photographed in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois on August 2, 2008

Meanwhile, Jamie Lidell was holding court on the MySpace stage. When we saw him at Pitchfork last year, we were bowled over by the way he used his voice manipulations and loops to create a solo symphony. This year, we were equally impressed, but this time by his full band performance. While we still dug his vocal acrobatics, we couldn’t help but long for more action with his backing band, especially on songs from his most recent LP, Jim. “Little Bit Of Feel Good” was one of the stand-outs for us, as was watching Lidell jump, dance, and strut around the stage with style. He brought the funk-infused soul that we had been hoping for from Duffy on Friday, and then some.

Excerpted from the Chicagoist’s second-day recap of the 2009 Lollapalooza festival.

photographed in Cozumel, Mexico on July 26, 2008

A breathing tube will let you swim or float effortlessly. Finding a dollar bill on the bottom of the Atlantic was as big a surprise as if I’d seen Wilbur Shaw pacing a tricycle race. It was in a tangle of seaweed 10 feet down in the clear water of Key West, Florida. I was snorkeling along, surface-diving occasionally to pick up a shell, when I saw it.

Why. Even when you don’t find sunken treasure, snorkeling is a lot of fun. More of these gadgets than ever are being used this summer. The purpose is not to make a submarine out of you, churning along with all but the tube tip submerged. Instead, the idea is to let you breathe normally while swimming or floating face down.

Exerpted from ‘What You Can Do with a Snorkel’ by Denis Sneigr. Appearing in Popular Science, July 1953.

photographed in Ellendale, Minnesota on September 25, 2008

Q. (By Mr. Conger). How do your prices compare on the line of road you operate on in relation to distance from this market? Do you pay as much for the grain at the farthest point as you do at a nearer point? – A. No, not exactly; but the railroads in the tariff rates for a long distance will haul grain pretty close the local. The long haul is what you are after.

Q. Then you pay approximately as much for grain 1,000 miles as 300 miles from Chicago? – A. Yes. look at the fish industry at Fairhaven. We can ship fish from Puget Sound to Boston as the same rate as we can ship to Chicago. That is on account of these proportionate rates. Now, I have always complained about these proportionate rates, because I do not think they are right. You can start to-day a train of 50 carloads of grain; you can have in that 50-carload train 25 carloads destined to Chicago, and I will have 25 cars billed through; on the same train; identically the same service performed. When it gets to Chicago, you say, “Mr. Counselman, I wish you would clean that grain for me.” “All right,” I clean it. I put it out on the eastern train, and these other 25 cars come in and make up the eastern train of 50 cars. Twenty-five cars will pay, say, 38 cents on to New York; the other grain, that you had cleaned here, will pay a 40-cent rate. Now, they have performed identically the same service, but charge you the additional rate simply because you did not bill it through.

Excerpted from a testimony by Charles Counselman, a grain and stock merchant in Chicago, on November 17, 1899, as recorded in Report of the Industrial Commission on Transportation, Volume IV. Printed by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1900.

photographed in Louisville, Kentucky on November 14, 2007

Now, in our world, many many people are studying for better life in the future. There are two ways of doing this : studying at home and studying with a group. From my own experience, I prefer to the second choice, studying with a group.

Firstly, studying with a group, students can save time. If one has a mathematical problem, it may take him a lot of time to think about a solution for it, he may have to read several books, post to some forums in the internet and so on. But if he studies in a group, other student can give him some advice and suggestions and he can solve the problem quickly.

Secondly, students can gain better result. I would like to take an example of learning English. When one studies alone, reading books, listening to cassette tapes and speaking to himself are very boring and he may not get the expected result. It would be wonderful if he studies with other, they can practise speeking English, do some vocabulary quizes. I am sure that after a short time, his skills will be much better.

Morever, it will encourage students to study harder and harder because no one wants to be lagged behind. They always think that if the others can solve the problem, why they can not. So it is the great motivation for them to learn more. It is also a good experience for them in the future when they work, because the world now is more competive, people have to compete to gain success.

In conclusion, I think studying in a group is better for students. they can save time, get good results and are under pressure to work harder. They are very essential to a sucessful man in our harsh society.

