Saturday 31 October 2009

Saturday 24 October 2009

Pompeii Graffiti

"Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!"

"We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus."

"Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog!"

"Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera."

"O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin."

A glimpse into the real Roman Empire.

Hobo Symbols

"To cope with the difficulty of hobo life, hobos developed a system of symbols, or a code. Hobos would write this code with chalk or coal to provide directions, information, and warnings to other hobos. Some signs included "turn right here", "beware of hostile railroad police", "dangerous dog", "food available here", and so on."

Hobo Alphabet.


Thanks to Susan Tomaselli for this.

Thursday 15 October 2009

Wednesday 14 October 2009



On October 24, 1888, only ten days after being filmed in Roundhay Garden Scene, Sarah Robinson Whitley, featured actress and Le Prince's mother-in-law, died aged 72 and was buried nearby on October 27 at St. John's Church, Roundhay, Leeds.

On September 16, 1890, while about to patent his invention in London and to perform his first official public exhibition in New York, Louis Le Prince, director, mysteriously vanished in a train between Dijon and Paris.

In 1902, two years after testifying in the Equity 6928 brief, Alphonse Le Prince, featured actor and elder son of the inventor, was found shot dead in New York.

- Roundhay Garden Scene

American researchers have pieced together a 10-second audio clip of a French folk song which they believe is the oldest recognisable recording of the human voice.

The recording appears to be of a young woman singing a couple of phrases from the 18th century folk song Au Clair de la Lune. It was made in 1860 by Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and librarian, on a Heath Robinson-style device he called a "phonautograph"...

"Mr Giovannoni sent scans of the recording to the Berkeley Lab where they were painstakingly converted into sound by scientists using technology designed to salvage historic recordings.

That technology allows the voice of a young French woman, recorded in Paris in the months before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration as President of the United States, to be heard again."

- The Times