The blog Small Town Noir tells the stories of people who were arrested in New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1930 and 1960. Diarmid Mogg became interested in the town and its people when he found some mugshots on eBay, and researched the stories of those people in the local newspaper archives -not just their crime, but their entire lives as well as they can be reconstructed.
Small Town Noir is dedicated to recovering the life stories behind mug shots from the vanished golden age of one American town.
The men and women in these mug shots are nobody special, but they saw things that none of us will ever see. They were all arrested in New Castle, a small town in western Pennsylvania, right over by the Ohio border. It was once one of the most industrially productive cities in America, but all that’s gone now.
Although Mogg is in Scotland, he continues to collect and research the mugshots that the New Castle police threw out some time around 1990. The stories are sparse but fascinating, and the blog as a whole serves to chronicle the history of a declining American town and the everyday people who lived and died there.
The mugshot above is of John Saul, who was arrested in 1957 for disorderly conduct. But the real story came later, when he got involved with holding a woman against her will for the purpose of prostitution, a crime that involved some of the town’s notable politicians. -Thanks, Lisa Menter!
Redditor merrderber is from the island of Rendova in the Solomon Islands. She is a now a law student in Australia. Her story is quite interesting.
Merrderber’s people have been in court for 14 years, fighting a logging company for the use of their land. She posted an explanation, but the TL;DR version is that an unscrupulous chief sold the tribal land to a large logging company out from underneath the people who lived there. The company came in and cut plenty of trees, but had to fight the residents, who were determined to stay. The residents won the case as of yesterday. Merrderber posted an album of pictures to celebrate. Be sure to read the captions.
John Walkenbach, formerly known as J-Walk, teased a tortoise with a remote control toy truck. The tortoise does his best to give chase, and would have made some real turtle tracks if that floor wasn’t so slick. Look at those little legs go! He probably have some amorous intentions, but the truck is under human control, and has a better grip on the floor. -via Arbroath
The time of death was firmly established. At 10:06 P.M. all three suspects said they heard a gunshot echo through the house. The house was shared by four graduate students; three, if you no longer counted Harry Harris, the victim who lay in his second-story bedroom, a bullet in his chest.
Harry, it seemed, had been a ladies' man. He had even bragged about seducing the girlfriend of one of his housemates. Unfortunately, the police didn't know which one. They separated the three remaining housemates and interviewed each one.
"I was working on my car," Bill Mayer insisted. "I plugged an extension cord into an outlet behind the house. Then I took a work light around to the side driveway, in front of the garage. When I heard the gunshot, it took me a second to realize it came from the house. Then I ran inside."
The next time you find yourself rolling a pair of dice, know that you’re tapping into something primordial- keeping alive an ancient tradition that began long before recorded history.
Archaeologists can’t pinpoint the first human who threw dice, but they do know this: Unlike many customs that started in one place and then spread, dice-throwing appeared independently all across the populated world. The oldest known dice -dating back at least 8,000 years- consisted of found objects such as fruit pits, pebbles, and seashells. But the direct precursors of today’s dice were bone: the ankle bones of hoofed animals, such as sheep and oxen. These bones -later called astragali by the Greeks- were chosen because they are roughly cube-shaped, with two rounded sides that couldn’t be landed on, and four flat ones that could. Which side would be facing up after a toss, or a series of tosses, was as much a gamble to our ancestors as it is to us today.
The first dice throwers weren’t gamers, though -they were religious shamans who used astragali (as well as sticks, rocks, or even animal entrails) for divination, the practice of telling the future by interpreting signs from the gods. How did these early dice make their way from the shaman to the layman? According to David Schwartz in Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling:
The line between divination and gambling is blurred. One hunter, for example, might say to another, “If the bones land short side up, we will search for game to the south; if not, we look north,” thus using the astragali to plumb the future. But after the hunt, the hunters might cast bones to determine who would go home with the most desirable cuts.
SQUARING OFF
And with that, gambling -and dice gaming- was born, leading to the next big step in dice evolution. Around 7,000 years ago, ancient Mesopotamians carved down the rounded sides of the astragali to make them even more cube-like. Now they could land on one of six sides, allowing the outcome to become more complex. As their technology advanced, materials such as ivory, wood, and whalebone were used to make dice. (Image credit: Swiss Museum of Games)
It is believed that the shamans were the first ones to make marks on the sides of the dice, but it didn’t take long for them to roll into the rest of society. Dice first appeared in board games in Ur, a city in southern Mesopotamia. Now referred to as the “Royal Game of Ur,” this early version of backgammon (circa 3,000 BC) used four-sided, pyramidal dice.
However, the most common dice, then and now, are six-sided cubic hexahedrons with little dots, or pips, to denote their values. The pip pattern still in use today -one opposite six, two opposite five, and three opposite four- first appeared in Mesopotamia circa 1300 BC, centuries before the introduction of Arabic numerals.
WHEN IN ROME
In the first millennium BC, civilizations thrived in Greece, India, and China- and they all threw dice. In Rome, it was common for gamblers to call out the goddess Fortuna’s name while rolling a 20-sided die during a game of chance. But they had to do it quietly -dice games were illegal in Rome (except during the winter solstice festival of Saturnalia). Not that that stopped anyone from playing it: One surviving fresco depicts two quarreling dicers being thrown out of a public house by the proprietor.
