31 August - The Sky Sublime



Carefully observed over DC the other day and beautifully photographed, this cloudscape seems to describe William Hogarth's famous

30 August - Tutte di Capo Tuttes


Tutte Lemkow as Ram Das in The Stranglers of Bombay

I haven't seen all of the films about the fiendish

29 August - A Wraith with a Graflex



Continuing with the scanning of my lost cache of 1981 Graflex negatives, here is a sublime representation of a foggy snowy morning on Rock Creek near Kensington, just up the creek from

29 August - A Man on a Bicycle Stops for a Song


Cecil Sharp via

Oh, the streams of lovely Nancy are divided in three parts
Where the young men and the maidens they do meet their sweethearts.
It is drinking of good liquor caused my heart for to sing
And the noise in yonder village made the rocks for to ring.

At the top of this mountain, there my love's castle stands,
It's all overbuilt with ivory on yonder black sand.
Fine arches, fine porches, and diamonds so bright,
It's a pilot for a sailor on a dark winter's night.

On yonder high mountain where the wild fowl do fly
There is one amongst them that flies very high.
If I had her in my arms, love, near the diamond's black land
How soon I would secure her by the sleight of my hand.

At the bottom of this mountain there runs a river clear.
A ship from the Indies did once anchor there,
With her red flags a-flying and the beating of her drum,
Sweet instruments of music and the firing of her gun.

So come all you little streamers that walk the meadows gay.
I'll write to my own true love wherever she may be,
For her rosy lips entice me, with her tongue she tells me No,
And an angel might direct us right, and where shall we go?

An obscure song. Although it has been more frequently encountered in Sussex, Lucy Broadwood postulated a Cornish origin, with the "little streamers" being young tin-miners who "stream" or wash the ore. Miss A. G. Gilchrist suggest that the song might be "an unrecognized relic of a hymn to Mary". [Sabine] Baring-Gould, however, collected a West Country version called The Streams of Nantsian and pointed out that "Nant" means a falling stream or a valley in Cornish. By the same token, the suffix "-sian" or "-zion" is also to be met in Cornwall. "Lovely Nancy" could therefore be merely a corruption of a Cornish place-name. None of which really makes the text any clearer, but it remains a quite hypnotic lyric.

24 August - Cat Amok



We were having such a nice catwalk in the Janus Museum Forest Preserve this afternoon when Natasha suddenly lashes out at poor old Leroy - jumps him and goes for his fluffy throat. But Leroy is a wily veteran of such sneak attacks - he flops with his legs facing the attacker and kicks for dear life. It all ended quickly, though, and the catwalk resumed with no grudges held. But I thought this snap was particularly poignant, with Leroy's tail unconsciously assuming the shape of a question mark, as if to say "... Why? Why me?".

Then we all went home for a little snack.

22 August - Deliver Us from the Goat of the Evil



Oh, jeez - just one more ex voto. Ex votos - sometimes paintings, sometimes medals - commemorate miraculous deliverances from disasters off all sorts. This example, currently

One night when I left the tavern and I took a shortcut for the fields to go to my house the Goat of evil appeared in front of me. I made to him the sign of the cross and I left running although I was very drunk. I thank to the Rosario's virgin because I could arrive at my house without the engender slobbered me and but many gray-hairs came out on my head for the fright.

22 August - Dangers of the Deep, Crustacean Division



Another excellent ex voto currently

My mother ask me babysitting my little brother while she was visiting aunt Eulalia who was sick, as it was a very hot day I took my brother to swim on the sea, he was a good swimmer since he was a baby, but when we were diving we were surrounded by hundreds of huge red crabs and they began to tray to to pinch us with their pincers, I invoked Santa Barbara, princess of the sea, and she made the crabs calm down and let us to go out from the water without make us any harm.

Her imprisonment led to her association with towers, then the construction and maintenance of them, then to their military uses. The lightning that avenged her murder led to asking her protection against fire and lightning, and her patronage of firefighters, etc. Her association with things military and with death that falls from the sky led to her patronage of all things related to artillery, and her image graced powder magazines and arsenals for years.

22 August - Utility of Sheep in Photographic Work



Yet another scan of one of the Graflex negatives from 1981 - a sheep from down in Accokeek, Maryland. Sheep are very suitable for photographic purposes - they don't move much, so they're fairly easy to focus on. And they add interest and variety to an otherwise unexciting landscape. When young photographers ask me how to improve their work, I always recommend more sheep.

Actually, no young photographer has ever asked for my advice, nor any old photographers. But I'm ready with the sheep tip, just in case.

