via bldgblog.blogspot.com

Interesting interview with Richard Mosse and more photos from his Iraq project BREACH on BLDG|BLOG, one of the blogs that made it into my “favorites folder” a long long time ago. Well worth a visit!

Posted via web from Bearded Dave

via jas-townsend.com

Awesome. In a very nerdy and re-enactment kinda way. But still awesome.

Posted via web from Bearded Dave

It’s a blistering 75ºF outside and today we talk about death. Isn’t it funny sometimes how all of a sudden one topic comes to the forefront of your day? The first thing I found was this blog that had been started in conjuction with an exhibition of the Justice and Police Department Archives and the Historic Houses Trust. Sadly, it’s not very well maintained, but there are some haunting, surreal vintage crime scene photos on it {NSFW & not for the squeamish). You could take one picture and write an entire book about what happened.

The really amazing thing, however, are the vintage mugshots. They are intense! There are some more pictures and background info on TrAcEy’s blog. Apparently, those mugshots were taken by the New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930. There are approximately 2500 of them and you can see a handful of them on the Historic Houses Trust’s searchable website. What strikes me about those portraits is how sharp and clear they are.

To round this up, we have Slate reviewing a book called Dissection, which is essentially a collection of, well, vintage photographs from the dissection room. Here’s a snip from the review:

This lost genre of photographs, Edmonson explains, dates roughly from 1880 to 1930. The images, which were taken at medical schools across the country, generally display groups of student dissectors posing with their cadavers. At times, the students—who are mostly male but occasionally female—are actively dissecting. Not surprisingly, many of the cadavers look less like human beings than pieces of meat. But in other images, especially those involving the skeletons that students used to help identify the bones and other landmarks in their cadavers, the dead are in unnatural positions, either by themselves or with students. A cadaver smokes a pipe; skeletons play cards; skeletons hug their dissectors; skeletons are even propped up to appear as though they are dissecting sleeping students.

Posted via web from Bearded Dave

UPDATE: Jessica Palmer wrote a great post on this topic on :bioephemera:, which is a blog I can only highly recommend for all you science aficionados out there. Great writing on art, anatomy, and science.

Man, what a bummer. Looking for a job sucks and when it turns out that one job that you actually want doesn’t work out, well, that’s a pretty big bummer. So we decided to go to the mall yesterday to pick up some craftsy stuff and spend 1 1/2 hours in the bus to get there just to barely avoid getting run over by the CT drivers. In my opinion, the strip mall, and the 24-hour-news cycle, are among the worst things in the USA (there are a ton of other things, of course). The entire design of the mall with it’s lack of sidewalks, lack of crosswalks, is a sad sad excuse for a town center. Who thought this would be an awesome idea, again?

There is a ton of writing on malls, which is actually pretty interesting. The first time I read something about it was in Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, a collection of her non-fiction writing that I can highly recommend! The article is called “On the Mall” and was published in The White Album.  And I think The New Yorker carried at least one lengthy article on shopping malls in America.

So when we go the the mall it usually involves having a late lunch (because the bus ride essentially ate up lunch time) in the Food Court, which is apparently a well liked hang-out for every teenager who lives in a 25-mile-radius (this is America, after all). Isn’t that sad? I’m not sure whether the town or city center is something especially European, but come on, even if it was it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have it here too, eh? Not everything the Olde Worlde invented is bad, right?

While drinking coffee this morning I read the current issue of WIRED and came across their advice column. Usually I don’t read advice columns, but the one in WIRED is kinda interesting and this one is just to good not to be shared. Somebody wrote that their mother had just passed away and they were wondering what to do with their father, who had died a couple of years before and, thanks to his wife’s belief in cryonics, had is head cut off and stored at a cryogenics facility. Here’s a snip of the answer:

Let’s first consider why Ma put Pa on ice. Was it because she genuinely believed that a cure for death (and decapitation) was imminent and that the lovebirds would someday be reunited? That seems improbable, because she didn’t arrange for her own remains to be frozen (or “vitrified,” in cryonics industry lingo). The more plausible explanation is that your mother never made it through the five stages of grief. Maybe she got stuck on bargaining, two steps away from acceptance. Arranging for the “neuropreservation” of her husband—a process that costs $80,000 and up—probably helped her evade the terrible finality of her beloved’s death.(via Mr. Know-It-All : WIRED)

This makes a good point. Even more so as I thought that cryogenics were, well, sooo 1990s (see if you can find the documentary Synthetic Pleasures (NYT review) somewhere. It’s a great trip down memory lane. Plus: it’s very interesting to see what counted as cutting edge 14 years ago).

Funnily enough, just a couple of weeks ago a friend pointed me towards a great episode of This American Life (which I’m recently becamse addicted to, by the way) called “Mistakes were Made“, which deals with cryonics and the shady characters involved in the trade of freezing humans. It’s a great listen, if you have the time, give it a go.