Excerpted from a message board asking TOEFL question Topic 184: ‘Some students prefer to study alone. Others prefer to study with a group of students. Which do you prefer? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer,’ found on the Test Magic forums.

photographed in Tijuana, Mexico on August 15, 2006

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — This Mexican border city is planning a fashion makeover for its throngs of street vendors by giving them an ultimatum: Wear brightly colored, traditional garb or leave.

The new dress code initially took effect June 25 in a popular pedestrian mall in time for the busy Fourth of July weekend — although most vendors ignored it and wore jeans and sweat-jackets.

But it will gradually be extended to other streets, including Avenida Revolucion — the bustling main tourist drag where one vendor donned a giant sombrero with the words “Mr. Viagra” written on it. He beckoned tourists to be photographed for $5 in a donkey cart.

The new decree, ordered by flamboyant Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, is designed to showcase the city’s melting pot of Mexican cultures to the outside world. He said the fashion mandate will allow visitors to “feel Mexico.” Those who disobey will be given two warnings and then forced to leave the area where the dress code applies.

The dresses “are very nice, very clean, very colorful, very happy-looking,” he told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday in his City Hall office, which he shares with a caged parakeet, a parrot and a python in a glass tank.

Excerpted from ‘Tijuana orders fashion makeover for street vendors,’ published July 4, 2005, in the USA Today.

photographed in Denver, Colorado on May 15, 2009

Scientific minds have ponderously traced the silhouette in Persian and Turkish art. They call our attention to the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphics are conventionalized silhouettes with full-faced eyes in profile faces. Indeed, so seriously do they trail the collateral branches in cameos and bas-reliefs, that I await a thesis on “A Comparative Study of the Silhouette Value of my Hearth Rug.” I can even fancy a theological monograph tracing a relationship between the practice of preserving the silhouette and the ancient superstition that a man who lost his shadow lost his soul …

It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the little black figures got their distinctive name. The art had been called “profile-cutting,” “cut-paper-work,” “Shadowography;” Étienne Silhouette, Controller-General of France in the time of Louis XV., who fathered the term “silhouettes.” This man was infamous then, and is famous now, for trying to put the country on a sound economic basis. He translated English financial writings, cut down royal pensions, preached thrift, and thus made himself generally unpopular. His frugal amusement was taking the profiles of his friends with a camera obscura or profile-machine – frugal, because this mechanical contrivance had brought down the price of silhouettes, while reducing their artistic value.

Excerpted from ‘Shadows of the War,’ by Mary Alden Hopkins. Appeared in Everybody’s Magazine, volume XXXV, July-December 1916. Published by the Ridgeway Company.

photographed along Route 209 in Eastern Pennsylvania near the Middle Delaware on October 6, 2008

A rural Cemetery seems to combine in itself all the advantages, which can be proposed to gratify human feelings, or tranquilize human fears; to secure the best religious influences, and to cherish all those associations, which cast a cheerful light over the darkness of the grave.

And what spot can be more appropriate than this, for such a purpose? Nature seems to point it out with significant energy, as the favorite retirement for the dead. There are all around us the varied features of her beauty and grandeur – the forest-crowned height; the deep glen; the grassy glade; and the silent grove. Here are the lofty oak, the beech, that “wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,” the rustling pine, and the drooping willow; – the tree, that sheds its pale leaves with every autumn, a fit emblem of our own transitory bloom; and the evergreen, with its perennial shoots, instructing us, that “the wintry blast of death kills not the buds of virtue.”

Excerpted from ‘Of Useful Knowledge. Cemetery of Mount Auburn.’ appearing in American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Boston Bewick Co., 1839.

photographed in Niles, Ohio on October 9, 2006

While we have been wandering through the building, and stumbling here and there among the poles and scaffolding, the time has flown – it is nine o’clock: at the first stroke of the bell everything stands still; and all rush away to breakfast. Let us see what kind of a thing is a French workman’s breakfast. It is neither the meal porridge of the Scotch not the tea and toast of the English. While the labourers eat modestly, in the open air, the morsel of pork, or the lump of sour cheese, together with huge wedges from the enormous loaf, which you cannot have failed to remark tucked under their arms upon their arrival at the scene of their operations, the companion-masons resort to the nearest wine-seller, who has prepared them an ample breakfast of their favorite soup, a kind of vegetable pottage, flanked with fried potatoes and other roots, among which the carrot ranks as a conspicuous delicacy – the bread, brought by the workmen themselves, forming the solid portion of the meal. The whole is quantified with a quantity of cheap light wine; and last of all, a pipe. At ten o’clock all resume their work until two, when the soup and ceremony of the morning are repeated, and the day terminates at six in the evening.

