Swat Squad Saturday
I stand in the cold rain
Medicate the pain
And try to remember
To shout out timber
What the rebellion was all about
Liberty cabbage or sauerkraut
As I think about the loss
Of the loudmouth on the cross
And who did what first
And when and where and worst
I wonder if it really matters anymore
When it all seems like a chore
An abyss
Hit or miss
Thank you Lumdog
Pictures are from The Library of Congress
BVD
Spencer Tracy’s rule for acting, number two, is don’t trip over the props. This might be a problem for Jon Hamm. In a bit of slow news day genius, his show leaked the information that the actor has been requested to wear underwear on the set. A rep for Mr. Hamm said: “It is ridiculous and not really funny at all. I’d appreciate you taking the high road and not resorting to something childish like this that’s been blogged about 1,000 times.”
This was an issue when Tallulah Bankhead was making “Lifeboat”. Other performers complained about the thespian not wearing panties. Director Alfred Hitchcock wondered if this was a matter for wardrobe, or a matter for hairdressing.
This concern about foundation garments, conveniently arising during the pre-easter shopping season, made PG wonder when men started to wear drawers. Could this be the result of manufacturers inventing demand for a product? Wikipedia says the loincloth is thousands of years old. A footnote, about the invention of the jockstrap, led to an English article, A brief history of pants: Why men’s smalls have always been a subject of concern.
“In 1935, the first Jockey briefs went on sale in Chicago. Designed by an “apparel engineer” called Arthur Kneibler (working at the time for Coopers Inc), the arrival of the first underpants denuded of any legs and featuring a Y-shaped opening has been compared with the 1913 invention of the bra, or the 1959 debut of tights. In three months, 30,000 were sold. Coopers, now known as Jockey International, sent its “Mascul-line” plane to make special deliveries of “masculine support” briefs to retailers across the United States. When the Jockeys arrived in Britain in 1938, they sold at the rate of 3,000 per week.”
One popular brand of underwear is the BVD. This was originally made by Bradley, Voorhees & Day, hence the name. They are not named for Bovine Viral Diarrhea. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Don’t Have To Call Me Darlin’
Ten Questions For Phoblography
The Daily Post is a WordPress facility, dedicated to “The Art and Craft of Blogging.” Recently they had a feature, Ten Questions (plus one!) for Phoblography. I decided to copy the feature, delete the published answers, and supply my own. Someone might be interested in reading this. If nothing else, this is a good excuse write some text to go between a collection of pictures. That is what text does at Chamblee54.
The extra question is about telephones with built in cameras, which PG thinks is a cool idea. When the current stupid phone wears out, a camera enabled phone might be a good idea. For the time being, the 12 button wonder phone works just fine. It was purchased at a yard sale for four dollars, and has been worth every penny. As for phoblography, it sounds like a Vietnamese Soup Magazine.
1. What’s your typical process for developing, creating, and publishing a post? There is no typical process. Text ideas come from everywhere… twitter, facebook, dead tree books, the real world. Often, I will hear something, and start thinking about it, and before long a post is on the way. I also keep a list of what I posted at this time each of the last five years, and have frequent reruns. Some posts just need to be repeated. At other times, a repost is the answer for writer’s tackle.
The pictures usually have nothing to do with the text. There are three groups of pictures. There are color photographs that I take, and edit. There are historic pictures from The Library of Congress, and “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. I am usually working on editing pictures from one of these groups, and often the most recently edited pictures are chosen for the post.
So I write the text, and include links for the sources and quotes. The first draft is written in a separate wordpad document. The text is marked up with HTML. I like to use colored fonts, typically alternating shades of green for each paragraph. The pictures are selected, and moved into a folder for that date. A new post is started, and given a title. The pictures, and text, are moved into the window. The post is saved, and a preview is opened in a separate window. The text is reviewed for typos, misspelled words, and what are known as widows. A widow is a single word, in a line by itself, at the end of a paragraph. These are ugly, and can almost always be corrected. Often there is a useless phrase in the last sentence, which can be painlessly deleted. The writing is usually improved.
When the post is up to the standards of Chamblee54, it is published. The code is copied, and pasted into the word document. The link is posted on facebook, and anywhere else that is appropriate.
