Sunday Showcase

Somethin’ fishy, headline from nypost.com: “240 pounds of cocaine hidden in frozen squid — on same ship that tried to traffic the drug in shrimp.”

From NYP: “Unvaxxed voices: Voters who skipped shots overwhelmingly back Trump — but prefer Biden to RFK.” Although I’m not surprised by the first part of that sentence, I find it ironic, since DT moved mountains to get researchers to provide inoculation. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t received the shots, although there’s no way of proving they did harm — not yet, anyway.

From NYP: “Wildly popular Poppi prebiotic soda not as healthy as it claims: suit.” Never heard of it but not surprised.

According to an uncredited article at newsmax.com, 37 Mexican political candidates have been murdered during the 2024 election cycle, surpassing the 36 of 2021. As I’ve said before, the country should be renamed Narcoland.

Now in my 74th year, I figured I’d heard about every important aspect of American history. Not so — I recently learned about one of the pioneers of photography whose innovations were one step before movies. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit is a portrait of time, place and mankind. Born Edward Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon-Thames, England, a restless soul who emigrated to America, he settled in San Francisco in 1855. Circa 1870 the pace of life began to accelerate, as railroads eventually covered all of the USA, shortening distances by a speed never dreamed of. Horses topped at ten-15 MPH. Trains at first doubled that. It is frequently referred to in the book as “the annihilation of space and time.” Muybridge longed to capture motion in his photos and eventually succeeded. Here’s a link to a five-minute video that explains his victory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNU7sXkZmSw

The book contains much more, useful, fascinating details about the era, about how important the City by the Bay was, and murder. As usual, I was bored by the lament of what happened to Indians except for one passage that blew me away, here whittled down by yours truly: “Sarah Winchester, the widow of the man who manufactured the Winchester repeating rife — ‘the gun that won the west,’ … was an ardent spiritualist who spent the last decades of her life, from 1884 to 1922, building a house to ward off the spirits of the Indians killed by her husband’s rifles… The house grew to cover six acres and contain 160 rooms… a labyrinth designed to baffle the souls whose enemy she was…” Much of the narrative seems geared to ardent photographers, rendering in detail the techniques and equipment. Although the prose is solid, accessible, it’s a tough read, the 259 pages of the large paperback edition reading like much more, the print small. There are many quotes from famous personages of the era. 159 users at Amazon have rated River of Shadows…, forging to a consensus of 4.5 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three, as my small mind frequently drifted along the way. Published in 2004, the book is still selling fairly well, remarkable for a challenging work that must have required tons of research. Kudos to Solnit for taking on such a task. Born in Bridgeport in 1961, she was studying in Paris at 17 and eventually earned a Master’s in journalism at Cal Berkeley. Her work has appeared in many publications of note and she has published more than 20 books. She has also been active in leftist causes. Raised in an unhappy home, she has chosen to be childless. Photo from Google Images:

And here is Muybridge’s San Francisco Panorama, shot in sections in 1878, panels put together by the photographer:

It was tranquil at today’s session of the Anti-Inflation Book Shop. My thanks to those who donated and bought stuff. Here’s what sold: a hardcover and two DVDs in Russian, Miracles by Bobbi Smith, The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult, and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

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