According to today's particularly good Library of Congress Today in History it has been 60 years since the release of the film Casablanca. The LOC entry deftly weaves the history of the film with what was actually going on in Casablanca during 1942-43, namely the massive aerial bombardment of Operation Torch and the subsequent meeting of the Allies during the Casablanca Conference. It's really fascinating reading.

Lovers of Casablanca will be amazed by the collection of Casablancaiana at Vincent's Casablanca HomePage. Vincent has great collections of photographs (including the one above of a supremely degenerate looking Peter Lorre), audio and video clips, the script in .pdf format ... all kinds of stuff. We were especially impressed by his collection of Casablanca movie posters from different countries. (Our favorites were the ones from France and Spain.)

In general most of the weblogs we read have to do with photography, visual arts, exploration, and stuff of that nature. Today, however, we stumbled upon the weblog of Richard Winters, an emergency room physician in Fresno, CA. Richard's very interesting blog, richard[WINTERS], reminded us of the enormous potential for blogs to expose us to the day to day lives of all kinds of interesting people in many different fields of endeavour. We were particularly taken by an entry titled Don't Move The Beer. Oh, and Richard also took that super-cool photo of his wife and her father in front of the jellyfish at the Montery Bay Aquarium.

Rêveries d'un voyageur solitaire by Philippe Goy. One of many unusual photographs to be found at Short Photographic Poems.

In 1967 Canada hosted Expo67 in Montreal. Expo was a world's fair "of the first magnitude" which meant that it's mandate was to cover the whole scope of human achievement. Expo was a spectacular success, many say it was the last great World's Fair. People from all parts of Canada, and from around the world, visited Montreal, and for one great year the eyes of the world were on the, suddenly very modern and sexy, Canada.

Now the National Archives of Canada has opened its new Expo 67 site. While we at Portage have some concerns about the site design there are lots of great materials including photographs, documents, political cartoons, movies, and more. Some of our favorite things included:

The above photograph is from Constructing Europe: Transport, an exhibition documenting developments in transportation in Europe since the 1880s. There's some great photographs here including a manned flying kite, an early motorcycle gang, and even a submersible canoe. The exhibit is the first one I've seen from the exciting SEPIA (Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access) project which is a multi-national European project devoted to conserving the photographic collections of Europe.

Stones In My Pathway is a remarkable site by photographer Bill Steber which documents Blues Culture in Mississippi. Steber interprets Blues Culture to include "juke joints, cotton farming, sacred music, rural church services, river baptisms, folk religion and superstition, life on Parchman penitentiary, hill country African fife and drum music, and diverse regional blues styles." That seems like a pretty decent definition to us. In addition to the remarkable photographs and great site design Steber has included Real Audio clips of his commentary on the photographs and clips of some great blues songs by performers such as Junior Kimbrough and Robert "Bilbo" Walker. So be sure to click on the music note icon beside many of the photos.
(link via visible darkness which has been excellent lately. Make sure to read Jeff's account of his chance meeting with Steber in 1996, it's really interesting. )

Imagine if the world really looked like it does as viewed through the eyes of the masters of Modern art. Then imagine that you were hammered. Now imagine that your reality changed with every drink you had. Stop imagining and visit the beautiful Kunstbar.
(link via leuschke)

Children's Letters to Einstein

This photograph is of 7 year old Julia Ann Crumpling who, in 1870, was sentenced to seven days hard labor in Oxford Gaol for stealing a baby carriage. We found it in the Crime & Punishment section of the Public Record Office's amazing Virtual Museum. They have some really neat stuff in there (including the thing we went looking for the confession of Guy Fawkes). Crime & Punishment is one of the eight sections of the museum. There's lots to see including the SOS telegram of the Titanic, Edward VIII's abdication letter, and a postcard from Jack the Ripper.

There's (almost) nothing we like better than a good scanning electron microscope site. We were so happy to find this site by David Walter at the University of Queensland which has some very nice scans of mites. As an added bonus we found the mite site on a great weblog, Dublog, that was new to us but which seems to share many of our interests. It's great. Another new weblog on our roll includes The Eyes Have It, which focuses on visual communications in the medical sciences.