2. What does your blogging setup look like? What do you need to be comfortable publishing? The setup is an old desktop, on top of a butcher block table. The computer is a storebought desktop. The desk is in front of a window, overlooking the street. There is a mirror behind the monitor, so I can see the TV set on the other side of the room. I usually have a beverage, usually coffee, tea, or water. Sometimes there is background music playing. If I am writing text, the music needs to be instrumental, with no vocals.
3. Do you do much processing to your photos? Are there photo tools, apps, or software you’d recommend? I edit the hell out of pictures. I use a program called GIMP. Even if I use a self taken picture, without cropping or adjustments, I need to reduce it to 720 pixels wide. This reduces the file size. I started out with a dial up, and learned the value of having small file sizes.
4. What are your top three tips for new/amateur photobloggers? Link to your sources, don’t spill your beverage, have fun.
5. What photo equipment do you use? What would you recommend for someone who’s ready to move on from a cameraphone or a point-and-shoot camera? On the historic pictures, I have a solid internet connection. For my own pictures, I use a Nikon coolpix L24. It was on sale at Walmart.
6. How many photos do you think you take for each photo you decide to feature on the site? What’s your process for trying to capture the “perfect” shot? I take as many pictures as the occasion demands. I edit them, and put them away. There is a list of folders to be used, and I go through that list folder by folder. I also repeat good collections of pictures, often when I repeat the post.
I really don’t go for the perfect shot. The pictures I take are just fodder for the desktop. Often at events, I just shoot, shoot, shoot, and take as much garbage as I do usuable images.
7. Why did you choose WordPress.com for your site? I used blogspot until google wouldn’t let me into my account. I registered with WordPress to make a comment at a blog, and decided to try writing there. I have been very happy with WordPress .
8. Tell us five of your daily reads / favorite photography blogs. The Fishwrapper, Peach Pundit, Bloggingheads, Trifecta, Yo is this racist, and Facebook. Podcasts include 99 percent invisible, backstory, radiolab. I would rather listen to something, while I work on pictures, than read.
9. Which of your posts has had the most influence on your readers, and why? I wrote Shock And Awe Day 2013 on Monday, and it is getting a good response. None of the posts really influences anyone. A few people enjoy them, which is all I have a right to expect.
10. What are your favorite things/locations/people to photograph? Is there something you’d never feature on your blog? I like dogs, graffiti, mannequins, and ethnic diversity. In history, I like group photographs broken into individuals. Public domain is a magic phrase. I would never print the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. G-d is too busy to help me.
Sin Salvation Send Money
Dear Patriot, We just returned from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and we’ve got so much to report! Each year, the most influential conservatives in America gather at CPAC to lay out the next steps in our movement. And this year, Tea Party Patriots was instrumental in charting a course for the future! Our chief goal was to target young activists – the essential ingredient for our movement’s long-term success.
We unveiled a new video entitled “A Movement on Fire,” which presented our struggle for freedom to younger audiences through the lens of the popular Hunger Games movie. Salon.com dubbed our short film CPAC’s “first viral hit”! We followed that up with a Hunger Games-themed party that attracted hundreds of young conservatives to our organization! We provided 30 hours of grassroots training to scores of new activists over the course of the three-day event, and we met with thousands more.
And Jenny Beth Martin, our National Coordinator, topped it all off with a rousing keynote address denouncing the nanny-state oppression of ObamaCare. In short, in three days at CPAC, our profile grew exponentially, the ranks of young Tea Party conservatives multiplied, and the number of trained Tea Party activists continued to increase!
And this fabulous conference was only the beginning! With CPAC now behind us, our movement is rejuvenated. Our ranks have grown. The younger generation is ready to join us. But now, we must resource and coordinate them. Will you make a generous contribution to Tea Party Patriots today to support the next chapter in our citizen-led movement?
All of this outreach will mean nothing if we are unable to provide materials, direction and guidance to the hundreds of newly activated Tea Party conservatives that have just joined us. We need to provide manuals, advanced grassroots training, and hands-on guidance to these new, young activists looking to make a difference in their communities and states. Tea Party Patriots relies on the generosity of conservatives like you to propel this citizen-led revolution forward.
