LIFE photo archives online

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1850s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

LIFE photo archive

Short term memory checker

My memory being what it is I luckily can't remember how badly I did.......
Start worrying about your failing mental faculties here

Vintage Geisha postcards

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

And now for something completely different...

The Monty Python channel on YouTube

Frost Fair

"Gateshead's Nordic Festival features a Frost Fair from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th November, taking place on Performance Square and in the Gateshead Heritage Centre, both adjacent to The Sage Gateshead. The Sage Gateshead plays host to some breathtaking street theatre and music on the Saturday and Sunday - but there will also be outdoor music from folk degree students, food and gift stalls and some very special reindeer! At 1pm and 6pm, look out for Los Kaos Theatre Company's Bjorn and Ursula: Bjorn is a very realistic polar bear, and with his Inuit herder Ursula, you'll learn lots about polar bears in their own icy landscape. At 3pm and 5pm, Pipers Wyrd will charm and captivate you with their three Northumbrian pipes in harmony. At 4pm, Swedish duo Fidola performs a magical fusion of Scandinavian, Estonian and British music."

More details and a downloadable programme here

Currently at the Laing

Two temporary exhibitions are well worth a visit if you've half an hour to spare, a perfect break from all that frenzied christmas shopping.....

"A dramatic new video installation by innovative British artist Catherine Yass will be on show at the Laing Art Gallery from 1 November 2008 to 11 January 2009.

HIGH WIRE draws on Yass's filmed footage of high wire artist Didier Pasquette, walking between three tower blocks in North Glasgow's Red Road, more than 90 metres above the ground.

The work explores the relationship between the enclosed psychological space inhabited by Pasquette, the architecture surrounding him and the open space through which he is moving.

The piece includes footage shot from a head camera worn by Pasquette, along with three other viewpoints, as he undertakes the walk with no harness or safety wires." (more)

....perhaps not for those of you who suffer from vertigo!

AND

Sir Stanley Spencer

"A major exhibition of work by one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century is on show at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle.

Stanley Spencer, which is organised by Tate Liverpool, brings together sketches and paintings which span Spencer's life as an artist, including early sketches, visionary biblical scenes, and portraits from the Tate collection.The exhibition includes a number of self portraits, from Self Portrait, 1914, when the artist was in his early twenties, to a final self portrait painted in 1959, the year Spencer died." (more)

Runs until 11 January 2009

Party tricks

With the festive season fast approaching you're going to need some of the above tricks to keep those parties going with a swing....no really! Click the image to enlarge.

Found at ModernMechanix

Where on earth am I?

Well, Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5.00pm I'm precisely here. MyGeoPosition.com does the number crunching, you just drag the marker.

(Christmas) shop-till-you-drop....in the great outdoors

(the picture came from here)

The festive season is almost upon us so here's some dates for your diary....
Newcastle Continental Market (looks like it's happening in Old Eldon Sq this year) runs from Monday 24 November until Saturday 6 December
Newcastle Christmas Market takes over from Wednesday 10 December till Sunday 14 December
Newcastle Christmas Arts and Craft Fairs (Grainger Market) 13 and 20 December
Whitley Bay St Nicholas' Festival 5-6 December (flyer can be downloaded from this page)
North Shields Victorian Market 13-14 December (link)
and don't forget the......
NewcastleGateshead Winter Festival (webpage and brochure)
Glow looks good this year!
Thursday 11 to Monday 15 December
"This year Glow will highlight some of Newcastle's medieval town walls using large scale architectural light projections to present and join together sites both grand and intimate that are rarely seen by tourists or known to local residents. Several phases of development have radically altered Newcastle's visual landscape, and the trail aims to reveal buildings, spaces and views largely lost to the public, tucked away and "hiding" amongst late 20th century roads, buildings and development."

The Doves of Cullercoats

Some local (Cullercoats) history for you..... 10mb pdf available to download from archive.org or you can read it online using their flipbook viewers here and here (beta version with more advanced features)

Bunny Concert

Watch with caution.....you'll be humming the tune all day!

Where's the Path?