I posted a slew of other

20 August - Dogs in Space; No Further Comment


Belka, Dog Cosmonaut. Photograph by Y. Abramochkin

Here's a fascinating recent anniversary - Dog Belka, along with Dog Strelka, two rats, and forty mice, made seventeen orbits on board Sputnik 5 on August 19, 1960, and returned home safely - the first critters to survive orbital flight. Looking somewhat relieved, Belka is seen here after the flight. From some book called something like

18 August - At the Shore with the Graflex, 1981



If one can't get to the beach this summer, the next best thing is to scan negatives from one's visit to the beach 27 years ago. Above, Rehoboth, Delaware. I was staying at nearby Bethany, where I got a ferocious sunburn on the first day out that caused my ankles to swell up like loaves of Wonder Bread. I could only bear going out in the foggy early mornings - good conditions for atmospheric black and white work - and spent the rest of the trip sulking indoors, high on rum and Tylenol.




Bethany Beach. Nice and foggy. My ankles hurt in retrospect.




The boardwalk, Bethany. Good times...

17 August - À la Recherche du Llama Perdu



How could I have forgotten that back in August, 1981, I photographed a llama at the Baltimore Zoo? Such memories I'm dredging up in the old Graflex negatives! But more recently...




... Nearby

17 August - Scan Break with Flopping



Lulled almost to a state of coma by the hum of the scanner, I took a bit of a break from my nostalgie de Graflex for a healthy catwalk. The day being warm, though, the walk did include a fair amount of

17 August - Goose Steps; No Comment



Yes, the scanning of the cache of 1981 Graflex negatives continues. This march past of geese took place in

16 August - A Horse on a Porch



For now, just one more sublimely beautiful photographs from my 1981 Graflex negs. We have here a horse on a porch in Lovettsville, Virginia.

What kind of horse is it? Of course, it's a Porcheron.

16 August - Vintage Bull



Don't you find that once you start scanning the old negatives, it's kind of hard to stop? This is a

16 August - Over on Rock Creek



Oaks on Rock Creek near Kensington, Maryland, from a Graflex negative. Yes, it is another beautiful photograph from the Museum's collection.

15 August - Mountain Cow



From the Museum's collections, another heart-breakingly beautiful photograph. It's a cow in the fog on Maryland's South Mountain. And you would have a magnificent view of the Great Valley of Maryland, too, if it wasn't so foggy. But the fog's highly impressionistic - heightens the anomie, you see.

15 August - Saved by Perseptive Cats; Commentary



Here's another splendid cat-related ex voto - a devotional object (in this case, a painting) that commemorates a miraculous intervention -

Saved by Perseptive Cats

One night I began to float on the air and I saw that I had left my body down there on the bed and my spirit was to the drift, I tryed to go back but I couln't and I began to sink in alethargy and to let it be, I thanks to the Virgen de Guadalupe because my cats are very perceptive and they noticed something wrong ad they began to to meow, to touch me and to lick my face and that made my body to react and I went back and I woke up.

Zoe also tells me that she'll be tinkering with the comments feature for a while, and that it's possible that existing comments could, tragically, be lost in her tinkering. She apologizes in advance.

Civil War casualties keep a-coming in. The Yankees have kilt another Suthrun, pore ol' Sam White of Chester, a Richmond subdivision.

Truth to tell, Sam killed his own fool self. He was a longtime relic hunter, one of those enthusiasts who cruise battlefields and encampments with metal detectors. War is a prodigiously wasteful, scattershot activity that leaves vast areas heavily salted with, besides bones, everything from bayonets and belt buckles to unexploded ordnance. Prudent persons leave ordnance items of unknown explosiveness to the proper authorities, but relic hunters relish them.

Sam was out in his driveway a while back, cleaning a 9-inch artillery shell with a grinder-mounted wire brush, when the sparks set it off and blew him way to hell and gone. A two-pound piece of the shell went through the roof of a house a quarter-mile away, the pieces of Sam not quite so far.

I claim this casualty as a Yankee kill because the shell was a 9-incher, and the great majority of the 9-inch guns used in the War of Northern Aggression were U.S. Navy Dahlgrens. The South captured some and cast others on the same pattern, but the North had so many more Dahlgrens and such a preponderance of powder and shot that the odds are something like a thousand to one that Sam's shell was made in the U.S.A.

Explosive shells of the period were filled with black powder, which has two overweening characteristics: 1) It is tetchy as a junkyard dog; 2) Even in leaky, rusty old shells it can remain dangerous about halfway to forever. Cannons of the period were forever blowing up, and as often as not it was caused by a shell exploding in the barrel from the shock of firing.