Please make a much-needed contribution today to help us resource and coordinate these patriots. Thank you so much for your dedication to the cause of freedom! Tea Party Patriots, Inc. operates as a social welfare organization organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to Tea Party Patriots, Inc. are not deductible as charitable contributions for income tax purposes.
Respect And Fear
It has been seven days since the last edition of the series tagged “repost this sign”. This is when someone puts up a visually pleasing (sometimes) graphic, with the invitation to repost the graphic if you agree with the message. The edited graphics are attached to this post, and the reader is encouraged to copy them onto a facebook wall. There might be copyright issues involved, but this is facebook, and we are making people better persons, so it’s all right.
There are four messages this week. Here are the links to the originals: one, two, three, four. They have been converted to grayscale, which helps them to fit in with the other pictures posted. These pictures are from The Library of Congress.
The first two are tough to disagree with. We all want to see people have well fed, happy lives. The second one is about finding a baby animal on the ground, and putting it back in the nest. The conventional wisdom says this is bad, the poster says it is not, and PG does not know.
The last two posters sort of contradict each other, with the truth somewhere in the middle. Many people confuse respect for fear. Right makes right, and you need the approval of an authority. Perhaps people who are raised with this mindset are more likely to develop mental illness. Or, children with problems have bully, authoritarian parents who make their problem worse. Maybe this is why the wide eyed girl in poster four clutches her coffee with such enthusiasm.
Poster four was put up last week, which is the middle of March. According to the inerrant wikipedia, Mental Health Awareness Week is the first full week in October. Maybe the people posting this need to be taught respect for the perfectly obvious facts.
When producing text for a column of pictures, it is normal to have space to fill. Last week, a series of quotes were copied into the spot, and the cup quickly runneth over. A bit of commodity wisdom from Friedrich Nietzsche was deleted.
Today, there is going to be random nonsense written, until the space runs out. It is ok to skip this, and go ahead to the pictures. These images are from the War Between The States. War is a time when the lines between respect, authority, and mental illness are blurred to the point of no return. A war is usually popular for the first thirty days, at which the memories of previous wars become unblocked. It was ten years ago that we started to kill people in Iraq. This is a textbook example of the inmates taking over the asylum. The oil revenues have not paid for this war.
Dick Van Dyke
The guest of this week’s WTF podcast is Dick Van Dyke. After World War Two, Mr. Van Dyke was recruited by Phil Erickson to form a comedy duo, the Merry Mutes. In 1949, they got a long term engagement at the Henry Grady Hotel, and moved to Atlanta.
Mr. Van Dyke enjoyed Atlanta so much that he bought a house here. Two of his children were born in Atlanta. Neighborhood legend says that the house was on Ashford Road.
After parting ways with Mr. Van Dyke, Phil Erickson opened the Wit’s End nightclub, with the Wit’s End Players. The performances were in a bar building on Fifth Street, next to the expressway. The club had a large sign in front, with an asterisk next to the words Wits End. The asterisk stood for “bring money”.
Dick Van Dyke has performed with, and gotten to know, many famous people. He looked up Stan Laurel in the phone book, and invited himself for a visit. (Oliver Hardy was from Harlem GA.)
One person the Mr. Van Dyke did not work with was Spencer Tracy. Mr. Tracy said there were two rules for acting … know your lines, and don’t trip over the props. Dick Van Dyke knew the first one.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Slavery And Global Warming
Have you ever wondered why your ancestors owned other human beings? How can you justify something this cruel? In an NPR interview to promote a new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart has an answer.
It was economics. “But I think we think of it differently when we realize that the value of slave property, some $4 billion, enormous amount of money in 1861, represented actually more money than the value of all of the industry and all of the railroads in the entire United States combined. So for Southern planters to simply one day liberate all of that property would have been like asking people today to simply overnight give up their stock portfolios, give up their IRAs.”