Google aerial photos alongside Ordnance Survey Maps.....nice! (warning for evening users....there's a 30,000 cap on the number of daily OS images displayed, morning use recommended)

Where's the Path

Europa Film Treasures

Europa Film Treasures is a vintage film archive and well worth a click. The above screengrab is from 'Butterflies' (there's a link to watch the film at the bottom of the page) Currently there's 50+ short films to view, with documentation and teaching materials in the pipeline

1832 - Cholera in Newburn

Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal Exhibiting a Concise View of the Latest and Most Important Discoveries in Medicine, Surgery, and Pharmacy

Click on the link above for the full story

German gargoyle

So this specimen (looks like he's got a bit of a cold!) was the nearest I got to a germanic gargoyle...in the main they tend towards heroic/religious figures or the empty helmet motif, but maybe that's just Berlin.

Cold War Classic

Jested Telecommunications Tower and Hotel - Cold War Modern from Victoria & Albert Museum on Vimeo.

"Designed in 1963, the hotel and telecommunications tower on top of Ještěd mountain are one of the most extraordinary architectural achievements of the entire Eastern Bloc. A piece of bravura engineering on a very difficult site, the cone-shaped tower continues the profile of the mountain to a perfect vertical point. The theme of space travel is reinforced by decorative meteorites set into theconcrete core inside."

I've added this to my list of 'places to visit before I die'!

Feelgood timewasters

Sometimes you need to justify your timewasting activities (even if it's only to yourself)....here's 4 possibilities.....

"Galaxies evolve over billions of years, which is why like evolutionary biologists, we can't just sit there and watch galaxies change. Instead, we need to look at the fossil record contained in the galaxies around us which provides only *one* snapshot of the universe.
The way scientists get around this problem is by analysing pictures of galaxies with up-to-date technology in as much detail as possible. Astronomers have spent many decades trying to measure basic galaxy properties such as age, mass or dustiness that may give us some clues as to how they formed and evolved and what precisely the connection between spiral and elliptical galaxies is. However, most studies of galaxies so far have only looked at a few dozen or hundred galaxies in the nearby universe and many aspects of galaxy formation and evolution are still a mystery.
However, with the advent of the 21st century the age of large-scale astronomical surveys has arrived! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking images of a large portion of the sky and will eventually find a million galaxies. With such a large number of galaxies, astronomers can finally begin to understand how they form and evolve by comparing various populations to each other with large enough numbers to draw real conclusions about their origin.
But out of these million galaxies, how do we know which are spirals and which are ellipticals? The answer is simple: look at them! Indeed, until now galaxies have been classified by visual inspection of their images. And in fact, technology is of little help here. It turns out that the human brain is far better than a computer at recognising the patterns that divide ellipticals from spirals. So visual inspection works well for a handful, or even several hundred objects....but one million? There are just too many galaxies for even the most dedicated of astronomers to look at. We need thousands of people to inspect galaxy images and to classify them as spiral or elliptical. We need you to help us."

Give the dedicated astronomers a break at Galaxy Zoo

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help.

foldit homepage

Now this one needs a bit more focus, involving transcribing scans of vintage (UK) data for the greater good....so possibly not for the faint-hearted (I've done a few stints, enjoyable but hard on the eyes!) They say "FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records."

Find out more at FreeBMD





But let's just say you can't be arsed with all the above but you're quite happy for your computer to search for extraterrestrial life while you're having a nice cup of tea and your screen saver kicks in....no problem.....

"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

SETI@home

Gerty

From The Gertrude Bell Project at Newcastle University, an archive of her diaries and photographs

"Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was born in Washington, in what was then Co. Durham, but, when she was very young, she moved with her family to Redcar. She was educated first of all at home, and then at school in London; finally, in a time when it was not at all usual for a woman to have a university education, she went to Oxford to read history, and, at the age of twenty and after only two years study, she left with a first-class degree. In the years immediately following, she spent time on the social round in London and Yorkshire, she travelled extensively in Europe, and visited Persia. Her travels continued with two round the world trips, in 1897-1898 and in 1902-1903. At about this time too, in the seasons1899-1904, her climbing exploits in the Alps earned her renown as a mountaineer.

But from the turn of the century onwards, her life was governed by a love of the Arab peoples, inspired, it seems, by a visit to friends in Jerusalem in 1899-1900. She learned their language, investigated their archaeological sites, and travelled deep into the desert, accompanied only by male guides. Her knowledge of the country and its tribes thereby gained made her a prime target for recruitment by British Intelligence during the First World War, later, as a Political Officer, and then as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad, she became a king-maker in the new state of Iraq, which she had helped to create. Her first love, however, was always for archaeology, and, as Honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq, she established in Baghdad the Iraq Museum."

