A Themeless Transition

Having moved out of our weight class last week and being wrestled to the rhetorical mat we're in a mood to flee to fluffier funfare. We're going to let the pictures speak for themselves with some assistance from LIFE's probably outsourced and offshored worker bee captioners. And what better format for a themeless transition than the lamented thumbnail?(yeth, we know that thome of you have been mithing them).

Pick USelf up, dust USelf off and start all over again

With the inauguration of President Obama last Tuesday the USA may have cast off it's leg irons and resumed it's halting attempt to walk it's constitutional talk. We've been listening to the radio this weekend and we note that most hosts have built their shows around Obamamania. We thought that we too would join the Barrage Obama and see what LIFE had to offer on the struggles of American Blacks. We were overwhelmed by the vast number of images on this subject but we tried not to shy away from the disturbing or the grotesque. There were also the inspiring and the courageous. We learned from our smoking post that Americans are never too young to be introduced to the pleasures of tobacco and apparently they are also never too young to be inoculated with the seeds of hate. There were early successes and Pyrrhic victories. We had been somewhat unaware of how overt and violent the anti-integration racists were in the 50s. It was a time of irony and contrast and contrast and irony. A strange Freudian slip by the caption writer prompted us to include this image. The work of the Freedom Riders and others led to a turning point in the sixties. As you can tell, we have struggled with the weight of this topic and failed, grossly oversimplifying it in the process but we encourage you to use these links as starting points into this archive and get a feel for the history that words have not conveyed.

Better Late Than Never

On Monday we celebrated five years of freedom from cigarettes and had hoped to compose a commemorative post but circumstances intervened and we wound up working too much too far from The Point. We hope that this post, like quitting smoking, is better late than never.

We started smoking in our late teens which is later than average and much later than this fellow or this one who apparently was not allowed to play with matches. We're glad we quit before we got old or wrinkled like Keith. Oops, sorry Keith.

Oddly enough, we didn't know till now about the "proper" or "correct" smoking techniques. Our methods were modeled on Bogie's but did Bogie learn from Kate?

In the working world smoking was often about a "breather" or break but this chap was probably trying to avoid succumbing to black lung.

Our only regret is that since we've been keeping away from cigarettes we won't be able to make use of any of these fancy smoker's gadgets.

So remember; don't let tobacco make a monkey out of you.

Hot Dog!! What a Serendipitous Search String

Well, it's true. We actually used "hot dog" as a search string and the results were better than you might expect. Only 29 hits but leaving aside the "wurst" and the "not so wurst" there were several interesting images and windows into pop culture.

Besides the lad with a price on his head there were several other happy hotdog eaters including Frank relishing a frank. The "hot dog shuffle" led to a bit of a primer on meatmarket cheating methods.

A young woman enjoying a solo(save for the butler) seaside picnic turned out to be the lovely and talented Buff Cobb who later married Mike Wallace. With both a butler and a chauffeur we were amused to find that she had nobody to fill the swimming pool.

A family outing to a hot dog stand introduced us to TV comedienne Dagmar who was big in the fifties. In fact she was so big that the missile shaped bumper extensions found on Cadillacs and other cars of the late forties and the fifties came to be known as "Dagmars".

Finally, our taste for the bizarre was whetted by a picture of a model consuming a hot dog and a coke in a cloud of pesticide in order to prove the "safety" of DDT. This led us to other examples of better living through chemistry.

and now for something completely different!

We always assumed that if or when we eventually deigned to blog, or to be more accurate, finally got around to blogging we would be talking about and sharing tracks from vinyl records. However, we stumbled upon this marvellous internet resource of the LIFE photo archive and our life took a full tilt ADDilettante turn for the different. We haven't spun wax for a week or more but hey - thats LIFE!

This is a huge archive of millions of images and is not consistently cataloged or keyworded so navigation is sort of like prospecting and in that spirit we hope to share the nuggets, the motherlodes and the occasional open pit in future posts. Many of the sub-collections consist of dozens or in some cases hundreds of images from a given assignment so we will pan through those and present the brightest and shiniest. We will discuss photographers, subjects, events, and techniques but no doubt we will often fall back to sharing the visual oddities and non-sequiters such as those in this initial post.

For many images the captioning is minimal or non-existent or the subjects are pre-internet and we are left to make inferences about what is depicted. We invite you to share your inferences and critique ours and if you happen to have the issue of LIFE in which the subject appeared we would especialy like to hear from you as that may be the only source of textual information.