Strange Daze Illustrated

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the RingAncient Egyptian Tri-Lobed Disc The original strange object was discovered in 1936 in Saqqara, Egypt. It is made of stone, is very thin and it has a very complicated shape that makes it look like some kind of machine part. The central axis seems to indicate it was spinning and part of a bigger machine or mechanism.

The object in the Cairo museum is about 61 centimeter in diameter and 10 cm in height. Nobody really knows who made it. We also don’t know how, when, or why was made. Mainstream science says it is at least 5000 years old, but the dynastic Egyptians did not have the technology to do it. It is possibly made by an ancient high tech civilization existing thousands of years before the Egyptian pharaohs of 5000 years ago.

Frederick Childe Hassam The American Impressionist. saw the city as a place of similar beauty and excitement to Paris especially in the fashionable neighborhoods along Fifth Avenue and at Washington Square.  It was from this apartment window that Hassam painted the view outside.  His 1915 painting entitled Fifth Avenue Winter depicts the bustling Manhattan thoroughfare which was quickly becoming a popular shopping district around the time he made this work.

The Wagner card, known as the T-206, is part of a large series known as the “White Border” series. Burdick named the entire series of over 200 cards, T206 (i.e. tobacco number 206), which was issued by the American Tobacco Company to promote sixteen brands of cigarettes and loose tobacco. The Wagner card is extremely rare because the player apparently did not want tobacco products to be sold to children, who were avidly collecting sports cards, and quickly pulled it from production.

Pitch Drop Experiment: The World’s Longest Running Lab Experiment | Today the experiment is broadcast on a live webcam. Unbelievably, no one had actually witnessed the pitch drop fall for 87 years, until April 2014, when the ninth drop fell. Thanks to round-the-clock monitoring by a webcam, the drop was seen touching down sometime between 9th and 14th of April—the wide time range is due to the fact that the pitch flows extremely slowly, and the exact moment of touchdown is uncertain. Although the webcam was present when the eighth drop fell in November 2000, it couldn’t be recorded as the camera malfunctioned at the critical moment. The tenth drop was predicted to fall this year.

daily timewaster: Whoa! A microscopic image of a brain cell (left) and a simulated image of the known universe (right)

John Pototschnik. The living rural artist.  “…Much of what I paint are deeply felt impressions formed during my childhood. I grew up in the 1950s. It was a totally different time. I grew up in small neighborhoods, small houses, small towns, near the country. My parents and grandparents had flourishing vegetable gardens. My mom made homemade cookies which I sold door to door. I had newspaper routes in which I delivered morning and evening newspapers door to door. I was free to ride my bicycle all around town and visit my friends. All these things, and much more, are in my work…”

Elsewhere in stone building constructions of the ancient one a groundskeeper mows the grass at Stonehenge

How The Pyramids Were Built: An Ancient Puzzle Close To Completion The icing on the cake is the work of Pierre Tallet, an archaeologist who in 2013 unearthed the papyrus journal of a man named Merer who appears to have been a low-level bureaucrat charged with transporting some of the materials to Giza. After four years of laborious translation, Tallet discovered the ancient diarist — responsible for the oldest papyrus scroll ever found — described his experiences overseeing a team of 40 workmen who opened dikes to divert water from the Nile into man-made canals that led straight to the pyramids.Avocados, The Toxic Berry – Avocados are toxic to almost all animals (including cats and dogs). Humans are a rare exception. It is the only fruit to contain persin, a fatty acid, which, when eaten by animals causes vomiting, diarrhea, and other nasty symptoms. Consumption of large quantities can cause death within twelve hours.

Evidence of Life : Two Photographers Show Us Mysteries In The Mundane It is difficult to pinpoint the subject matter of these pictures: human contact with mechanical apparatus, bits and pieces of industrial environments that depict a world separate from our everyday experience where the process of technology is tested and recorded, tension and explosion, and above all, a carefully designed invitation to participate in the closure of the meanings of the images. – Sultan and Mandel’s statement on Evidence, 1977.

Star Wars. Where are they now? daily timewaster: This is terribly disturbing – and Harrison Ford is super old too. Alec Guinness is long gone as well.

KA-CHING! the most important tumblr in the universe because it is mine.

Pointer Pointer  Just click and watch the hour dissolve.

The Italian Immigrants Who Grew Fig Trees in Unlikely Places –   THEY BROUGHT THEM IN SUITCASES and in trunks, tucked into the corners of boats and, later, on airplanes. Seeds that became rapini, cardoons, artichokes, cucuzza squash. Cuttings from knobby grape vines that flourished into backyard arbors. And, above all, bits of stick that grew into fig trees. Starting in the late 1800s, when Italian immigrants poured into U.S. port cities, the Mediterranean trees took root in unexpected places: Astoria, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Bayonne, cities whose cold-weather climates seemed hostile to the plant. Yet the trees grew, even if their owners had to wrap them in burlap or bury them underground so they’d survive the cold winters.