Here is Eduoard Manet's Le Déjeune sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), a painting rejected for the presitigious Salon exhibition of 1863. Classical nudity was respectable in Academic art at the time, but the presence of fully clothed gentlemen indicated that this was a contemporary and therefore scandalous scene.
It didn't help Santa's reputation at the time, either.
Okay, the original did not have Santa Claus. Over the past 25 years, photographer Ed Wheeler has taken self-portraits while dressed as Santa. He often digitally inserts himself into famous paintings. You can view more in the series here.
It can be hard to determine precisely which is the first or last engagement of a war or what qualifies as a battle. But one can plausibly argue that the last battle of the American Civil War was the Battle of Palmito Ranch. This event occurred on May 13, 1865 in southern Texas. It ended with a Confederate victory.
The lower Rio Grande Valley was a weak spot in the Union blockade of Southern ports. Blockade runners could ship to the Mexican port of Matamoros on the southern side of the river. They could then carry the goods across the river into Texas and through the rest of the South.
Union troops landed at the mouth of the Rio Grande in November, 1863. They pinched off much of the smuggling across the border. But generals in Washington did not support a sustained campaign, so Federal forces did not advance inland.
On March 11, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. Lewis Wallace (the author of the novel Ben-Hur) met with the Confederate commanders in the area to discuss terms of their surrender. They agreed to a truce while the Confederate commanders conferred with their superior officer. That Confederate officer, Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, rejected the terms. The war was back on.
On May 1, Confederate forces learned that Lee had surrendered, Lincoln had been assassinated and that in North Carolina, the last major Confederate army was negotiating its surrender. Hope evaporated and Confederate soldiers in the Valley deserted in large numbers.
Meanwhile, the local Union commanding officer Col. Theodore H. Barrett heard false reports that the Confederate forces were not disbanding, but withdrawing intact to the town of Corpus Christi. He decided to strike.
(Ralph A. Wooster)
Col. Barrett moved west along the Rio Grande. His force eventually numbered about 500 infantrymen. On May 13 at Palmito (sometimes spelled Palmetto) Ranch, he encountered a Confederate force of about 500 men, mostly cavalry and artillery, under Col. John Salmon Ford. The Union force faced withering artillery fire. Col. Barrett ordered his men to retreat. The Confederate force chased the Union force 7 miles back to Federal entrenchments on the coast. They killed 2 Union soldiers, wounded 6 others and captured a total of 102.
Among the Union dead was Prv. John J. Williams (left), whose unhappy fate was to be the last soldier killed in the last battle of the war.
The South won the battle. But it didn’t matter. It had lost the war. Federal armies began to converge on Texas. On June 2, Confederate forces in Texas officially surrendered. The army that had been victorious at Palmito Ranch dissolved.
We’ve seen e-readers and libraries without print books. But beyond the obvious proliferation of e-books and fully online information sources, what might we see in the future of libraries? Here are five possibilities.
1. Patron-Driven Acquisition
In library circles, PDA doesn’t stand for “public display of affection” but “patron-driven acquisition.” Collection development librarians select materials for purchase based upon their understanding of the patron base, item reviews and circulation statistics. In a patron-driven acquisition system, patron interest can bypass some of the intermediary work of a collection development librarian and purchase library materials.
PDA is typically used for electronic resources, particularly e-books. A database vendor may offer a certain number of views of an e-book item for free. If enough individual patrons view the item, the library automatically purchases a copy, which is then added to the collection. Vendors and librarians can set up safety mechanisms to ensure that a single patron cannot rig the system to purchase something inappropriate or excessively expensive.
The advantage of patron-driven acquisitions is that a library can respond to shifting patron desires and acquire electronic materials very quickly.
2. Discovery Portals
At most libraries, if you want to effectively search the whole of body of resources, you’ll have to perform several different searches using different tools and different ways of expressing your query. But what if you could use just one search portal that would give you access to everything (or most) that a library has to offer? This is what a discovery service or discovery tool does.
Libraries have had one-stop shopping portals for years, but they’ve generally been awful—especially if you’re searching for an obscure piece of information or information from a particular type of source. They’ve been like convenience stores that offer some basic goods, but have few options beyond them.
Now computer technology has advanced to the point in which programmers have developed portals that can effectively search the breadth and depth of a library’s resources across multiple database platforms that use different search languages and scopes of materials. EBSCO Discovery Service and ProQuest’s Summon are among several competing products in this field.
Once upon a time, libraries commonly offered public internet access for exclusively research purposes. Then they offered internet access for whatever patrons wanted, as well as basic computer applications, such as word processing. Now many libraries offer document scanners, and computers with photo editing and computer-aided design software. Libraries are giving people access to tools that they wouldn’t otherwise have so that patrons may create things that are important to them.
Santa came in like a wrecking ball. But what choice did you leave him? You left the flue on the chimney closed. He had to get inside somehow. After all, you’re on his list.
