Today we have plenty of cameras that will take an up close and personal look at the the creatures that surround us, down to microscopic size, as we've seen in the Nikon Small World photography competitions. But 100 years ago, just seeing a spider's face was a rare treat. Sure, there were people who had mounted insect collections, but those weren't available to everyone, and David Fairchild considered them unnatural after they had dried up. He and his wife Marian published a book in 1914 full of photographic images of the insects, spiders, and other tiny creatures in their backyard called Book of Monsters.
Cameras of the time were not up to macrophotography, so they came up with a system that separated the lens from the photographic plate by a cardboard tube that went up to twenty feet long! The exposures were between 50 and 80 seconds, so they couldn't use live specimens, but their "fresh" specimens were fixed with wax to remain in place for the photo shoot. The text in Book of Monsters was overly dramatic, like a spider killing a fly was a “true picture of merciless cruelty.” The spider just considers it lunch, but such prose got kids interested in the book. Read about the making of Book of Monsters and see a gallery of the images it contained at the Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake
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Slurs against lifestyles/sexual preferences aside, 'talking like a pirate' is an invention of hollywood.
Look it up.
You might as well have talk like an Ewok day.
Yub yub!
Talk Like a Pirate Day comes from Dave Barry's book a few years back... wiki it, scallywags.
Check it out at www.teefury.com
(And for those that would dismiss it as a lame fad, I grew up in California, but this was hardly Hollywood's doing. For a long while this was an underground geek thing to do, not exactly "cool", then the Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out, and pirates were suddenly in. Go figure. Mostly though, then, as now, it's just good, somewhat crusty fun if you have some suitably goofy and creative friends. Linguistic inventiveness and a overflow of rrrrrr's is a must.)
- I am Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate.
- Look! A three-headed monkey!
- You fight like a dairy Neatorama author!
Stupid Darwinists. Go crawl back in your monkey cave
Instant Yarrrrr!
(And guybrush- 'I can see a diorama of of all the children in the world, all happy and living in peace. No, wait')
On that belated note, I am off to make ye a Neatorama diorama.
YAAARRRRR!
Is it stupid? Yes. But who cares? It's fun!
(says a total ninja supporter)
YE SCURVY DOGS!
(Techincally, it's no lnger TLaP Day, but I celebrate all 24 hours, and I wake up real late.)