Excerpted from ‘The Masons of Paris,’ appearing on page 254 of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Volume X, number 235 to 261, July-December 1848. Published by William and Robert Chambers, Edinburgh.

photographed in Pass-A-Grille, Florida on May 3, 2009

At the bus station in Krakow, I stopped to take a photograph of an old man and woman covered in blackish rags, their faces overcome by sleep. Their slack bodies, immobile behind an iron bar, were pressed against a staircase, in between the narrow opening separating it from a road map. And there they were, hunched over, exhausted, propped against the metal bar like oversize marionettes in a booth. T. upbraided me for taking the picture, and I found his resistance interesting. Physically, I could have taken the picture since I didn’t have to confront the gaze of the man and woman. They were asleep, so the photograph would have had no effect on them, only on those around them, their fellow citizens. T. asked me why I wanted to take the picture, and I argued, wrongly perhaps, that it disturbed me. Yes it wasn’t because of its social implications that I was disturbed. He said to me, “That picture has already been taken a hundred times, it’s only interesting because it’s different than from where you live,” and that seemed both reasonable and unreasonable. Reasonable because it’s true that a photograph acquires value only through a displacement in time and space. Unreasonable because his statement was a stupid taunt about my immediate desire that forced me to think: if I think, I can’t take the picture.

Excerpted from ‘Example of a Travel Photograph,’ an essay in Ghost Image by Hervé Guibert. Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1996. Translated from the French by Robert Bononno.

photographed on I-275 North Over the Sunshine Skyway on May 3, 2009 by Michelle Ehlert

Before breakfast, I padded down to the beach and scanned Tampa Bay. In the morning haze I glimpsed two majestic sailboats cresting a huge wave more than a mile offshore. I waited for the boats to dip back into the water, but they didn’t move. Behind them, I suddenly noticed what looked like twin railroad bridges, one of them missing a large section. It was then that I realized how different the new Sunshine Skyway is from its predecessor – aesthetically as well as structurally.

[…]

Bridge designers chose an elliptical shape for the Sunshine Skyway’s piers, which are paired to support the main pylons. The piers are more flexible in the longitudinal direction, permitting expansion and contraction in the bridge. But they resist bending in the other direction, so they’re less vulnerable to broadside winds. Engineers say the bridge can withstand hurricane gusts of 190 mph. In the water, cylindrical bumpers protect the piers from ship impact … Some [concrete roadway] segments weight as much as 124 mid-size automobiles. The new Tampa Bay bridge contains 180,000 cu. yd. of concrete, enough to pave every residential driveway in Bradenton, Fla., located at its southern tip. Almost 5.4 million ft. of steel post-tensioning cables strengthen the concrete. Laid end to end, they would stretch from St. Petersburg, Fla., to New York.

Excerpted from “Inside the Sunshine Skyway” by Dawn Stover. Printed in popular Science, July 1987, Volume 231, number 1.

photographed near Dakota, Minnesota on February 22, 2009

A Talk on Weather Forecasting. By Charles E. Linney, Section Director U. S. Weather Bureau. Chicago, Illinois.

So the sunrise and sunset will often tell a day in advance of the coming changes, a red sunset with lowering clouds or hazy west presaging foul weather on the morrow, because the storm comes out of the west, and if sol’s declining rays shine dimly through the vapory shield it is more than probable that water will be wrung out before the next sunset, while a golden and clear sunset is likewise a sure forerunner of a fair day to follow.

The Silo. A rhyme by H. D. Hughes, Antioch, Ill.

