Oddments of Different Kinds ~~~

While searching for something else I stumbled upon this superb video cartoon, it's one segment of a half-hour film, Why Man Creates written by Saul Bass and Mayo Simon, and directed by Saul Bass, available in full HERE The rest of the film is interesting, but this segment, The Edifice Sequence is the stand-out, in my opinion.

This photograph is one of husband's vintage acquisitions. He posted it on his Flickr pages recently, wondering whether anyone might recognise the subjects, who have a rather VIP/"celeb" air about them, and appear to have arrived in, or are about to depart from, Hawaii. From the woman's hat style one commenter puts the date of the pic around the mid 1930s. Some commenters suggested names, not always seriously: Cantinflas (from husband) but he'd have been the wrong age in the mid-1930s; Ethel Rosenberg, Shelby Foote, Tim Curry's uncle......

Does any passing reader here recognise either the woman or the man?

Peter Mark Roget, he of the famous Thesaurus, was born at this time of year (18 January 1779, in London): Capricorn/Aquarius cusp country:

Snippets: Pocket Paradigms from the Writings of Sam Smith

Media
The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know it's being used.

Politics
The system that envelops us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it." The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing houses, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms from the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century of human existence. What should be merely portraits on the wall of our memories run our lives still, like parents who retain perpetual hegemony over the souls of their children.

Why bother? Only to be alive. Only to be real, to be made not just of what we acquire or our adherence to instruction, but of what we think and do of our own free will. Only, Winston Churchill said, to fight while there is still a small chance so we don't have to fight when there is none. Only to climb the rock face of risk and doubt in order to engage in the most extreme sport of all -- that of being a free and conscious human. Free and conscious even in a society that seems determined to reduce our lives to a barren pair of mandatory functions: compliance and consumption.

Life is a endless pick-up game between hope and despair, understanding and doubt, crisis and resolution.

On a lighter note, something from the husband's blog Thinks Happen (vintage 2008) also via Flickr. He used to write fanciful narratives to some of his vintage found photographs- not everybody "gets" this type of deightful wackiness, but I always have... and that's what got me where I am today, I guess. ;-)

It was to be a work-free week-end in the hills at the famous Woodsnipe Walls Manor for the members of the Waistdeep Nature Club. After gathering for the get-away in the gilded grand foyer, the group wandered out on the grounds for this group picture to commemorate the great event.

Just as the photographer yelled “pose” someone pinched the butt of Geary Stype, standing third from the right. Geary obviously suspects Gilda Goldflue standing just to his left. Gilda is ignoring him, of course. Geary did not see the guilty grin on Baldwin Molepost, just to his right. Actually Baldwin is grinning because he is secretly wearing a tie fashioned from a scarf belonging to Caldera Soo (standing, far left). Caldera designed her own blouse, hat and matching scarf. This morning her scarf went missing.Caldera, it must be noted is standing next to B. F. D. Blasko the well known vampire and vacuum cleaner repairman. They are not related.

The women of course perceived immediately that there were not enough men to go around. The men, of course, in typical masculine fashion, perceived that there were not enough women to go around.

All the girls are wearing hats for identification purposes.

Inside, the cook was making celery soup and singing "Heart and Soul” along with the wireless which was playing, “Night on Bald Mountain” by the Harmonicats.

Someone noted later in green ink, that Ivie Leak (seated fourth from left) was not a Waistdeep Nature Club member at all but an undercover writer for Popular Séance magazine.

But then, that’s another story, isn't it?