On the other hand, old-time shells often failed to explode when and where they were supposed to (as does much modern ordnance). During major artillery duels countless duds would rain upon the field, bouncing about or burying themselves at various depths according to their trajectories and the character of the ground. Some went off after a brief hangfire, as in one case during the Battle of Antietam, where a mongrel dog kept quartering the field investigating the duds that came thumping all around. Finally one exploded as he poked his nose into its burrow.

So here and there these duds lie, moldering and menacing. Civil War authorities say there are many thousands of live shells still buried in battlefields and at random along Southern coasts and rivers, it having been a major amusement of the Union Navy to shoot at anything their fancy struck as they cruised Rebel waters. The shells are nothing like so thick in the ground as along the Western Front, where thousands of guns fired millions of shells during the war to end all wars. French farmers turn them up regularly as they plow their fields, and set them out along the road for pickup by ordnance disposal vehicles, like milkmen collecting empties. Of course these are not milk bottles, and from time to time a mushroom cloud will signal the abrupt elevation of un fermier francais.

Now and then a Civil War shell will go off of its own accord, but most just lie there until erosion weathers them to the surface or a metal detector whines. Experts, and laws, keep telling people not to dig them up, and people keep digging them up. Usually they get away with it, because the powder charge has leached out or degraded into harmlessness. There are relic hunters who specialize in opening shells and flushing away the residue. This had been done with the shell Sam was fooling with, but it hadn't been done thoroughly. Dahlgren designed his shells to resist moisture, but he couldn't make them idiot-proof.

11 August - From the Collection



This is

11 August - Rusty's Progress



Follow the thrilling (and occasionally messy) adventures of Rusty, a charming young Airedale puppy recently arrived in The Hague, as chronicled in friend Janis's blog

10 August - The Benish Way



I've recently acquired, through the kind generosity of a friend, two menus from the Benish Grill, a St. Louis restaurant owned by my grandfather Edward Benish back in the 1920s. Above, a detail from a 1920 menu featuring, from the left, Aunt Barbara, Uncle Bob (the Reverend Robert Benish), and my Ma,

9 August - Recent Acquisition



I'm very pleased to announce a recent acquisition to the Museum's collections, a major gift from the Richters Foundation - an extremely rare cast iron statuette of the well-known Washington Grove aviator,

9 August - The Appreciation of Beauty



Revisiting the site of

9 August - Deliver Us From Cephalopods

Graciela was swiming and diving when she was caught by an enormous octopus that pulled her to the bottom of the sea and when she felt already that her laungs were going to explode for the lack of air, a dazzles light illuminated the whole sea and the octopus let her go away and she could ascend to the surface and to breathe, she thanks to the virgen de Guadalupe for the miracle...

8 August - Sticky Bandit Bling


Czesław Jaroszyński and Marek Perepeczko in Janosik

I reviewed the excellent headgear in the 1973 Polish miniseries

3 August - Military Aesthetics and Ingenuity



Here's another superb World War I headgear-related cartoon from

In addition to its obvious aesthetic qualities, the helmet offers many other advantages.

For those fond of their comforts, it's the obvious complement to one's comfy little nest.

Designer Roy Wallingford, brother of Fred Wallingford won a large contract to supply the helmet to the AEF on November 10, 1918. The contract was quickly canceled following Armistice Day (November 11). Ingeniously, Wallingford converted the helmets into chamberpots, but this did not prevent the Wallingford Armor Co. from slipping into bankruptcy.

The Janus Museum has a rare example of the Wallingford Experimental Helmet (thoroughly cleaned) in its collections.

3 August - Uncanny Fez Resemblance



Speaking of

2 August - The Cat Came Back



Here's a heart-warming ex voto - a painting meant to commemorate a miraculous intervention - currently

The girl Alicia Lozanp thanks thanks to the Santo Niño de Atocha because her Pelusa, who had been lost by more than two weeks, finilly came back home after many prays of Alicia to the Santo Niño, because she loves very much her cat and it's her best friend.

2 August - Pickel Fez



Appreciating deeply as I do both

1 August - The Military Roots of the Carousel


A Denzel Carousel Cat

The word carousel originates from the Italian garosello and Spanish carosella ("little war"), used by crusaders to describe a combat preparation exercise and game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen in the 1100s. In a sense this early device could be considered a cavalry training mechanism; it prepared and strengthened the riders for actual combat as they wielded their swords at the mock enemies. European Crusaders discovered this contraption and brought the idea back to own their lands, primarily the ruling lords and kings. There the carousel was kept secret within the castle walls, to be used for training by horsemen; no carousel was allowed out in the public.

1 August - Lions Have More Fun



And now, a lion in a sidecar in a wall-of-death,