Irish Oatmeal

It's no secret that I prefer to keep, whenever possible, products in my pantry that have at least a tenuous amount of mythic resonance with the style of that golden era we all adore. Well, that's no problem with John McCann's Steel-cut Irish Oatmeal, which seemingly hasn't changed its graphics much since the 19th century.

But it is good? Oh, mais oui. Irish Oatmeal has a thick, nutty flavor that is so far-removed from that bland, bleached-out genetically modified piffle that the guy from the Religious Society of Friends hawks, you won't recognize it. If a cereal can be said to be meaty, this is it.

The main drawback to Irish Oatmeal is that it takes so long to prepare. The package recommends bringing the oatmeal to a boil and simmering at least 30 minutes. However, if you pre-soak 'em overnight, they're all ready to be heated up and served the next morning. Bring it to a boil, then quickly turn it down and simmer it a couple minutes, then set it aside and let stand for a couple more minutes.

Me and all the boys down at the Transylvania Gentlemen lodge recommend pouring a little Bushmills on your McCann's, for a perfect McNulty-approved snack.

Dogs of the World

From a tiny ad (about the size of a business card) in the corner of an old 1950s issue of American Home magazine, an even more miniscule element - an image of a free giveaway book, Dogs of the World (smaller than the smallest postage stamp in the ad) is brought up into our realm of viewing via the magic of scanning.

Hot Air Balloon Death in NM

From InjuryBoard:

A woman died in a hot air balloon crash on Monday, October 8 during an annual balloon festival in Albuquerque. The balloon tipped over after getting caught on fiberoptic line running above a power line at about 8 a.m., which sent 60 year old Rosemary Wooley Phillips to her death.

The crash site is about three miles from the launch site for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, a nine-day event that began Saturday and features mass ascensions of balloons, events for special shaped balloons and competitions for pilots.

In recent years there have been numerous fatalities from hot air balloon accidents.

Cannon Doorknocker

One from our Unusual Kentucky blog:


Walking down the street in Frankfort, at first glance I thought this was supposed to be a submarine, or a submarine's periscope. But upon closer inspection, this unusual old metal doorknocker turned out to be a miniature simulacra of an antique cannon. It's on the door to the ticket office at Frankfort's Grand Theatre. A nice Steampunk-retro touch.

The Aether

What is The Aether?

Plato's Timaeus posited that a fifth element must exist, corresponding to the fifth remaining Platonic solid, the dodecahedron. He called it "Quintessence", the stuff of which the entire cosmos is really made of, deep down.

Aristotle included a concept of The Aether in the system of the classical elements of Ionic philosophy as the "fifth element" (the Quintessence), on the principle that the four terrestrial elements were subject to change and moved naturally in straight lines while no change had been observed in the celestial regions and the heavenly bodies moved in circles. In Aristotle's system aether was devoid of qualities of its own - in other words, it was neither hot, cold, wet, or dry.

In the late 19th century, the "Luminiferous Aether", or "Ether", was the term used to describe a hypothetical medium for the propagation of light. It signifies a mysterious all-pervasive substance - and even can be thought of as a place where one goes during astral projection or after death - which was thought in ancient times to contain the key to everything in our universe. Devices, such as the one pictured above, were created to attempt to record and measure this elusive substance.

Einstein's Special Relativity was formulated without needing a concept of an Aether. Albert Michelson called it "one of the grandest generalizations of modern science". Today the idea of The Aether is considered a laughably outmoded concept of the past.

Or is it?

Henrietta Lacks

On October 4, 1951, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer.

Samples of her cervical cancer cells were extracted by Dr. George Otto Gey. To his amazement and horror, Henrietta Lacks's cervical cells multiplied readily and rapidly, faster than anything ever seen. They quickly latched to the sides of test tubes and consumed the medium around them, growing thicker and thicker all the while. He wondered when the cells would stop growing.

They didn't.

Soon Gey had to transfer the growing mass of cells to another test tube, and then a petri dish, and then more petri dishes. Henrietta's cells were, and still are, some of the strongest cells known to science, reproducing an entire generation every 24 hours. "If allowed to grow uninhibited," researcher Howard Jones said in 1971, "[Henrietta's cells] would have taken over the world by this time."

