Evenings on the lake

While we're on the subject...

of family and friends, here is a link to my cousin Shannon McMaster's blog, which primarily concerns itself with the musings of 2 new homeowners (Shannon & his wife Charity) and the domestic details thereof...

For Family & Friends

Just a quick note to let folks know that our British friends, Lee Conybeare & Mark Merrifield, have a website for their new arrival, Ralph. To see some pictures (more to be added to our photo gallery in days to come...) of this fine young man and his proud parents, please visit here.

Maps of many lands

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. An excellent resource for Historical maps.

Look At Me

A fairly large collection of found photographs, presented without comment or context.

Mike Disfarmer

There are few American photographers as important and yet as relatively unknown as Mike Disfarmer. His work consists of a series of (mostly) anonymous portraits of the people of Heber Springs, Arkansas, taken over a 6 year period (1939-45) in his small photo studio. These images, almost painfully stark and completely devoid of the portraitive affects one usually finds in studio work, are hugely compelling. In them, one sees the physical tracery of a particular kind of life--overwhelmingly rural, proud, clannish, beset with but not entirely broken by poverty-- that has been effectively disappeared from contemporary American consciousness.

Not NFL, but URL

Instead of watching the game (the best MNF so far this season, I hear), I spent the evening exploring the archives of Muxway, Joshua Schachter's excellent link site. Here are just a few of the more choice discoveries, for those who are interested in this sort of thing:

The Directory of Open Access Journals: A collection of some 500 peer-reviewed on-line journals, covering a vast range of topics. Some really excellent stuff in here.

An explanation of the PLU (Price Look-up) stickers found on fresh fruit. This sort of information, while only marginally interesting in the isolate, has gotten me thinking about what other sorts of information encoded in otherwise mundane objects might be discovered. Perhaps I'll do a bit more exploring and report back. Watch this space...

A Landmine Database. A veritable who's who (or what's what) of death and destruction. Interesting if only to illustrate the sheer number of nations that produce these things (hell, Portugal and Sweden are listed as countries of origin...).

And finally, a gallery of Surf-movie posters.