My bedroom was invaded by huge rats that came out every night and I was very afraid of getting up to the bathroom because they could gone up to the bed and my cats are very lazy and they only sleep all the time and they didn't hunt the rats. Thanks to my requests to Nuestra Sra. of Zapopan she inspired me and I had the idea of requesting to my neighbor borrowed her cat and it end to the rats in a single night. Now my cats feel embarrassed and they wake up at nights to keep the house with no rats.

26 November - Cinematic Llamas



Can't imagine how I missed Anna Magnani's dramatic llama scene

24 November - The Clowns



What with

24 November - Readers' Submissions



Friend of the Museum

Quit whining! Take it like a man!

21 November - qoq



Very, very sorry to report the death yesterday of a friend and a reader of these pages, Bob Jernigan -

18 November - Tableau sur le Pont



The Circle Cats perform a dramatic tableau vivant of Thomas Babington Macaulay's

The Three stood calm and silent,
  And looked upon the foes...

18 November - Folk Wisdom



Our old buddy

17 November - The Kindness of Friends of the Museum



I'm happy to report that the Janus Museum has recently been the undeserving, though grateful, recipient of a slew of generous contributions. Above, a comic postcard from 1910, the gift of Friend of the Museum Lois Montbertrand. I suspect that it's based on one of aviator Fred Wallingford's less successful flights, though the fellow on the postcard doesn't really look much like

17 November - Tank for the Memories



Here's another snap from

Solido Char de Grand Jouet

As the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe following Nazi Germany's Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, France's Ministre de la Défense belatedly came to the realization that the nation's tank forces were inadequate, and could never face the Wehrmacht's forces. An urgent summons went out to French industry; among those who answered the call was the manufacturer Solido, known mainly for its diecast toy vehicles. To the inevitable question of what the hell were they playing at, company representatives explained compellingly that it would be a simple matter to scale up the plans for the company's best-selling tank model and up-gun it from the current spring-operated peashooter to the standard French gun, the 75mm SA32 L/17. This argument, combined with growing government desperation (and a generous douceur to the procurement officers), clinched the deal, and the Char de Grand Jouet (Big Toy Tank) was swiftly brought into production, decorated with a charming camouflage scheme contributed as a patriotic gesture by the students of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and rushed to the front. Its reception by French armored personnel was not enthusiastic. A young tank officer, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, remarked on seeing the Solido for the first time, C'est magnifique, et bon amusement gai, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. But the Solidos gamely rallied to meet the German blitzkrieg in May 1940, and it was then that the tank's fatal flaw was revealed: the Solido's clockwork motor had a tendency to wind down at inopportune moments (such as during combat); the crew had to exit the tank, insert the large and ungainly key, and wind that sucker up again. The key would then have to be unshipped, strapped down, and the crew would re-enter the tank, if they hadn't by that time been cut down by the German infantry. Most Solido crews conveniently "lost" their keys on their way to the front, thus contributing to the tragic French collapse and surrender.

12 November - A Veteran of the Great War


Frank W. Buckles
Photograph by Nikki Kahn, The Washington Post

Today's Washington Post had an article on Frank Woodruff Buckles, one of the last veterans of World War I,

Yesterday, Buckles's service was honored in a Veterans Day ceremony to remember Pershing, who commanded U.S. forces in World War I. The ceremony at Pershing's grave, organized by the Military Order of the World Wars, was one of several in the area as crowds converged on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and smaller groups gathered at various statues and memorials.

In Section 34 of the cemetery, where Pershing was buried on a rise overlooking the graves of men he led, organizers honored Buckles as one of three known surviving U.S. World War I veterans.

Sitting in a wheelchair with a military field cap on his head and a heavy blanket across his lap, Buckles recalled lying about his age to a Marine recruiter at a fair in Kansas to enlist when he was 16. On his arrival in France, he said, he was touched by the sight of so many people wearing black armbands in memory of loved ones who had already died.

