October Idyll

I would hope that you are equally enchanted by the imaginary 134th birthday of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.

His revolution, his progress were not ideals, their underbellies were too encroaching for that sort of nonsense.

Man with Spectacles

More of Dobuzhinsky: courtesy of “Olga”

It’s a supersordid world out there.

Love regards etc

Enjoy

This week, via the the Library of Congress flickr account, I came across the fantastic story of my (now) favourite ever ship.

In the 1850s it was employed as a prison ship off the coast of Australia, gaining notoriety when, in 1857 prisoners managed to murder the Superintendent of Prisons John Price. After this, it was “purchased by a group of entrepreneurs to be refitted as a museum ship to travel the world advertising the perceived horrors of the convict era.”

It then travelled to England before spending more than twenty years sailing up & down the east coast of the U.S., only falling into disrepair during the great depression, which coincided with a fall in the public’s appetite for buying museum tickets.

Now as far as I am concerned this, especially alongside the striking images of torture equipment makes for a fine tale. But the really remarkable thing about this museum about horror, pain & death, is that throughout its history, it retained the original name given to it. Which was the Success.

File under “Sublime Ironies”.

My thanks to Joho (the blog) who first alerted me to the existence of the LOC on the interwebs.

Love regards etc

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

This is a beautiful mirror for my sense of idealism. And also perhaps one of the reasons that i am forever obsessed with psychopathy

April 24, 1961

Dear Mr Goodman :

I received the first annual report of the Franklin Corporation and though I am not an expert at reading balance sheets, my financial advisor, (who, I assure you, knows nothing) nodded his head in satisfaction.

You wrote that you hope I am not one of those borscht circuit stockholders who get a few points’ profit and hastily scrams for the hills. For your information, I bought Alleghany Preferred eleven years ago and am just now going through the process of disposing of it.

As a brand new member of your family, strategically you made a ghastly mistake in sending me individual pictures of the Board of Directors. Mr Roth, Chairman of the Board, merely looks sinister. You, the president, look like a hard worker with not too much on the ball. No one named Prosswimmer can possibly be a success. As for Samuel A. Goldblith, Ph.D., head of Food Technology at M.I.T., he looks as though he had eaten too much of the wrong kind of fodder.

At this point I would like to stop and ask you a question about Marion Harper Jr. To begin with, I immediately distrust any man who has the same name as his mother. But the thing that most disturbs me about Junior is that I don’t know what the hell he’s laughing at. Is it because he sucked me into this Corporation? This is not the kind of face that inspires confidence in a nervous and jittery stockholder.

George S. Sperti, I dismiss instantly. Any man who is the President of an outfit called Institutum Divi Thomae will certainly bear watching. Is he trying to imopress stockholders with his knowledge of Latin? If so, why doesn’t he read, “Winnie ille Pu”? James J. Sullivan, I am convinced, is Paul E. Prosswimmer photographed from a different angle.

Offhand, I would say that I have summed up your group fairly accurately. I hope, for my sake, that I am mistaken.

In closing, I warn you, go easy with my money. i am in an extremely precarious profession whose livelihood depends upon a fickle public.

Sincerely yours,
Groucho Marx
(temporarialy at liberty)

This letter is found in The Groucho Letters which are excellent, and moreover the only truly sound investment I can think of in these Troubled Times. [non-affiliatelinkage]

Should anyone have/find copies of the photographs in question, I would be fascinated. My searches have been fruitles.

Love, regards, etc

I now have a favourite stationary company, D!rektrecycling. They make envelopes by recycling old maps.

[photo via notcot.com]

I can assure you it is far more fascinating to receive your invoices along with a snapshot of Schleswig-Flensburg than it is to get them in a plain envelope.

Then later that day, via FriendFeed I came across barcode revolution

Who are doing fantastic things to make barcodes more interesting. Which is a wonderful example of people putting great time & creativity into something that is normally just ignored and left as the standard “good enough”.

In fact both are things that can so easily be ignored, left at the default setting. But when you bother to think about even these things with a sense of vision & identity, well then now you’ve really got my attention.