Mr. Goodheart compares it to the situation today with fossil fuels. “many of us recognize that in burning fossil fuels we’re doing something terrible for the planet, we’re doing something terrible for future generations. And yet in order to give this up would mean sort of unraveling so much of the fabric of our daily lives, sacrificing so much, becoming these sort of radical eccentrics riding bicycles everywhere, that we continue somewhat guiltily to participate in the system. And that’s something that I use as a comparison to slavery, that many Americans in the North, and even I believe sort of secretly in the South, felt a sense of guilt, felt a sense of shame, that knew that the slave system was wrong but were simply addicted to slavery and couldn’t give it up. “
When the economic pressure is there, people will find a way to justify their actions. Slavery was justified in a number of ways. Today, there are people who deny the ill effects of using fossil fuels, and they have an eager audience. The payback for the environmental horror is in the future. This is similar to the way people today are paying … with racial turmoil … for slavery.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
Shock And Awe Day 2013
Ten years ago, Iraq teetered on the edge of regime change. It was obvious what was going to happen, at least at first. Amerika was going to storm in, kill a bunch of people, and take over.
In post 911 Amerika, the military industrial complex saw an opportunity for plunder, unrivaled since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories of WMD would infect the body politic with fear of a mesopotamian madman. Saddam Hussein wanted Iran to think he has wonder weapons, and did not think Amerika was serious about regime change. We all make mistakes.
In the ten years since the time of shock and awe, trillions of dollars have gone down the drain, dragging the mighty Amerikan economy along into the sewers of bankruptcy. One of the oldest civilizations of mankind was reduced to hiding, from neighbors, behind concrete barricades. They fought the conquerors with bombs triggered by garage door openers. Thousands of women and children have been murdered. The WMD were never found.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Mundane Stories
The group started to tell mundane stories. PG waited his turn. He had ridden his bike up Ashford Road, and saw the wife of an old friend walking. Is your name Diana, with an A, or Diane, with an E? PG was correct on his first guess. It happens that the parents of several friends had died in the last fifteen years, and PG did not hear about it.
Ashford Road is a treasure. It is a residential road, where the trees grow together in the midddle to form a canopy. The original plan for MARTA had been to connect Ashford Road with Ashford Dunwoody with an underpass. The neighborhood association was not amused.
The next person to speak said that he likes to pee sitting down. PG wondered if, truth be told, how many men would say the same thing. The convenience of piss standing is well known, but sometimes things happen when you are seated.
With a flush toilet, it is a moot point. In a composting outhouse, mixing urine with feces has unpleasant results. There are some things you learn from basic living.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is written like Charles Dickens.
Who Invented The Word Racism?
Writers tackle was rampaging through Brookhaven. PG looked in a list of old product, and found a feature built on the output of Teju Cole. He has a dandy article, at the New Yorker, about what is antiseptically called drone warfare. It is the twitter feed that gets attention.
@tejucole I see my point, but I don’t completely agree with myself.
@tejucole Strong hints that the next pope will be male.
@tejucole “Oh my God, this electric iron is terrible as a vacuum cleaner.”—internet critics
@tejucole I’m of two minds about most things, and so am I.
@tejucole George Carlin’s original seven dirty words can all be said freely now. The one word you can’t say, and must never print, is “racist.”
The quote marks lend mystery to the last tweet. Does he mean the dreaded “n word”? Or does he mean that other six letter slur? There is no shortage of people screaming racist in Georgia, often at the slightest provocation. There is an attitude that racism is the worst thing you can be accused of, and that, once accused, you are guilty until proven innocent. If you do a bit of research into racism, the word, you will see some interesting things.
The concept of groups of people not liking each other is as old as mankind. The word racism apparently did not exist before 1933 (merriam webster), or 1936 (dictionary dot com).
Something called the Vanguard News Network had a forum once, What is the true origin of the term racism? This forum is problematic, as VNN seems to be a white supremacist affair. One of the reputed coiners of the R word was Leon Trotsky, also referred to as Jew Communist. Another Non English speaker who is given “credit” for originating the phrase is Magnus Hirschfeld. As for English, the word here is: “American author Lawrence Dennis was the first to use the word, in English, in his 1936 book “The coming American fascism”.”
The terms racist and racism seem to be used interchangeably in these discussions. This is in keeping with the modern discussion. As Jesus worshipers like to say, hate the sin, love the sinner.
The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to add: “racist 1932 as a noun, 1938 as an adjective, from race (n.2); racism is first attested 1936 (from French racisme, 1935), originally in the context of Nazi theories. But they replaced earlier words, racialism (1871) and racialist (1917), both often used early 20c. in a British or South African context.”
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
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