Scientists saw this horror-film aspect as a boon - since the cells kept replicating like mad, they now had an unlimited supply of a single isolated cell source, and could thus ramp up their efforts to cure mankind's ills using the cells as test cultures. And in 1952, they did just that. Henrietta's cells (now called "HeLa" cells) were directly responsible for Jonas Salk's Polio vaccine.

But then things got weirder.

By 1974 people were starting to realize that HeLa had infiltrated the world's stock of cell cultures and ruined everything it came in contact with. Millions of dollars of research were wasted and for many scientists, at least two decades of work were down the drain. According to Rebecca Skloot in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

The truth was, Henrietta's cells had traveled through the air, on hands, or the tips of pipettes, overpowering any cell cultures they encountered. And researchers had no idea. There was no way to know which cells were growing in the petri dish. And there was no universally accepted test for a cell culture's identity.

Walter Nelson-Rees dedicated his life to trying to control the spread of HeLa, but towards the end of his life he admitted that effort was a failure, and that the HeLa cells are "out there somewhere dancing" and will live forever. The problem of HeLa cell contamination continues to grow today.

Stranger still, Nelson-Rees discovered that the HeLa cell line had several marker chromosomes not found in the normal complement of human chromosomes. Which begs the question, what IS this stuff, really?

Due to their ability to replicate indefinitely, and their non-human number of chromosomes, Dr. Leigh Van Valen has proposed HeLa be classified as an entirely new species, Helacyton gartleri. This controversial idea has not currently been embraced by the scientific community.

No. 16 Cheyne Walk

An 1882 painting by Henry Treffry Dunn, depicting Dante Gabriel Rossetti's drawing room at No. 16 Cheyne Walk. It's a wonderful representation of a typical Victorian home, with its highly ornamented sense of decor.

Boneshaker

Cherie Priest's new novel Boneshaker is now out, and sounds like it might be a pretty good read.

The author herself describes it: "It’s an alternate-history steampunk setting wherein the Civil War has been going on for 20 years, and the west has not yet been won".

Amazon's description says:

"In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive."

Caufield's Hearse

Photos of the most excellent Cadillac Superior hearse parked outside of Caufield's Novelty Shop in Louisville, KY. We're envious of the propane-powered flame-throwers connected to the mouths of the metal skulls - this is a feature that'll come in handy when zombies start crawling over your car.





See our Unusual Kentucky blog for more images of this sweet ride.

Copperplating at Home

Recently saw an old post on the Home Chemistry blog about a simple and effective way to do copper-plating of small objects, using salt, vinegar and pennies. Has anyone else tried this?

The Lindy Hop

There is no dance that better sums up our zeitgeist than the Lindy Hop.

You've seen endless variations of it in 1,001 Hollywood films set in the first half of the 20th century, from Barton Fink to The Cotton Club to Malcolm X. You can also see actual period footage of it in old films such as After Seben, Rock Around The Clock, Hot Chocolates, The Girl Can't Help It, Hellzapoppin', A Day at the Races, That Certain Feeling, Keep Punching, Symphony in Black, Radio City Revels, Stompin' at the Savoy, and Killer Diller.

There's also a short-but-excellent 1988 documentary, Call Of The Jitterbug, which contains extensive archival footage, and includes interviews with Norma Miller, Frankie Manning, and Dizzy Gillespie.


The Lindy Hop seems to run like an infinite silver cord along the entire length of time. Kids today see it done at Rockabilly festivals and assume it's a 50's/60's thing. Then they start to realize it was already a pre-existing dance when 50's kids were doing it in old rock and roll movies like Don't Knock the Rock. Then they discover it was a dance craze of the 1920s and 1930s. And then, digging back even further, we find the key moves of the Lindy Hop (the Swingout/whip/turn) were previously called The Breakaway, and that this in turn was derived from The Texas Tommy, circa 1900-1910. The Lindy Hop also encompasses The Charleston, which was popularized in 1923 but goes way back before that.

Before that, it's almost a certainty that these dance moves existed in the 19th century, before the activities of African-American culture were well documented. I'd bet money that some of them go back to antiquity.

The Lindy Hop has always been here, and always will be. It is ever shifting, mutating, sidestepping like Billy Childish's allegorical crab to avoid dilution. No flies on it. Long may it wave.

Wall Sconce Electric Fan

This "Old Havana" Wall-sconce fan sure is nice-looking, but $563 is just stupid. (And it's on sale, marked down from $940!) I could make one myself that would be much more interesting - and I probably will this winter when I get snowed in and have more free time for such projects.