Pretty Polly

Edward Lear was better known for his 'Owl and the Pussycat' genre of nonsense rhymes....well, I certainly didn't know he was a talented illustrator anyway. The above from an interesting post about his life and work(with links to lots more large scans) over at BibliOdysey

But if you're just up for nonsense, click through his book of the same here (Hint: click on the images to enlarge)

A Benwell Murder....1811

From the Crime Broadsheets Project at the Harvard Law School Library: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders

Power napping

Now I don't usually need any help taking a 'power nap' while staring at a computer screen...it seems to go with the territory. But here's 3 variations (electronic, classical and nature) to listen to online or download. Think they last about 20 minutes each.....yawn, well maybe......zzzzzz

Napsounds online

Tipping Point

I posted about Tipping Point when there was only one chapter (it's an online point and click adventure game).....but it's now up to chapter 4 so......

Play all 4 here

Back from foreign parts

So I'm back from Berlin....as you can see from the picture on the left the weather wasn't the best, that's the Fernsehturm (TV tower) in Alexanderplatz disappearing into the mist....we didn't bother going to the top! A`whistlestop tour.....

• Alexanderplatz
• Unter den Linden
• Brandenburger Tor
• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
• Potsdamer Platz
• Berlin Wall Documentation Centre
• Gemaeldegalerie
• Altes Museum
• Berliner Dom
• Hackescher Markt (video, not mine)
• Olympiastadion

....and for a bit of retail therapy Ka De We
I'm all walked out, half a stone heavier and sporting a German chest infection....never mind, soon be Christmas! I'll post some pictures of the trip (and severely hung-over students) when I get round to downloading the camera.

Bad Welsh

.....The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

The rest of the story here

And after the trick-or-treaters are tucked up in bed I'll be watching......

Nosferatu.....

1001.....

....cleans a big, big carpet, for less than half a crown......whoops, sorry, nostalgia for the joys of early UK TV advertising and substantially lower prices got the better of me there! Just to report that we've got 1001 posts under our belts and are still staggering along.

But should you feel the urge for celebrating the occasion with a substantial (it runs to 16 volumes, so definitely not for the faint-hearted, or prudish for that matter!) dose of culture, can I suggest "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night" at archive.org ....plain vanilla text available for download. Wikipedia article with lots of links here

It wouldn't be Halloween if I wasn't listening to.....

Soooo.....why change the habits of a lifetime?

Ninja Cat

Berlin bound

Come Monday and you might catch me (along with aforementioned 50 quantity surveyors) on this live webcam on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, our hotel is over to the left and the U-bahn station to the right. So now all I've got to do is pack, and there won't be much because we're flying steerage with a 15kg hold baggage allowance, the ball gown and fur coat are on ice!

The 'DO' Lectures

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but better late than never!

"The Do lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about."
The lecures are all online here

Here's a sample
Andy Cummins....Surfers Against Sewage Campaign Officer
"Andy started surfing way back in 1992 in the North East. Back then surfing in the North Sea was similar to surfing in an open sewer. This served as great inspiration and drive to bring about change, but at 15 he never thought he could be an active part of that movement, so the most he did was join Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) and tag along to actions and events in his area.
Since then, travelling, experience and education has helped open his eyes to the scale of abuse our oceans and seas suffer at our hands. He has been a full time SAS campaigner since 2003, working on over 50 campaigns."

Spooky sounds from Saturn

NASA has posted some spooky sounds from the solar system....

Another spooky game

Ghostscape is a game where..... "You play a veteran investigator of the occult who, upon hearing rumors of a haunted house, cannot stay away...and what a paranormal gold mine it turns out to be! Chairs and cups move as if grasped by some invisible hand, mysterious diary entries litter the floor, grotesque paintings adorn every room. And then, of course, there are the ghosts. But who would believe you? Luckily, you have your trusty camera to provide proof." (via JayisGames)

Halloween lucky dip

There's some lovely vintage Halloween images here (the image above is one of them)

Also worth checking out is the Vintage Halloween Postcard pool for creepy cards.

