The Perfect Back Contest

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jul 21, 2023 - Comments (2)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Body, Medicine, Twentieth Century

DeVere Baker, Mormon Raftmaker

He had the goal of sailing ocean currents in order to prove the voyages spoken of in the Book of Mormon were possible.... His failures were many, and often embarrassing, so embarrassing that the press and Mormons in general began to look the other way, rather than report on his adventures.... Nor were Baker’s dreams confined to the ocean. In a unique combination of science-fiction and Mormon theology, he authored several stories focused on a beautiful alien girl named ‘Quetara.’ A human scientist is kidnapped by her crew and falls in love with her, learning in the process how God came to be, billions of years previously, and how evolution allowed the endless variation of species to develop on each world in a grand, perpetual Cosmic experiment overseen and controlled by Deity. A subtext of this was ostensibly good latter-day doctrine – that countless other worlds, including, of course, the wise and alluring Quetara’s own planet, were inhabited by people just like us.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jul 19, 2023 - Comments (5)
Category: Eccentrics, Explorers, Frontiersmen, and Conquerors, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, Religion, Twentieth Century

Hoosier Poet Canned Goods

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jul 14, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Poetry, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century

Rodeo Sweetheart

Posted By: Paul - Mon Jul 03, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Animals, Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Regionalism, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century, Circuses, Carnivals, and Other Traveling Shows

True Crime Podcast on Vinyl

Posted By: Paul - Sun Jun 25, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Crime, Death, Vinyl Albums and Other Media Recordings, United Kingdom, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century

Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 51

Posted By: Paul - Sun Jun 18, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Statues and Monuments, Russia, Twentieth Century

Bevo

"Bevo" was the name of a non-alcoholic "near beer" produced by the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Saint Louis. Introduced in 1916 as the national debate over Prohibition threatened the company's welfare, the drink was extremely popular through the 1920s. Over 50 million cases were sold annually in fifty countries. Anheuser-Busch named the new drink "Bevo" as a play on the term "pivo," the Bohemian word for beer.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jun 14, 2023 - Comments (6)
Category: Replacements, Substitutes, Alternatives and Knock-offs, Advertising, Twentieth Century, Alcohol

Miss Sportsorama

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jun 13, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Sports, Twentieth Century

James Eads How, The Millionaire Hobo

In addition to advocating for hobos, How chose to live as one, even though he had both money and education. He wore a shaggy beard and rough tramplike clothes. It was said that even ordinary hobos looked well dressed compared to How.[3] From about age 25, he traveled around doing hard work for a living.[11] One of How's contemporaries, sociologist Nels Anderson, describes how fully How immersed himself in the hobo lifestyle and how seriously How took his work:

Millionaire that he is, How has not failed to familiarize himself with every aspect of tramp life. He knows the life better than many of the veteran hobos. He has become so thoroughly absorbed in the work of what he describes as organizing the "migratory, casual, and unemployed"...workers that he practically loses interest in himself. He becomes obsessed with some task at times that he will walk the streets all day without stopping long enough to eat.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Jun 10, 2023 - Comments (1)
Category: Bums, Hobos, Tramps, Beggars, Panhandlers and Other Streetpeople, Eccentrics, Money, Twentieth Century

UPenn Gargoyles

In the 1890s and the first couple decades of the twentieth century, Penn engaged Philadelphia architects Cope and Stewardson to design several University buildings. With their design for the Quadrangle, whose first section opened in 1896, Cope and Stewardson emulated several vintage eras of English architecture in a style that became known as Collegiate Gothic. In a delightful homage to Elizabethan architecture, they incorporated several dozen bosses into their design. They worked with sculptors Henry Plasschaert and John Joseph Borie (a Penn architecture alumnus) and stone carvers Edmund Wright, Edward Maene and assistants to turn these uncut stones into sculpted figures. Cope and Stewardson approved elevation views and clay models of each proposed boss, which was then carved over a period of three to four days from a fourteen-inch square piece of Indiana limestone that had been incorporated into the Quadrangle.

Mr. Plasschaert and his carvers kept the mood of these bosses whimsical. Parodic figures are abundant, such as a grotesque animal biting the corner of a block of stone, or an architect dressed in an elf costume carrying a basket of fruit. A variety of mythical creatures and bizarre monsters are on display, as is the occasional reference to academic activity, like the creatures brandishing tragedy and comedy masks atop the Mask and Wig clubhouse, or a monkey clutching a scroll labeled “diploma.”

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jun 07, 2023 - Comments (4)
Category: Architecture, Regionalism, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century