115 Sangrio Avenue, Johannesburg, South Africa
There’s something incredibly dreamy and unreal-seeming about this, even though I can’t put my finger on anything that’s really extraordinary in itself. I’ve really been hooked on Globe Genie, which takes you to a random point on Google Street View; it’s amazing to me how many beautiful places there are in this world.
Model filling station near my house. It’s non-functioning; the man who owns it maintains and adds to it as a hobby. In the spring, students from the high school come here to take their prom photos.
I think this must have been the most fun ever.
Source: The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, via Vanity Fair
* French - “when chicken have teeth” “quand les poules auront des dents”
* Russian - “when the crawfish whistles on the mountain” “когда рак на горе свистнет”
* Malay - “when cats grow horns” “Tunggu kucing bertanduk”
* Swedish - “when there are two Thursdays in the same week” “två torsdagar i veckan
Mange et Tais-Toi! (Eat and Shut Up!), published in 1966 by Editions Fleuve Noir, Paris
“You think you know me?
When the wife of a guy who’d saved my life throws herself against my chest crying, telling me her husband’s gonna be plugged in two days for high treason, I rush to the rescue— even when the man in question is in Saigon, and he’s gotta get rid of the spoils of his treachery, quick.
Béru, you know him? He’s always ready to follow his superiors— just as ready as you’d be to follow the girl you loved down the path of glory and past some punches, too— even when his orders are unofficial.
Dames, you know ‘em? The better looking they are, the deeper they’ll drag you into their problems.
I sure know ‘em— lucky me. I know how to help ‘em, too.
As for my style… if you still haven’t experienced it, it’s about time to wise up, because it’d be a pain in the neck for me if you died having only read Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau!
Just remember one thing, boys: culture. It’s the only true thing out there.”
Translation mine.* via
*It’s approximate, of course— I thought preserving the original pulpy noir style of writing was the most important thing. This style, of course, meant that some of the idioms and slang were wholly unfamiliar to me. I was able to find whole or partial translations for most of them, except for one: “devoir effacer sa ration de prunes,” which I couldn’t even find a reference to anywhere. It literally means “to have to destroy/clear away one’s ration of plums.” Based on the context other idiomatic usages of the word “prune”, I guessed that it might mean “to cover up one’s mistakes,” but then I thought about the English meaning of “plum” as a way to describe a choice assignment, job, or reward original description and image. There’s a similar enough meaning in French— “prune” can apparently be used as part of descriptions of wealth and privilege (“having a prune in one’s mouth” being roughly equivalent to “being born with a silver spoon…”). Given the context— high treason! Orientalist decadence!— I thought that “he’s gotta get rid of the spoils of his treachery” was, if not a great guess, a passable one. If anyone reads this who has any clue at all about this idiom… God. Let me know.
Also, who knew that the French for “pain in the neck” is “pain in the thyroid?” Not me.
Fig. 15 Mock Moons (“Paraselenae”) seen at Denver, Col., in 1881
“These extraordinary and rare phenomena in Nature which are called ‘Mock Suns’ or parhelia or ‘Mock Moons’ (paraselenae), (Fig. 15) chiefly seen in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, owe their origin, like the rainbow, to reflection by particles of water, but unlike the rainbow, those particles are in their crystalline or frozen condition. The phenomena of halos and coronae are caused partially by disfraction in the aqueous particles constituting a misty atmosphere, and partly by reflection and decomposition of light, as produced in the rainbow.”
From Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 35, 1881
Photo reblogged from My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning with 25 notes
Tales to Astonish 39
January 1963
They do seem quite unstoppable. I had plenty of questions about this one, mainly answered by Wikipedia. Apparently that helmet can control ants. Also, there is an upcoming movie based on Ant Man… oh god.
Source: drakecaperton
Babar at School, by Jean de Brunhoff
Sometimes I feel very much like Babar seems to feel here.
I was going to post one of the covers featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., but this one was too lovely to pass up. I warned you I’d be posting a lot of these. You can read every issue of Jet through Google Books. This issue is here.
Photo reblogged from My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning with 106 notes
ventriloquist two c 1890
Source: thizizit
St Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
—Galway Kinnell (1927-)
From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980
Poster for the play Anna Livia, by Jan Jaromir Alekslun, 1977.
Image taken from Contemporary Polish Posters in Full Color, ed. Joesph C. Czestchowski
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