If, as many readers seemed to, you enjoyed last week's post about Vesalius and the De Humani Corporis Fabrica then you're bound to enjoy Dream Anatomy a fantastic new exhibit from the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D.C. The show details the history of anatomical illustration from 1500 to 2002. A central theme of the exhibit is the important role that the artistic imagination plays in such illustrations. There's some incredible stuff here most of which we'd never seen before. The whole exhibit is worth looking at, but if you just want to see the pictures you can go straight to the Gallery.The illustration above is by Fritz Kahn and is intended to demonstrate the effects of sunlight on the health of the body. You can see it here.
(link via boingboing)

Myths + Illusions is an excellent photoessay by Marc Rochette exploring the daily lives of several children with Down's syndrome.

William Clothier, 86, Spy and Tennis Star, Is Dead
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

VALLEY FORGE, Pa., Nov. 1 — William J. Clothier II, a former tennis star, international spy and grandson of the co-founder of the Strawbridge & Clothier department store chain in the Philadelphia area, died here on Oct. 19. He was 86.

While Mr. Clothier won national tennis titles, he was also secretly a special agent for the F.B.I. and later worked for the C.I.A.

Mr. Clothier, whose father, William J. Clothier, was a national singles champion, toured on the grass-court tennis circuit from 1934 to 1938. Together, the two won a national father-son title twice.

In his government work, Mr. Clothier was an F.B.I. special agent in Peru, Cuba and Chile in World War II. He used his 1938 bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard as a cover. From 1952 to 1979, Mr. Clothier was a C.I.A. officer, gathering intelligence and aiding defectors.

He received several awards for his service, including the Order of Merit for Distinguished Service from Peru.

He is survived by his wife, Evelyn Baram-Clothier; a son, Morris; a daughter, Steffanie; a sister; and three grandchildren. His first wife, Irene Greif Clothier, died in 1990.

Spy AND Tennis Star?! Is that cool or what?

Magic Pencil: Children's Book Illustration Today is a very nice, although disappointingly small (the real life exhibit has over three hundred works, the virtual one has only the thirteen), website from The British Library examining the work of some of the top children's book illustrators working in Britain today. It's interesting to compare the modern works with these galleries (i, ii) (also from The BL of images from historic children's books.

It was on Halloween 1926 that the great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini died. Newspaper clippings here. Houdini willed his extraordinary collection of papers to the Library of Congress of the United States; those papers now form the amazing Harry Houdini Collection. Be sure to check out the LOC's extra special Today in History for October 31 for all kinds of Halloween links.

Happy Halloween! That thoughtful fellow up there is an illustration from De Humani Corporis Fabrica by the great Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Published in 1543 the work was the first anatomy to be based on the actual dissection and examination of human cadavers. (You can see an illustration of one of Vesalius's early dissections here. That's Vesalius to the left of the cadaver performing the dissection.) It is still considered to be the cornerstone of modern anatomy and many consider it to be the point at which medicine became a science. There are several sites which feature copies of the De Fabrica including some nice scans at the University of Michigan. Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast at Northwestern are working on an annotated translation which looks like it will be fantastic.

Today also marks the beginning of the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico. During the next few days families and friends will be reunited with their departed loved ones. You can read about the meaning of Dia De Los Muertos at this site (be sure to visit the The Altar and The Cemetary). Also well worth a visit is this site which features 5th grade students drawings of the Day of the Dead.

There's some excellent Hoagy Carmichael links over at BookNotes.

Mike Stanfill, an illustrator and animator from Dallas has created an excellent Flash animation of Tom Lehrer's classic song The Elements. You can read more about the enigmatic Tom Lehrer here.

The Price of Oil by Billy Bragg

Parables in Glass: Stained Glass Artwork by Judith Schaechter

Herc! Herc!

harrumph! has posted an excellent Hercules sticker book that brings back so many memories. There's lots of info on The Mighty Hercules here.

Posters American Style is an awesome gallery of posters at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. There's some really great stuff in here. We'll be back later to share some of our favorites.

Tools As Art

"When in Rome, should one actually do as the Romans do or is it all a farce?"
Noted Chicago Funnyman Kevin Guilfoile tackles this very tricky question for the Morning News.