The Silo. What is it! How? When? Where and why?
Is what I propose to discuss. But if I
Should not make it plain by my manner of speech,
At least I will try to keep well within reach
Of what may pertain to the silo, in fact,
Though what I may say will perhaps not attract
Attention from those who in science delve deep,
But plain, common farmers I still hope may reap
A benefit equal to what it has cost
To come and listen.

Excerpted from page 435 of Annual Report of the Illinois Farmers’ Institute with Reports of County Farmers’ Institutes for the Year 1899. Published by Philips Brothers, state printers, 1899.

photographed in Delton, Wisconsin on February 22, 2009

Chapter 11. An act to legalize the election of officers of the Delton Cemetery Association, and the acts of the officers so elected. The people of the state of Wisconsin, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows:

Section 1. The acts of the Delton Cemetery Association in the election of its officers, on the second day of September, 1878, and the official acts of the officers so elected, are hereby declared to be as legal as though the regular meetings of said association had been held according to law, and the officers had been elected at a regularly constituted meeting of said association, as by law provided; and all the official acts of the officers of said association, elected on said day, which they have performed since that time, are also hereby declared to be legal and valid.

Section 2. This act shall take effect and be in full force from and after its passage.

Approved February 17, 1879.

Excerpted from Laws of Wisconsin Passed at the Annual Session of the Legislature of 1879; Together with Joint Resolutions and Memorials. Published by David Atwood, state printer, 1879.

photographed in Chicago, Illinois on April 16, 2009

It is easy to become the most hated man in the ball park. You do not achieve this dubious honor by muffing a double play ball. Or by sitting among dyed-in-the-wool fans chanting, “Them home team guys are bums.” Or by being an umpire.

Just become a peanut vendor and everybody hates you. They treat you as if you had two heads and were the guy who fired General MacArthur.

This is a pity, for a peanut vendor is a very talented guy. He can field dimes like Tris Speaker. He can pitch a bag of peanuts with the speed and accuracy of Walter Johnson. And he has a voice like Patsy O’Toole, who was once banished from the Detroit ball park for yelling so loudly he knocked bells out of the steeples as far away as suburban Hamtramck …

I know, for I went out to Briggs Stadium and became a goober merchant for one of the games this year – an amateur among pro peanut peddlers with twenty years’ experience …

An elderly hawker, who can curve packages of peanuts around fat men, warned, “Get the coat loose, Jocko. If it’s too tight you may bean the wrong fan and get traded to the Three I League – or maybe killed if he’s a big guy.” Then they give you ten dollars change, load you down with a basketful of sixty packages of peanuts, crackerjack and potato chips – and a last warning to never insult anybody and “keep moving.”

Excerpted from “Vendor’s Life Is Not the Nuts – Fans All Yell They Hate His Nerve,” by James S. Pooler. Originally printed in the Detroit Free Press, reprinted in “Baseball Digest,” July 1951, volume 10, number 7.

photographed in Owatonna, Minnesota on February 23, 2009

Chapter 119. An Act Authorizing Posts of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States to Parade with Music on Memorial Sunday.

Be it enacted, as follows: Section ten of chapter one hundred and thirty-six of the General Laws is hereby amended by striking out, in the second line, the word “or” and inserting in place thereof a comma, and by inserting after the word “Legion” in the same line the words: – or post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, – so as to read as follows: – Section 10. Any post of the Grand Army of the Republic, camp of the United Spanish War Veterans, post of the American Legion or post of the Veterans of Foreign Wards of the United States may parade with music on the day designated by the national encampment of the grand army as memorial Sunday next preceding Memorial Day, for the special purpose of attending divine service on that day; provided, that the music shall be suspended while passing within two hundred feed of any place of public worship where services are being held. Approved March 4, 1922. 

Excerpted from Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in the Year 1922, Together with the Constitution, Tables Showing Changes in the Statutes, etc., etc. Published by Wright & Potter, 1922. 

photographed in Shanghai, China on August 28, 2007

GUANGZHOU: Beggars here are being told to move into shelters or pack up and go home as part of a scheme to clean up the city’s streets, the Information Times News reported yesterday.

The local civil affairs bureau launched the campaign after the people’s congress said beggars were disrupting social order and damaging the city’s image. Between August 2003 and April of this year, more than 140,000 beggars have stayed at government-run shelters in the city, the bureau said. But of those, just 1,247 had later returned home, it said.