Monsters in mid-1870s news prints from Pink Tentacle.....

"For a brief period in the mid-1870s, artistic woodblock prints known as “newspaper nishiki-e” were a popular form of mass entertainment in Japan. These colorful prints fed the public’s enormous appetite for sensationalism by retelling shocking stories culled from the major newspapers of the day. The Meiji government swiftly cracked down on the publishers of these “unofficial” sources of information, causing them to disappear as quickly as they had appeared, but not before hundreds of issues had been published and circulated around Japan."

The Hospital...an interactive artwork. Wander/click around a deserted, derelict hospital. As they say "Stay a while, stay forever"

Why not get in the Halloween mood with some Zero Budget Zombie Make-up

Scuttlebuggery is described as "sort of like a game of liquid soccer played between beetles with drops of absinthe and formaldehyde"....it had me beat, but I rather liked the music, and I'm guessing that if you get past the first level you get to hear more

Who knows, maybe more later......

Yum yum

Surveying Berlin.....again

And staying with the European theme, I'm off to Berlin on a fieldtrip very soon....check out the website, live the dream....imagine me tramping the streets with 50+ quantity surveyors! (I'll be the one at the back shouting 'two by two, hold hands while you cross that road, get a move on!'....it's rather like herding cats)

Here's one for Anne and John.....

.....just back from a long weekend in Paris (where apparently it was t-shirt weather....hang on, t-shirts, what are they?) They can relive the experience (of Paris, not the weather) at Paris en images....just a small collection of 25,000 pictures!

Scaring the kids....a lost art? Discuss.

Halloween cocktail.....

....just so you can buy in the essentials in advance!

Brain Hemorrhage
1/2 - 3/4 oz. Peach Schnapps
Float 1-2 Tbl. of Baileys on top
Drop 1 tsp of grenadine through the Baileys.

Apparently it tastes like peaches and cream

Link

Slow, slow, quick quick, slow.....

On my iGoogle homepage I have this widget that delivers up random free fonts to download....the one above is dance-step....which reminded me of the vintage joys of Victor Sylvester and his Silver Strings (I really must get out more!!) So anyway, if I'm suffering, you can too. (Just pray I can't find a picture of Edmundo Ross in one of his ruffle-sleeved signature shirts because then you're in REAL trouble!)

First off, the distinctive sound.....

Discover Victor Sylvester!

A vintage Victor struts his stuff in the 20's



....and some vintage "Come Dancing" (they sewed all the sequins on themselves!)

Jesmond Picture House

After standing empty for 15 years, the Jesmond Picture House is earmarked for demolition and replacement with a, no doubt faceless, office/shopping complex sometime soon (if the process hasn't already started....it's a while since I went 'the posh way round' on the Metro to town!) Seeing that there's a bit of a family connection (Uncle Elwood was the manager there at least until the early 70's and was always good for a free seat on a quiet night when my grant cheque didn't quite stretch) I thought a memorial post was in order to mark its passing.

From Wikipedia...."This suburban cinema opened in 1921 and survived well into the multiplex age. Made in America was the last film to be screened there when it finally closed its doors in October 1993."

The Jesmond didn't just do films, I remember seeing Alexi Sayle there in the mid 80's....it was described as "a memorably bawdy and raucous night", and I can vouch for the fact that it was!

In 2007 28DaysLater, the UK urban exporation group, 'gained access' (no names, no pack drill!) and took some pictures of the decayed interior....see them here together with scans of the Chronicle write-up

Your name here.....

I tried embedding this video from archive.org (where it's described as "The ultimate generic industrial film, built around every script and visual cliche") but Blogger was having none of it. Made in 1960, you can read more details and download the original here

Sunday timewaster

Play the Eyeballing Game

Bisect the angle, find the centre of the circle, find the mid-point of the line etc....strangely addictive even when you're rubbish at it (it took me ages to get that screen grab where I was even vaguely close!)

When concrete was king

I found this set of 35mm teaching slides at work today and scanned them in....they date from 1973.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Beatles do Shakespeare

Now I'm old enough to remember watching this live (and thinking that the Beatles made Shakespeare a bit more memorable than school did!).....the Fab Four doing the 'play within a play' from Midsummer Night's Dream.

