JF Ptak Science Book Post 316
Well: this is a variation of yesterday’s post on the two opposite edges of color in oddly-applied scientific/technical manners. In unwittingly responding to the question “when is color-use bad?”, the answers were found in these room decorations from 1942, all of which come from a pamphlet entitled Ideas for Old Rooms and New, extracted from the mind of Hapel (?) Dell Brown. It is a tidy book with ideas that are anything but tidy;and as you scroll down you’ll see that the room solutions suggested by Hapel Del are anti-tidy; clutterous (no, not a word but could be). Everything about these creations speaks to the annihilation of visual resting places; everything seems to be an affront to the concept of causal emptiness. The weird thing is that there aren’t very many objects in these rooms at all (at least comparing these rooms from where I’m sitting)–the visual complaints seem all rocketing from the abuse of colors found in the fabric of the furniture and walls and floors and window treatments. The eye gets no rest–and as a matter of fact, the cones of the eyeball are impaled on the rods as a result of the author/decorator desperate attempts to invent three more primary colors.
Believe it or not we don’t really get the full flavor of the color cacophony because the floors in these picture look sort of benign, fading away into themselves–which they are not, according to the description in the text, because they are all high-gloss linoleum rolls or tiles (“efused [sic] with deep wondrous color”. And that means not only are these floors adding sheen and color to the rest of the incredibly colorful–an effect fairly lost in these photos–they are also cold.
One thing that I haven’t pointed out in this peon to syrupy/pastel-y/techno-gelatinous-chromodrama is that they were all done in response to a re-decoration of a perfectly nice-looking house, with all of the former “bland” colonial-style rooms presented in glorious black and white. I’d rather live in Maison Noir than in this happy nightmare.
wire—it was refrigeration. The creation of refrigerated railroad cars meant that all that the cowboys needed to do was get their stock to a nearby railhead and modern technology would do the rest, the RR pulling the slaughtered stock to St. Louis or (more likely) Chicago, thus ending the Long Drive. The home refrigerator enabled the creation of Jell-O much as we see it today. (And I say that with as little inflection as possible, as hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed this sugary dried gelatin ensemble, so it must work to the good somewhere, at least as a cheap sugar delivery system)
trench (that just happens to be there in the middle of the yard) and cover your head with a sheet “to protect you from heat” (“if your drying laundry is within reach”). I hope that its an Oxford double weave.
“The lunatic , the lover and the poet,
But Mr. Pickett did evidently assemble ALLOT of data and drawings and plans and renderings of the pyramids in the course of looking for the secret strings which would alter the known into the secret and unknown.
Oscar Lowry attempts to answer the question in the subject line of this post in a very red book of 46 shouty pages. What he’s really concerned with, in Where are the Dead (1930), and what he maintains is of “universal interest to the saved and unsaved, the hearers and nonhearers”, is what happens to people after they die; more particularly though, Mr. Lowry is interested in differentiations in eternal damnations versus eternal doom. And there is evidently a very wide difference here, as people in Hades are just in “prison”, waiting for their final judgment which will fling them into Mr. Cash’s ring of fire (well,”lake” of fire, actually). There’s also little chance that the snakey charms of Orpheus’ poetry will ever change anyone’s mind at the gates of Sheol-Hades, leading anyone away from the firey pit. The discussion of Hades and Hell and Sheol is interesting if not scary in Mr. Lowry’s hands, describing “Sheol-Hades” as a “prison”, its occupants waiting for final disposition to Hell. Strong’s Hebrew opens the possibilities of definition with a number of translations for Sheol: the underworld, the abode of the dead, place of no return; without praise of God; wicked sent there for punishment; righteous not abandoned to it; of the place of exile; of extreme degradation in sin. The most troubling of these in my book is the definition of what it is not, as in “when the righteous are not abandoned to it”, which seems both reassuring and really terrifying.. 
Missing them is understandable if you weren’t looking closely at the image’s little bits and pieces, what with the horses occupying something like 1/1,000 of the print’s surface. But there they are, clear and bright as day: “1798, Ascent by Testu-Brissey”, and “1828 London Chas Green on horseback”, and “1850 Paris Poiteven’s ascent on horseback (10,000 spectators)”. 
Now what was going on in this display–appearing in the Illustrated London News on 8 September 1928–was the idea that a group of soldiers (14 in this case) could be seated in a cushioned/springed box which would be parachuted onto a battlefield. The idea of getting troops into a tight or difficult spot by a parachute is a very good one, a brilliant step forward really in the history of military strategy–but doing it in this fashion, by these means, was just not correct. First of all the whole thing looks way too heavy for the aircraft to leave the ground to begin with, at least with those engines; then it looks too heavy for the chute to pull it out of the plane (and looks as though it would act as an airbrake more than anything else, as the chute seems to be gigantic, fully half the width of an already-wide aircraft. I reckon that given space for seven seated men that the cabin would have to be at least 25′ long, meaning that the parachute seems to be 10 cabin-widths in the larger image, or 250′ in diameter…in the smaller image the chute is only 4 times the length of the cabin or so, meaning it is a hundred feet across.). The intention was for the chute to be deployed and for it to somehow lift the big box up and out of the plane, without dragging into or across the tail and etc. Then there’s the issue of landing, which, springs or shock absorbers or not, looks to be very problematical.