The Ice Bucket Challenge is a meme to raise awareness of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and donations to the ALS Association. A participant pours a bucket of ice water over his head and then challenges others to do the same. As the viral videos spread, more people are joining in. Continue reading to see more.
Witold Pileki was a leader in the Secret Polish Army, a resistance group that operated under the radar after Hitler’s troops occupied the country. In 1940, they knew that the Nazis were rounding up Jews and others they considered undesirable and sending them off by train. Pileki hatched a plan to be arrested and start an uprising among the prisoners. September 19, 1940, Pileki made sure he was among a group of 2,000 to be arrested, and he was sent to Auschwitz.
At the time, no one knew (or believed) that the Nazis were systematically murdering Jews and others in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Pilecki and TAP were no exception. But Pilecki’s ability to infiltrate the camp began to change that. He managed to organize a small resistance group within the death camp, focusing mostly on increasing morale — any attempts to forcibly resist the Nazis would have certainly failed. Similarly, his ability to communicate with those outside of Auschwitz’s walls was limited, to say the least. So Pilecki did what few others were able to do: he broke out.
After two-and-a-half years in the concentration camp, that was no small feat. And it was only the beginning of the efforts in which Pileki spent the rest of his life to free to people of Poland. His story remained unknown outside of Poland until the fall of communism in 1989, but now you can read about him at Boing Boing.
August 17 is Black Cat Appreciation Day! Black cats, like black dogs, are often passed over for adoption, possibly because of outdated myths, or possibly because their color makes it difficult to see their facial expressions. But black cats need homes, too, and they can be wonderfully loving pets.
Furball Fables celebrates with a video highlighting their favorite black cats: Kitten Gunnar, Buddha, Spooky, Squiggy, Ziggy, Lucky and Miss Blacat.
There’s a Facebook page called For the Love of Black Cats where you can plenty more black cats on Black Cat Appreciation Day -or any time.
And here’s a “now and then” picture of my black cat Gogo as a kitten and fifteen years later.
The millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1999, are now estimated to number over 80 million in America. That’s more than even the baby boom generation! They’ve been called spoiled, narcissistic, and overly tech-dependent, but those generalizations come from the outliers that get our attention, not from real statistics. The events that shaped their lives include Katrina, 9-11, the housing bust, the longest war in American history, and millennials have developed their own ways of dealing with the uncertainties and insecurities of modern life.
“Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of millennials said they would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring,” the Brookings Institution recently noted in a report by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais titled “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America.”
The generation that gave us Occupy Wall Street has embraced its own modes of entrepreneurship, found across the broad spectrum of “creatives,” from stylists to techies, who reject the presumed security of the corporate job and riskily pursue their own ventures, even if it means working out of their parents’ basement. At the same time, record numbers of new college graduates are applying for jobs in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps or Teach for America.
Greenpeace was working on a video about coal mining on public lands, which features a time-lapse nature sequence. Filming such a sequence doesn’t always go smoothly, though. This one was photobombed by a marmot, who not only screwed up the possibility of converting the video to a time-lapse, but also got so friendly with the camera that it was knocked off balance! That’s a good marmot. -via Metafilter
Remember when you were a kid and watched Batman and Superman on TV and tied a towel around your shoulders for a cape and pretended you were a superhero? Liz Climo’s latest comic shows us how TV can influence our fantasies. Or mthe honor of having a week named after you just goes to one’s head. She had another ominous shark comic a day earlier.
A pristine issue of Action Comics #1 from June of 1938, featuring the debut of a new superhero named Superman, is up for auction at eBay, with proceeds going to the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. Want it? The current bid is $1,750,100, and there’s more than a week left before the auction ends. Good lulck! -via Boing Boing
After 41 years, first-grade teacher Mrs. Flexer is retiring. That’s 41 years of little kids she’s influenced, and they love her. With the help of the production team behind Kid President, former students of all ages gathered to honor Mrs. Flexer with a surprise party. They gave testimonials of of how their teacher inspired them to future success. You can’t watch this without getting at least a little choked up. How many of us will be able to retire and see how many lives we’ve influenced for the better? -via Viral Viral Videos
Do you recall a couple of years ago when Lee Hall proposed to Ashley Fragomeni by re-enacting a scene from Jurassic Park? It was very appropriate, as they are both paleontologists. They had a Jurassic Park-themed wedding, too! One of the wedding gifts they received was this custom illustration from their friend, artist Britt Sanders. See it full-size at Imgur. It looks just like them, doesn’t it? -via reddit
Goussainville is a village just north of Paris with a peculiar history. Once it was a perfectly normal small French town -up until just 40 years ago. It is now a group of abandoned homes showing some signs of decay, along with relatively modern touches that show it was not long ago that child grew up here. What happened? The short answer is that the Charles de Gaulle Airport was built.
Goussainville-Vieux Pays was once a postcard perfect town, but less than a year before CDG opened in 1974 a plane crashed into it, destroying several houses and killing six crew and eight locals. The destruction caused many of the townspeople to evacuate immediately, with others following over the course of the subsequent year as the sound traffic from the airport and sorrow for the devastation of their town became too much. Now only a few residents remain.
The result of this recent abandonment is a scene that resembles a post-apocalyptic movie set. See a collection of pictures of Goussainville as you take a short tour at Atlas Obscura.