Musical Mechanix

Surrey garages must be a bit bigger than we're used to in the North then!
via Modern Mechanix

Strike a light

Japanese matchboxes.....


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Puget soundscape

Listen to Puget Sound...

Ukuleles on the Tyne

A date for your musical diary, there's still tickets left! A taster follows......

Oliver Kilbourn - a retrospective

"Oliver Kilbourn (1904 – 1993) was a founder member of the Ashington Group, the former WEA art appreciation class that became widely known in the 1930’s as a body of artists committed to recording their working lives and their surroundings. Kilbourn developed a passion for painting, primarily as a painter himself but also for the work of others down the centuries. In the late Thirties and again in the Seventies he produced what he called ‘memoirs as a pitman’: three series of drawings and paintings detailing the working conditions he experienced as a boy of thirteen down the pit. The exhibition, from the artist’s estate, includes paintings and drawings never previously shown, among them pictures in Walpamur on board from the early days of the Group, studies of wartime blackout and wide-ranging landscapes as well as domestic scenes."

19 September– 31 October 2008
Northumbria University Gallery
Monday to Thursday 10am – 5pm, Friday and Saturday 10am to 4pm
Closed Sundays and Bank Holidays. Admission free.

Well worth a visit!

Snarling beast

I thought I'd start posting an occasional image of some local stone beasts I've come across recently. This snarling delight lives on Neville Hall (home of The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Westgate Rd, Newcastle....next door to the Lit and Phil)....he's rather splendid, don't you think?

Stay calm and stay in your homes

"A script written by the BBC and the government to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack has been published. The script, written in the 1970s and released by the National Archives, included instructions to "stay calm and stay in your own homes". It said communications had been disrupted, and the number of casualties and extent of damage were not known. Other papers reveal debates about how to ensure the person reading the script was authoritative and comforting. The script was discussed from 1973 to 1975, during the Cold War."

Read more, and download the transcript here

Graffiti Creator

Someone asked me to plaster a picture of a local beauty spot with mock graffiti today (don't ask!)....and not being that way artistically inclined I had to find something to aid the design process. Luckily I came across Graffiti Creator a while ago. Now it doesn't have a 'save' option, only 'print', but there's 2 workarounds if you want to use your tag as an image...
1 If you have a 'virtual' pdf printer installed just print to that, many image editing programmes are capable of opening pdfs where you can tidy the image up
2 That ever-useful PrtSc (Print Screen) key at the top of your keyboard works wonders too.

Welcome to Mars

"Two years ago, Ken Hollings (a UK journalist) presented a radio series called Welcome To Mars, his reflections on the "fantasy of science in the early years of the American Century." In this unscripted, engaging, and mind-bending series Ken connects the dots between nuclear war, LSD, flying saucers, the occult, weird science, B movies, and the birth of the space age. Ken's words are supported by an incredible outer space score prdocued by Simon James."

Listen to/download all 12 episodes here

A book based on the radio broadcasts is due to be published soon (details)

via BoingBoing

60's Newcastle

Starts Monday, click the image for bigger. A few more details here, (and click on the image for all the gory details of the Bainbridge Revlon Make-up counter......go on, double dog dare you!)

Rainbow....the X rated episode

Bubble Cars

Oh, how I wanted one!



There's a great post about the Bubble Car Museum at Nothing to See Here for the similarly afflicted.

A moment in time

"Muther Grumble existed for around 2 years between 1971-1973 it was produced by a motley group of people consisting of students, workers, the unemployed, trade unionists, pensioners, hippies, artists etc, etc. - anyone who wanted to be involved could be. Its aim was to give a voice to the people of the North East and act as a link between the many varied community/self-help groups which were springing up throughout the region at that time."

The online archive of all 17 issues (either read online or download as pdf)

What are you doing here?

because Dr Who REALLY wants to know!......

Animal crackers

Maw's Educated Ponies....
"When he retired in 1954, Mr Joseph Maw reminisced about his 44 years with educated animals. His first was a horse called Skylark, who could pick from a pile of handkerchiefs those colours named by the audience. Another was Daisy, who danced, and then there was Dolly, the Shetland pony who did sums and told fortunes. In addition, he had a troupe of performing dogs." No, no you can't leave me in suspense...tell me more

From the "North Shields, Life and Work, 1890-1930" Collection at Tomorrow's History