According to Tang Xiujuan, a professor at Guangzhou University, the reason why so many people choose to stay on the street is because they regard begging as a profession. “More than 95 percent of today’s beggars are professionals,” she told China Daily.

As reported by the China Daily, September 12, 2008. 

photographed in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee on February 18, 2009

The worth of musical patronage - when a rock star attempts to kick start one of their idols’ careers by producing, playing or touring with them – is debatable at best. When that rock star is Jack White, the very notion could cause you to swallow hard …

Thankfully, he has chosen to extend his patronage … to the country singer-songwriter Loretta Lynn. In her heyday, Lynn was an unprecedented figure, dealing in kitchen-sink feminism at a time when country divas were supposed to simper in sequins. Lacklustre husbands were scorned and cuckolded. Love rivals were frequently offered a punch in the mouth. In recent years, however, her output has dwindled while Lynn has concentrated on her businesses, including Loretta Lynn’s Kitchen (a dining establishment which, judging by its website, makes Dolly Parton’s Ham’n'Beans restaurant look like Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons) and a series of cookbooks that should come with a complementary packet of Rennies. One look at the recipe for Loretta Lynn’s Gooey Cake – a packet of chocolate cake mix, three frozen chocolate bars and a jar of caramel – will tell you that the quality of her new album scarcely matters. Merely by turning her attentions away from gastronomy, Jack White has performed humanity a service.

Excerpted from The Guardian’s review of Loretta Lynn’s 2004 album ‘Van Lear Rose.’ 

photographed in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 15, 2009

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

Excerpted from ‘Poets to Come,’ which appears in ‘Book I: Inscriptions’ in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

photographed in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin on February 22, 2009

(Turn on your monster-truck voice, please): Race fans! It’s the Ford/Budweiser/U.S. Hot Rod Truck Association championship! Madison Square Garden this Saturday and Sunday!

Dream of the $50,000 Monster Truck Challenge Series with Bigfoot, Giant and Excalibur taking on the half-tank, half-truck Beast from the East!

Plus wheel-standing trick trucks! The Orange Blossom Special and Midnight Express! See wild, screaming funny cars!

Tickets now (now … now …) at Ticketron outlets at the Madison Square Garden Box office. Saturday 7:30 p.m. and Sunday 1:30 p.m. 

Madison Square Garden! It’s AWESOME … Awesome … awesome. 

Excerpted from a 1988 monster-truck ad available on YouTube.

photographed near Cave City, Kentucky on February 18, 2009.

Prehistoric animals weren’t all enormous. The horse’s earliest known ancestor, for example, lived around the same time as the giant boa and (at roughly the size of a fox) was much smaller than today’s equine. And though many prehistoric creatures did get very, very large, they didn’t all appear at the same time. The hugest dinosaurs, such as the plant-eating sauropods and the giant predatory theropods, lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, about 65 million to 200 million years ago. Forty-five million years ago, the earth started seeing a wave of giant mammals, including the rhinolike Uintatherium and the massive Andrewsarchus.* Wooly mammoths and elephant-sized ground sloths, in turn, lived during the last ice age, between 12,000 and 5 million years ago.

Excerpted from ‘A Snake the Size of a Plane,’ posted on Slate, February 5, 2009.

photographed in Chicago, Illinois on Februrary 6, 2009

In the 1940s, southern California inventor Leo Fender realized that he could improve on the amplified hollow-body instruments of the day by using an innovative and rather simple solid-body electric guitar design.

The Stratocaster first appeared in 1954, incorporating many design innovations based on feedback from professional musicians, Fender staff and Leo Fender himself. Its third single-coil pickup offered more tonal possibilities, its sleekly contoured body made it more comfortable, and its double cutaway design made access to upper registers much easier.

Nobody could have foreseen then how the Stratocaster would go on to revolutionize popular music. Essentially unchanged since its 1954 debut, it is the most popular and influential electric guitar ever, and players at all levels and in all genres continue to rely on its sound, playability and versatility to this day.

Excerpted from the history of Fender guitars.