ClicksyPicsWiggle animations and more!

Below is a link to a letter from a slave to his old slave master.  The site looks pretty cool, collections of old letters… sounds like something I’ll be digging through very soon!  Letters of Note:  To my Old Master

I found this pretty interesting and thought you might too.  It’s an old stereo showing what the uploader suspects is a UFO.

I found it interesting but I’m skeptical.  Notice the clouds?  See how they’re really wavy and unnatural?  It’s as if the clouds moved by during exposure.  I find it more likely that a bird flew past while the photo was being taken, and because the exposure likely took a second or two, it appeared as this elongated ‘UFO’.

Most of us can get a similar effect by setting a slower exposure time on our cameras and aiming at an area with birds -  a tripod helps, and maybe a rock to get em to fly.  I find it unlikely that it was a smudge on the camera lens or plate, as the smudge would have to be identical on both lenses or both plates. I can’t see the second image very well… no opinion there.

Still, pretty cool. What do you think?

Here is a page I wanted to point out because the writer has taken an ordinary, every day event and looked at it differently.  It’s a picture of lightning, the bottom is a composite of several images that’s been made interactive by moving your mouse across the image.

It’s different, it’s cool, and props to the creator for sharing:  Click here to see it.

I haven’t checked out genealogy online much in the last few years, but times are changing and you can actually get family documents online for free.  You don’t even have to sign up.

Searching for my great grandfather, I got just a little worried when I found out his sister has the same name as his… wife!  But then I tracked down the documents for his wife, thank goodness that one was a coincidence. Apparently Maudie/Maud was a common name back then.  Phew!

There is plenty of census information on the site, and in some cases the actual documents are scanned in at high resolution.  There are also marriage and death records, and probably a whole lot more.

Visit Familysearch.org

AP story:

WASHINGTON – In the Confederate circles he navigated, John Scobell was considered just another Mississippi slave: singing, shuffling, illiterate and completely ignorant of the Civil War going on around him.

Confederate officers thought nothing of leaving important documents where Scobell could see them, or discussing troop movements in front of him. Whom would he tell? Scobell was only the butler, or the deckhand on a rebel sympathizer’s steamboat, or the field hand belting out Negro spirituals in a powerful baritone.

In reality, Scobell was not a slave at all.

He was a spy sent by the Union army, one of a few black operatives who quietly gathered information in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot. These unsung Civil War heroes were often successful, to the chagrin of Confederate leaders who never thought their disregard for blacks living among them would become a major tactical weakness.

Continue reading here

Try to quickly summon an image of good-with-small-children dog, and chances are you’ll picture something adorably Benji-shaggy. Or maybe a sweetie-pie golden retriever, or a loveball of a lab. It’s not likely, at least not in today’s perception of the breed, that an American pit bull terrier leaps to mind.

But not so long ago, pit bulls were brought in as “nanny dogs,” the trusted caretaker pups to watch over kids.

Vintage photographs recently posted on a personal blog show off the breed as babysitter.

Continue reading…

There’s a cool new project on Abe Lincoln in the works.  Check it out at www.savinglincoln.com.  They are looking for people who can be of help, so if you’re interested – that’s you Civil War buffs and animators – be sure to check it out!

I couldn’t say it better than the title:  Link

Here’s a great article by one of my favorite sites, listverse.com.  I’ve been to #10 several times, a very cool spot.

Really old typewriters

Star Wars figures added to real images from WWII

Anti-suffrage propaganda posters