Dylan-Cleveland-Amer.

Old-timey rock and roll trading cards

via growabrain

Sea glass

In the picture above, there is genuine beach sea glass on the left and on the right of the picture, artificially tumbled craft glass. This photo shows the artificial glass covered up.

Sea glass:

Sea glass (also known as beach glass, mermaid's tears, lucky tears, and many other names) is glass found on beaches along oceans or large lakes that has been tumbled and smoothed by the water and sand, creating small pieces of smooth, frosted glass.

Sea glass is one of the very few cases of a valuable item being created from the actions of the environment on man-made litter.

Sea Glass: The Search on the Shore (it's harder to find these days)
North American Sea Glass Association

Civil War News: Friendly Enemies

Civil War News Cards Text:

52 - FRIENDLY ENEMIES
Chattanooga, Tenn. - Sept. 10, 1863
CHATTANOOGA TO UNION AFTER BATTLE
The bodies of the dead and wounded covered the battlefield for miles, after the Northern Army came storming into Chattanooga. Led by General Rosecrans, the Union Army gained control of the larger Southern city at the cost of many lives. Nurses and Physicians were hard to recruit to the actual battlefront and often those who might have been saved bled to death. Since medical aid could not be administered to all, often two wounded soldiers would try to help and bandage one another. Shirt sleeves were applied as tourniquets to stop bleeding from wounds, and head bandages were made from old handkerchiefs. Once wounded, the soldiers no longer thought of war, and only tried to help themselves survive.

Bob Heffner's Civil War News Cards HomePage

via Bifurcated Rivets

Mort de Harris (1824)

image: LoC

trialsanderrors' photostream:

A depiction of the death of Thomas Harris, a balloon pioneer who, according to legend, sacrificed his life for his fiancee when the balloon they were riding in lost altitude fast and threatened to kill both passengers on impact.

The ninth card from an uncut set of ten, labeled "Collection 476, 2ème série", issued by Romanie & Cie. in the late 19th Century, to commemorate events in ballooning history from 1795 to 1846.

A Man of Leisure

NYPLDigitalGallery

via Fred's Tumblr

Travelling Commode in form of Large Book

Bloomsbury Auctions:

383. Travelling Commode in form of Large Book. Wooden folio book titled on spine: Historia Universalis. [France]: 18th Century, Oak and calf leather, Folio (Closed: 500 mm high x 90 long (binding) x 380 mm deep. Full calf covers elaborately blind-stamped in geometric design over oak boards, spine with lettering label in red morocco paneled in gilt, 6 raised bands. The folio opens to reveal two oaken boards that can be folded out to form a closed square and one board lifted upward to become the seat, the hole in the middle ready to hold a chamber pot. The box rests on four small wooden pegs, the binding protected by a small brass plate at the foot. Condition: clasps possibly renewed in 19th century, seat cracked, old restorations, minor losses to calf.

An unusual example of the use of the book form to disguise travelling personal furniture, probably for use on the military field. Other examples include a piece of furniture at the Chateau de Lamothe-Fenelon in the Dordogne, consists of a pile of folios on short legs with a lid to open, but is not portable. Other examples listed in Komrij, Kaka fonie, p, 286, and plate V.

est. $1500 – $2500

For the well-prepared 19th century spy? I guess the paper was used up long ago.

via Bibliophile Bullpen

Elvis Presley's gun permit application for sale

Telegraph:

Elvis Presley fans have been given the rare opportunity to buy the only authenticated set of his fingerprints in existence, as long as they have £75,000 to spare.

and get a load of this:

Other lots up for sale include a bustier worn by Marilyn Monroe during the filming of Some Like it Hot, the lyrics of Sexy Sadie hand-carved into a piece of wood by John Lennon, and a portrait of Jimi Hendrix on a Yamaha Pacifier guitar painted by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.

The most sought-after items are expected to be the last notebook written by Jim Morrison of the Doors and the former Beatles manager Brian Epstein's own copy of his signed contract with the group, which alone is expected to fetch £250,000.

Victorian Trade Cards

Victorian Trade Cards Digital Collection:

This digital collection was created using a scrapbook of Victorian-era advertising cards from the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections department. Products being advertised include clocks, jewelry, food, and medicine. The advertisement images are often whimsical and bear little relation to the company or product being advertised. (Note: Viewers should be warned that some of the text and images from this collection are considered racially offensive by today's standards.)

Some, like the one above, are just straight-up weird.

via hanuman

stray bullets

Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.

Making an Arguement for Misspelling Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether. Disagree. Lern too spel, dumas.

Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past.

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.

The couple who lived in a mall After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way -- they moved in.

Macbeth (1040-57) King of Scotland Macbeth lived during brutal times. He defeated Duncan I in 1040 and reigned for seventeen years. His story differs from Shakespeare's play written nearly six centuries later.

also:
How can I survive a night in the Alaskan wilderness?
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene (via)
List of problems solved by MacGyver (via)
The Olympics with MST3k If I hadn't recorded it, I'd think I'm losing my mind. (don't miss it, MSTies) (via)
Cthuugle The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine (via)
Musée Patamécanique (via)

viddy:
RIAA Lawsuit Victim Becomes Free Culture Activist
World's Largest Record Collection (it's for sale and quite a bargain at $3 million for 2.5 million records)
Jean-Luc Godard: YouTubed
Monty Python on Public TV in 1975

Vintage Boxing Cards (c.1910)

Baseball-Cards.com

via Little Hokum Rag

stray bullets

Why I'm an illegal downloader My appetite for the more recherché stuff that cinema and DVD distributors ignore has turned me, regretfully, into an outlaw Interesting rationale, but I wouldn't worry too much, they tend to go after people that go for the high profile, mainstream stuff. If you have ever downloaded and used Peer Guardian, you'll certainly know what I'm talking about. (via)

IBM software acts as human memory backup Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting? Well, you're not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. I've always felt that someone would come up with a pair of glasses that would prompt you on the details of the situation around you, help you remember your To Do List or remember birthdays and the names of a customer's kids, but having this ability on your phone or computer is more practical. Think of all the times you would have liked to dial up a conversation when there was a dispute over what was said. This new technology will change the way we live in a measurable way.

Unknown Beatles tape could go for £12,000 A Unique recording made by The Beatles in the 1960s has been unearthed in the attic of a house in Liverpool. (via)

also:
The Awful Truth: Cary Grant on LSD! (not really news, but for those of you who missed it....)
10 SKills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything (sometimes it feels like our lives are being "hacked" to bits, but I thought this was a good one) (via)
10 Shark-Infested Beaches (via)

viddy:
South Park Imaginationland: The Movie free uncensored directors' cut (via)
An anthropological introduction to YouTube Excellent, entertaining and edifying. (via)

Bloop: The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown. Because the Bloop noise originated near the location of the fictional sunken city of R'lyeh from H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu", the Bloop has been linked to Cthulhu by Lovecraft fans. (via)

Geektopia

You think you have a formidable collection of geekabilia? Step off sonny, you got nothin' on this guy.
via Crooked Brains

Wacky Packages

wackypackages.org
via THE FIRE WIRE