wildbillsdreamscape

I confess I am an old guy and I remember watching as a youngster almost gavel to gavel coverage of US political conventions not the one hour per night disservice served up by the networks this year. I end up wondering if the punditry ever tire of their wisdom. I am. I read one interesting piece in The New Yorker in which the writer wondered if President Johnson would continue to be treated like a pariah over the Viet Nam War or if his breakthrough civil rights legislation would earn him the mention he deserves as the Democrats nominate Obama.  I guess I will tune in to find out.

Fascinating article in the LA Times by P. J. Huffstutter about the historical detective hunt to find handwritten documents of Abraham Lincoln. Huffstutter goes on the road with history detectives as they check leads about new sources of Lincoln’s papers.

They found “an original of the so-called “ghost amendment”, a proposed but never ratified, 13th Amendment, which was an attempt to avoid the Civil War by making slavery permanently legal in the South.” This is only the second of 34 originals sent by Lincoln to governors to be found.
Some 11,000 pieces of paper in Lincoln’s handwriting have been found. The task has been made more difficult because immediately after his death, people went into public records and sought legal documents that Lincoln as a lawyer had filed over the 25 years of his legal career prior to his Presidency. They often clipped the signature from the documents. Members of the project have become experts in Lincoln’s handwriting.

The project began back in 1980. In 2000, the Lincoln Legal Papers were published on DVD, a collection of nearly 100,000 legal documents. The hunt for paper is now expanded beyond legal documents. A fascinating story of history and detective work.

Finished reading this detailed account of the battles of Sicily and Italy. It was a difficult read, not because of Atkinson’s style but because of the content. The incredible waste and suffering of so many soldiers and civilians. I had prior to reading this book only a sketchy idea of the Italian campaign. Growing up in Toronto, my next door neighbour was a Canadian Combat Engineer Major who I believe had been in Italy during the war. I thought of him often while reading this book. Highly recommended.

Monticello

Originally uploaded by canuckshutterer (W.J. Gibson).

visited here back in 2002, have only travelled twice since then, maybe it is time for another journey, however without a current passport I may have to limit myself to Canada, which is no bad thing.

this house was designed by Jefferson and is beautiful, thoughtful, and much smaller than I had anticipated….

you can see the two wing buildings on the edges of frame left and right….running underground between the two wings and the central main house are storage, work rooms and servants (slaves) rooms…

the house is situated on the top of a hill and has wonderful views in several directions.

Just finished reading “This Just In: What I Couldn’t Tell You On TV” by CBS Newsman Bob Schieffer (published in 2003). What a great book. He explains a lot about American news television reporting and its evolution and a lot about American politics. Read this book and learn and laugh and appreciate a hard working reporter.

He explains things like the technical struggle pre-video tape and electronic linkage that we take for granted today in the 24 hour news world.  I wished he had written more about his time in Buenos Aires covering the Falklands War. What he does share suprised me and gave me a new if somewhat surreal view of that war.

His chapter on the coverage of the 9/11 attack is very moving.

I confess I stayed up last night and raced to the end, could not put down the book, such a well-written piece of work. Actually as you read it you just accelerate to run with the story, and begin to take the writing for granted, which I imagine would please Schieffer.

At the end of WWII, the war time William Donovan’s OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and Hoover’s FBI fought to see who would control international intelligence service for the US. They both lost, kind of. This book describes the men and women who played significant roles in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its inception and through a multitude of disasters through the Cold War. If it wasn’t so serious and if so many lives had not been lost, it would be a comedy.

One tale I had not run across before is that of the revolt in East Germany in 1953. American intelligence was completely unaware of how vulnerable the Soviet puppet government was at that early time in the Cold War.

Kim Philby and Igor Orlov (Soviet agents) figure in the story, as well as Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, William Harvey, and George Weisz.

“On January 31, 1931, two Italian day laborers, Luis DeDominichi and Guiseppi Tedeschi, died as the result of a fall. Four others — steelworker Reuben Brown and carpenters Sigus Andreasen, Frank Sullivan, and A. Carlson — would join them before construction was complete.”

Nearest Thing to Heaven: the empire state building and american dreams by Mark Kingwell

recommended T. Jefferson Parker’s Little Saigon. excellent thriller, I will be hunting for more of his work.

reading Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas, which is one of those marvelous history books  that pauses along the main route and provides mini histories – for example, I found out that the Elks were first formed in NYC mainly by actors who needed a club to drink on Sundays when new blue laws were introduced….the main route is the trial of men accused of conspiracy in the murder of former Idaho Governor Francis Steunenberg in 1905. It describes the battles between miners, mine owners, unions, the Pinkertons and other detective agencies (mainly spies for big business in this time period) and who shows up but Clarence Darrow, Ethel Barrymore, Eugene Debs, and baseball pitcher, Walter Johnston. It is a big book and a big story and a wonderful read.

US Grant in his memoirs does not write at great length about his childhood. He briefly mentions buying a horse while he was a boy. At the age of four, the horse went blind and was sold. Ten years later he recognized the horse on a tread wheel on a river boat. He does not mention his reaction.

I tried to imagine the life of that horse, the change from being a boy’s horse to being blind and then working as a tread wheel horse on a river boat. Then I thought of all the horses killed in the Civil War. And then the men blinded in that war, the men killed.

Then once again I was back with that young man looking at that blind horse.

Gene M has been buying old cameras for several years and often finds unfinished rolls of film inside. He has mastered the art and science of using current film chemistry to develop old film. But more importantly he opens these "time capsules" and we are then able to see the past.

here is a recent page showing an old Kodak Brownie camera that used the old 620 film format Brownie Flash 620

The link below is the main photographic page for the site. Click on Films Found in Old Cameras and marvel at what Gene has accomplished in his photographic archaeology.

Gene M photography site

It is also wonderful to see these old cameras, some very basic photographic technology, put to use to make present day photographs of surprising quality.