Asked what he thought about attending a service for his duty while the United States is engaged in armed conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, Buckles replied: "I'm no authority, but I'm not in favor of war unless it's an emergency."

As a teenager, Buckles was eager to enlist. He had been raised on a farm and took a job at a bank in Oklahoma after delivering some horses there. After the Marines rejected him as too young and the Navy told him he had flat feet, he signed on with the Army, claiming that Missouri did not print birth certificates when he was born. He enlisted Aug. 14, 1917.

Eager to see action, he joined an ambulance corps and sailed to Europe on the Carpathia, the ship that had rescued survivors from the Titanic in 1912. He never did make it to the front lines, but he saw firsthand the brutal consequences of war. His last assignment was caring for German prisoners of war, and he emerged from the war as a corporal...

12 November - The Romance of Ruins III



Here's another salt print by Allan Janus of the ruins of the old

12 November - On Sugarloaf



Another shot from yesterday's

12 November - To the Summit


West View from the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain

We mounted an expedition yesterday to the summit of nearby

11 November - Armistice Day


The Author, age 5

With our National Scallywag still in the Oval Office, I'm no longer quite so enthusiastic about putting up the old flag as I used to be, but I always do it on Veteran's Day. Remembering that the day was originally Armistice Day, I see that the good old AEF - the American Expeditionary Force of World War I - is practically gone. According to

10 November - St-Cloud



Now on view on our ancillary site Panabasis-Photo is

10 November - Current Conditions, As of Yesterday; the Wallingford Papers



Rainy but colorful in The Circle yesterday. I stuck my head out the door to snap the superb panorama above, but I was mostly taken up with the final touches of the processing of the papers of that famous aeronautical pioneer

9 November - Another Triplane



The first object I beheld on entering the Tsarina's palace

6 November - Rhomboid



Returning home on Sunday from the harrowing Grossman celebration described below, I made a stop at

5 November - My Advice



My advice to rising young topers, gained from hard-won experience at Friend Lisa's birthday party on Saturday night, is this: if the port doesn't even begin to circulate until one in the morning, just pass it on. Don't have any, not even a taste. You don't need port at 1:00 AM. I'm aware that this will make me sound like an old stick, a kill-joy, even a milqetoast. So be it - just trust me on this.

The other bit that I remember from the party is that by two o'clock, things got very serious and thinky. Lisa and several of the guests were going great guns in the talking department - the government was criticised, I recall. Hard things were said about morons - it was also thought that the population of morons was on the increase with no end in sight, and that morons were incapable of improvement. Suggestion was made that the Liberal method with morons - to throw money at the problem of moronery - was imperfect, but that the Conservatives, who were accused of just ignoring the Moron Problem, were equally unsuccessful. I was doing a pretty fair imitation of a moron myself, being exhausted and blotto in equal proportion, and had nothing much to offer except that at one point I heard myself saying that the theory of eugenics was fallacious and had been roundly discredited. I even gave a proof of the fallaciousness of eugenics that seemed to go down fairly well, but I forget what the proof was - I do remember feeling proud that I was able to pronounce "fallacious" successfully. Later on, I roused myself from my stupor to hear one of the guests, an engineer with Hewlett Packard, describing the dilemma of examining a problem. One can't even study a problem without changing it, he said - "God, there's a name for that - what is it?"

"

5 November - Road Trip



I was on the road over the weekend, to the waters of Babylon (NY), visiting old Friend of the Museum

2 November - Romance of Ruins II



I knew that we had an image of the ruins of the old

2 November - Young Sailor of the Civil War, Probably a Boy



Now on view over at our alternate site

2 November - Extended Halloween Coverage



Here, for your viewing enjoyment, are a few fleeting glimpses of Halloween '07 here in Washington Grove, Maryland. Above, Satan settled for a Twix and a Butterfingers.




Here are three of the four elements - from the left: Fire, Water, Earth. Not shown: Air. It seems that Air, the airhead, missed the rendezvous.




On the porch of Friend of the Museum