
When I was little, my mother used to sing bits and snatches of songs to me that she remembered from her own childhood. One that always stuck in my mind was “The Czar of the Tenderloin,” which she told me she often heard sung by her uncle, Leo Marshall.
Leo Marshall, center in rear, with his wife Lucile Rogers Marshall (right front) and her siblings Frances, William, and Victor, December 1970
Years later, at the 80th birthday party of my grandmother Frances, (Leo’s sister-in-law), he sang it for the assembled family one last time. It was two years before his death, and the rendition was hesitant and shaky, but all the more lovely for his still being able to remember as much as he did.
As I grew older, I often wondered about the origins of the song, and if there were any more of it than the little bits Mother sang.
And then came the Internet, the modern-day Areopagus (Acts 17:21). As the body of the world’s knowledge is slowly but surely gathered and preserved online, not everything happens at once. For years I searched and scraped the web, but always came up poor… until today.
Notice the nightstick on the cover.
The Lyrics
America has a President and England has a Queen,
While Germany’s great Emperor sits ruling all serene,
The Indians have their medicine man, Bavaria a king,
But none of these high diplomats are quite the proper thing.
For in gay New York where the gay Bohemians dwell,
There’s a Colony called the Tenderloin, though why I cannot tell,
A certain man controls the place with no regard for coin,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus:
The Czar of the Tenderloin,
With great propriety, seeks notoriety,
But the girls all shun the society
Of the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Each evening through the Tenderloin the Czar will gayly prance,
With whiskers well divided just to give the wind a chance,
His bodyguard behind him scouting for a finish fight,
Arresting everything that’s left because it isn’t right.
Piano legs must now be clothed with care,
And he’s ordered all the trees cut down because their limbs were bare,
He’s going to build a little church which everyone must join,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus
His hobby is arresting shoes whenever they are tight,
He also nabs electric lights when when they go out at night,
The sun came out one morning and he ordered its arrest,
The moon was full, he pulled it in and claimed it was a pest.
One day on the Tenderloin, a maiden changed her mind,
Now the Czar thought that was naughty so the girl was quickly “fined.”
He arrested a cook for beating an egg, now don’t that take the coin,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus
This 1897 song by Bob Cole and Billy Johnson is based on the life and times of Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams, a notoriously corrupt but effective police inspector who ruled over New York’s Tenderloin district with an iron fist and a wooden club. At the end of his career he was reputed to have said that he never clubbed anyone who didn’t deserve it. The name of that part of town, the northwest corner of which is now Times Square, came from William’s statement that “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force, and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin,” said because of the lucrative business of protection payments from legitimate and illegitimate businesses alike. Prior to Williams’ reign, the district was known as “Satan’s Circus.” San Francisco also has a Tenderloin district, and the term has come to be synonymous with a seedy, ill-reputed or red-light district of town.
Manhattan’s historical districts, the Tenderloin indicated by a star.
Emile Berliner’s Gramophone 78 rpm record. “The Czar of the Tenderloin,” sung by Will F. Denny. Recorded July 14, 1897
With thanks to Tim Gracyk, you can hear Will F. Denny singing an abridged version of the song at YouTube, but I can still hear Uncle Leo singing it as clearly as though it were yesterday.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
This is not radical feminism, it is the cold, hard, harsh truth – and as long as nothing changes, rape culture, image problems and relationship dysfunction will continue to have a fertile breeding ground. Sexualization and objectification in advertising affects us all, regardless of our gender, age, or body type. Spend 22 minutes listening to this powerful lady speak truth to the advertising world.
Thanks to Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square for pointing this out.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
And anyone else who does this as well, may Karma reward you according to your deeds.
Yarg.
Playing in the World Game 