Reading suggestions for a rainy and foggy mid-March weekend

I've been doing a poor job lately of providing actual content for the blog, so the least I can do is offer up some suggestions for important, cool and silly things to read elsewhere on the internet. This list was compiled over the past couple of months. Hopefully there's something here for everyone.

And stick with me, please, I promise there will be some new ephemera posts down the road.

Serious stuff

• The Atlantic: "A Brewing Problem" by James Hamblin (The terrifying cautionary tale of John Sylvan and the Keurig K-Cups. Almost 1 in 3 American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine. The cups are STILL not recyclable or biodegradable. Billions of them end up in landfills each year.)
• The Washington Post: "The terrible loneliness of growing up poor in Robert Putnam’s America" by Emily Badger
• Roads & Kingdoms: "To live, the oyster must die" by Oliver Bullough
• The Atlantic: "How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning" by Luba Vangelova (Mastering English requires abilities that most children don’t develop until they're pre-teens.)
• Slate: "The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s" by Eric Holthaus
• The Atlantic: "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket" by Joe Pinsker (Most of Scandinavia determines fines based on income. Could such a system work in the U.S.? This story dovetails in some interesting and important ways with NPR's "Guilty and Charged" series.)
• The New York Times Magazine: "The wreck of the Kulluk" by McKenzie Funk
• The Hill: "'Father of the Internet' mounts defense of hard copies" by Elise Viebeck
• Narratively: "The last eco-warrior" by Aaron Kase

Not-so-serious stuff

• Grantland: "The Grantland Q&A: Errol Morris" by Alex Pappademas
• Huffington Post: "Vincent Van Gogh May Have Hidden 'The Last Supper' Within One Of His Most Famous Paintings" by Todd Van Luling
• The Atlantic: "1985: The Last Great Year in Film for Kids and Young Adults" by Garin Pirnia
• The Millions: "A Thousand Hands Will Grasp You with Warm Desire: On the Persistence of Physical Books" by Alix Christie
• The Spark: "Our Lacks, in the Shape of Fairy Tales" by Joel Hans
• Longreads: "The Holy Junk Heap" by Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole (Some 300,000 Jewish documents were hidden in a closet in Cairo for hundreds of years. They were discovered by the lady adventurer twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson and the legendary Rabbinical scholar Solomon Schechter.)
• LA Weekly: "Some Hollywood Extras Suffer, But Others Are Rolling In It" by Hillel Aron
• Tokyo Desu: "8 Hilariously Nonthreatening Monsters from Japanese Folklore"
• Gizmodo: "The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery" by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
• LA Times: "REVIEW: It's game time for the history of Monopoly" by Heller McAlpin (Related post: Board for Parker Brothers' 1936 version of the game Finance)
• The Guardian: "The Great Moon Hoax and the Christian Philosopher" by Rebekah Higgitt
• The New York Times Magazine: "My Dad, the Pornographer" by Chris Offutt (Don't be put off by the subject matter. This is an amazing read.)
• ListVerse: "10 Disturbing Tales From Scandinavian Folklore" by Gregory Myers
• Vermicious: "Forgotten TV: Star Maidens" by John Seven (Excerpt: "The 1975-76 German/English co-production Star Maidens, without any doubt, is the worst science fiction television series ever made, no contest. This is not up for argument. If you think it is, you should step away, because you are wrong.")
• The Quill of Victory: "Marathon-on, Mr. Movie" (memories of Philadelphia late-night radio legend Steve Friedman) by Dan Weckerly

Book cover: "Six Little Bunkers at Miller Ned's"

• Title: Six Little Bunkers at Miller Ned's
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 246
• Author: Laura Lee Hope (pseudonym)
• Illustrator: Walter S. Rogers
• Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap, New York
• Year: 1924
• Notes: "Six Little Bunkers" was a 14-book series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate between 1918 and 1930. ... The series was described thusly in this advertising copy from Grosset & Dunlap:
  

  "Delightful stories for little boys and girls which sprung into immediate popularity. To know the six little Bunkers is to take them at once to your heart, they are so intensely human, so full of fun. Each story has a little plot of its own -- one that can be easily followed -- and all are written in Miss Hope's most entertaining manner. Clean, wholesome volumes which ought to be on the bookshelf of every child in the land."

  ... All of the books in the series involved the six children being at someone's place. Other books had them at Aunt Jo's, Grandpa Ford's, Cowboy Jack's, Mammy June's, Indian John's, Happy Jim's and Lighthouse Nell's, for example. ... The children were named Mun Bun, Russ, Rose, Violet (Vi), Margy and Laddie. Vi and Laddie were twins. Rose was the oldest girl. Laddie liked to speak in riddles. Margy was a friend to stray cats. Mun Bun's full name was Munroe Ford Bunker.
  
• Excerpt:
  

  "The six little Bunkers were also growing — growing fat and sturdy — and they were getting to be as tanned and brown as a russet shoe, so Daddy Bunker said. For they played out in the sunshine and fresh air all day long. That is, when the weather was good. When it rained they played in the house, the barn, or in the mill."

1910 postcard to Conyngham: "I'm going to take a trip."

The vintage joke postcard — and it's a bit of a cruel prank that's pictured — was published by Bamforth & Co. of Holmfirth, England, and New York.¹ It was mailed in January 1910 from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to Conyngham, Pennsylvania, a small borough in Luzerne County that is named after American Revolution hero Captain Gustavus Conyngham (pictured at right).²

The postcard was addressed to Albert G. Harvey and the message on the back states:

"Look for me Saturday Evening on the 8 O'clock train. I expect Uncle Frank will be with me. Uncle James."