You may remember the Miley Cyrus “Wrecking Ball” Christmas tree ornament. Who would decorate a Christmas tree that way? Santa, of course! He's clearly a Miley Cyrus fan.
Artist David Lacasse made this digital image in the style of old fashioned Christmas cards. It’s a shame that it’s not available as an actual Christmas card.
Scott Sherwood has amassed a huge collection of images from around the world executed by different photographers over 50 years. Here’s a clever craft that he made from selections of his 35mm film archive.
Mr. Sherwood carefully arranged the 1,152 slides by dominant color. They flow from pink to red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple. He placed them inside slide mounts, which are connected to each other with 7,000 metal rings and held on to a curtain rod with 36 large rings. The 5’7” by 6’ curtain took 4 months of work to complete.
Dolly Faibyshev is a Russian-American photographer who lives in New York City. Her work focuses on "the meaning of the American dream in all of its forms." She's especially interested in mid-Twentieth Century modern design.
In her mind, that is best represented by Palm Springs, California, the site of the above mailbox. In an interview, Ms. Faibyshev explained why:
I’ve lived in New York for years, and I’m an east coaster but I just don’t think there’s any other place like it. It’s like stepping into the past, a time warp where many of the homes and surrounding architecture have been preserved (especially the exteriors) since the 1950s. Sometimes it feels like everything is changing around us so fast, it feels good to go to a place that hasn’t changed much at all. There’s something a little unsettling about that for me too.
You can see more photos in her Palm Springs series here.
Go, video, go! You can do it! Keep loading ahead of the playback. Failure means that I won't get to watch this My Little Pony episode without being interrupted. Push it!
There's drama in everyday life, as illustrated by Essenti of the webcomic CUTBU. And, yes, yelling at your computer helps.
Last month, a man walked into a Sports Page sporting goods store in Marshalltown, Iowa. He asked for a job application, filled it out and turned it in. Then, according to police, he felt entitled to a five-fingered pay raise: he shoplifted $153 of clothes and left the store.
Managers reviewed security camera footage and recognized the suspect. So they called him in for a job interview. The police were waiting and arrested him for the theft.
The moral of the story: don't go to job interviews.
This shark clearly made Santa's nice list! On Wednesday, a member of the staff of the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo dressed as Santa Claus and embraced a zebra shark.
This is a painting of HMS St. Lawrence. With 112 guns, it was the largest warship ever seen on the Great Lakes and the largest Royal Navy vessel to ever sail entirely on fresh water.
After Napoleon abdicated, the British government offered the famous Duke of Wellington the command of its forces in North America. For several reasons, Wellington declined. Among them, Wellington stated that what Britain needed in the war against the United States was not a huge army, but naval control over the lakes between the United States in Canada. These waters alone were the highways that could carry British armies into the United States.
Early in the War of 1812, Britain gained control over Lake Huron. The Americans eventually gained superiority on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. But Lake Ontario was different and this huge warship is one reason why.
Niagara Falls blocked Lake Ontario from Lake Erie and rapids at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River limited the size of vessels that could travel from the sea onto Lake Ontario. Thus it was necessary to build large vessels on-site.
Are you going to eat this meal or is it going to eat you? Don't take any chances and dig in right away. Stab it in the brain with a chopstick.
You can find English-language instructions on how to make your own here. You'll need green drink powder to get the facial coloration just right. The eyes are two halves of a quail egg. A diced quail egg white also provides teeth. The nostrils are sliced seaweed and the infected tongue is a slice of ham.
It's a hard time of year for people with claustrophobia, as Dan Piraro of Bizarro Comics illustrates. There are Clauses everywhere and rooms tend to get smaller and air in shorter supply wherever they go.
Here's a fascinating story from the filming of the 1968 science fiction film Planet of the Apes. In that movie, there are 3 ape species: chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. When the actors for the ape characters put on their makeup and costumes, they segregated themselves by species:
During the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, Charlton Heston noted “an instinctive segregation on the set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, the gorillas ate with the gorillas, the orangutans ate with the orangutans, and the humans would eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky.”
James Franciscus noticed the same thing filming Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969. “During lunch I looked up and realized, ‘My God, here is the universe,’ because at one table were all the orangutans eating, at another table were the apes, and at another table were the humans. The orangutan characters would not eat or mix with the ape characters, and the humans wouldn’t sit down and eat with any one of them.
Smaug from The Hobbit has a fiery breath, but maybe he can put it to good use by lighting this cocktail from The Drunken Moogle. To make your own, you'll need Goldschläger, which is a type of cinnamon-flavored schnapps, Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, a splash of grain alcohol and a bit of flame.
There are now cameras everywhere. So you can't just roll out of bed, put on sweat pants and drive to the McDonald's anymore. There are people there who will judge you. So you have to impress them by putting on a fedora that matches your sweatpants.
We wanted flying cars. We wanted robot girlfriends. This isn't the future that any of us, including Kris Straub of Chainsawsuit, wanted.