Footnotes
1. Previous posts featuring Bamforth & Co. postcards include:

• #27: That's it. Everyone go to bed. (Postcard Blogathon 2013)
• 1908 postcard: "TOO BUSY TO WRITE."

2. Fun fact: Conyngham's sister village is Drums.

I hope Yuriy Sosnitskiy becomes a famous artist

I recently sent a Postcrossing card to Yuriy and Nataly Sosnitskiy in Kharkov, Ukraine. After receiving it, Nataly emailed me:

"We are very happy to have such a beautiful postcard with cool postmarks! Yuriy especially like postmark with a Batman:) He is a painter and now he illustrated his own book for children. You can see his work in google - Yuriy Sosnitskiy. We also dream about our own business."

So, of course, I Googled Yuriy and ... wow!

Here are a few of his pieces of artwork that I really loved...

Rain

Road to Home

a

Odessa No3

Game

See more of Yuriy's artwork here. I told them that I hope his work finds a wider audience and appreciation in the near future. Some of his paintings would look great as prints on a wall. But, of course, I also told them that these would make great postcards! (More my price range, too.) Nataly said that was indeed their hope, too, and that they're especially excited about Yuriy's new children's book. "We hope to send you our own card some day," she concluded.

Six illustrations from 1920's "Primer of Sanitation"

Primer of Sanitation by John W. Ritchie is subtitled "Being a Simple Textbook on Disease Germs and How to Fight Them."

The 1920 revision serves as Book II in the New-World Health Series, published by the World Book Company. The book delves into germs, bacteria, tetanus, diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough, tuberculosis, consumption, typhoid fever, mosquito-borne diseases and other somber topics. In the preface, Ritchie writes:

"The author has therefore followed with sympathy and very great interest the efforts that are being made to teach sanitation in the public schools, and has felt that the effectiveness of these efforts would be very greatly increased if they were supplemented by an elementary textbook in this field."

The textbook's illustrations were done by Karl Hassmann

Here are some of them, presented without editorial comment on my part. (Readers, please feel free to discuss these 95-year-old notions of healthy and hygiene.)

"The great outdoor world is practically free from germs."

"Consumptives taking the winter air on a city roof."

"This house was so infested with mosquitoes that the owner was about to sell it at a sacrifice, when he learned from a health official that a half-hour spent in draining the ditch or in sprinking it with kerosenee would free his family from annoyance and the danger of disease."

"It is never safe to use public drinking cups."

"In a light and well-ventilated room germs are killed by the light and drying."

"In both city and country the public health nurse is becoming one of the most important agents in the prevention of sickness. Day afer day she moves about among the people, advising them on matters of health."

Telegram: Sandra & Leonard Nimoy plead with JFK for a safer planet

Years before Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy hoped that the planet Earth would live long and prosper.

This afternoon, in the wake of Nimoy's death, the JFK Library tweeted out the above image of a telegram that Nimoy and his first wife, Sandra, sent to John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1962.

It states:

"IN NAME OF DECENCY DON'T POLLUTE AIR WITH BOMB. PRESERVE CHILDREN'S RIGHT BREATHE CLEAN AIR"

Mashable's Megan Specia provides some background and context for the telegram in this article.

While the telegram did not stop the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test, its simple plea on pink paper is worth remembering. We'll never, of course, reach the universe's distant stars and planets if we destroy our own.

Apple crumb pie for Jack Benny and Canadian cheese soup for Bob Hope

"How to hold a star" is a 12-page staplebound recipe booklet that was published in 1950 by the Edison Electric Institute.¹

It's one of the most sexist things you can imagine.

Which was par for the course in the United States in 1950.

The introduction states:

"Like clever wives everywhere, the wives of movie stars know that there's more truth than poetry in the old saying, 'the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.' ... On the pages that follow, you will find how the wives of top-notch motion picture husbands 'hold their stars' by cooking their favorite recipes the modern way — with a modern Electric Range."

And so we get pages of recipes and photos in which women who only get to exist as "Mrs. Pat O'Brien" and "Mrs. Gene Autry" share the recipes that apparently kept them in good standing with their Hollywood husbands.

Here's the full rundown:

• Jack Benny: Apple Crumb Pie
• Pat O'Brien: Savory Beef Stew
• Bob Hope: Canadian Cheese Soup
• Robert Young: Ham-Yam Casserole
• Gene Autry: Veal Chops California
• Alan Ladd: Hamburger Rodeo
• Eddie Cantor: Almond Chicken Casserole
• Broderick Crawford: Mixed Grill

Here are two of the pages from the booklet...

And here are the two above recipes typed out for your convenience, in case you want to try to wrangle a movie star of your own.

Apple Crumb Pie
Made by Mary Livingstone for her husband

• 7 cups peeled, sliced apples
• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon grated orange rind
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sifted, enriched flour
• 1/2 cup butter or margarine
• whipped cream

Place apples in greased deep pie pan; add orange juice. Combine sugars, orange rind, spices, salt and flour. Cut in butter or margarine with 2 knives or pastry blender. Spread evenly over apples. Bake in moderate oven, 350° F. 1 hour. Top each serving with flavored and sweetened whipped cream. Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Canadian Cheese Soup
Made by Dolores L. DeFina for her philandering husband

• 4 tablespoons butter or margarine
• 4 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cans condensed consomme
• 2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• Dash tobacco
• 1/4 cup minced pimientoes

Melt butter or margarine; blend in flour, paprika and pepper. Add milk; cook over low heat, stirring constantly until thickened. Add consomme, just as it comes from the can. Add cheese; stir until melted. Add remaining ingredients, salting to taste. Serve at once. Yield: 8 to 10 servings.

Footnote
1. The Edison Electric Institute is still around and is holding its 2015 convention this June in New Orleans. Just FYI.