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Category / Life is Messy

Desire to Kill the Streetcar

In the 1920 and 30s, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and countless other major American cities had sprawling electric streetcar rail systems until General Motors, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone bought up a controlling interest in National City Lines. Once the monopolising companies owned the railways, they shut them down, forcing Americans to buy cars or…

Kayaking (and fishing) in the Death Valley Desert

If someone had told me I could go kayaking in Death Valley as we drove through that barren desert one summer; the merciless August sun beating down on the tarmac ahead, I would have assumed they were starting to see a mirage. Boating in the desert?Strange things can happen in such an otherworldly place… Today this National…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CLXXXVIII)

1. Photoshop from the 1930s Beauty retouching has been around a lot longer than we thought. The side-by-side images above from the early 1930s show what a glamour portrait looked like before and after manual ‘Photoshopping.’ Photographer George Hurrell shot the portrait of actress Joan Crawford as a publicity shot for the 1931 film Laughing Sinners. A retoucher named James…

The Anti-Nazi Teen Gang that Beat Up Hitler Youth and Danced to Jazz

A band of adolescent music-lovers, swing dancers and snappy dressers– not exactly the type you’d expect to take on the Nazi Hitler Youth. But in pre-WWII Germany, the Nazi regimentation of society inadvertantly gave rise to massive teenage street gangs who beat up the Hitler Youth, tagged anti-Nazi graffiti at train stations– and listened to…

The 1930s Secret Cambridge Club of Rooftop Climbers

As night fell on Cambridge University in the 1930s, a dapper gang of undergraduate students regularly met in secret to climb up historical buildings, illegally exploring their campus via its rooftops and façades. They were known as the “Night Climbers of Cambridge”, immortalised in a cult guide book on the forbidden practice, anonymously published by the daredevil you see in…

Here is the Blog of the Game of Thrones Costume Maker

There is so much going on in that crazy HBO show Game of Thrones that we rarely get to stop and appreciate the finer details that go into its creation. Michelle Carragher is the talented embroiderer and illustrator behind the lavish costumes worn by many of the characters, and her blog is like a secret Game of…

Meet the Hipster Tattoo Artist of Cuba (where Tattoo Parlours are illegal)

While he might look like the average modern hipster, Ché Alejandro actually thinks of himself as a “neo-hippie communist”. In Cuba, there are currently 201 types of private businesses permitted by the government and tattoo shops are not one of them, making Ché’s small parlour in Havana still currently illegal. Despite constantly dodging government closures of his clandestine shop by paying small…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CLXXXVII)

1. Hitchock’s Bates Mansion on an NYC Rooftop British artist Cornelia Parker has created an installation based on the mansion from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho for this year’s Roof Garden commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. PsychoBarn was built by reusing materials from a dismantled red barn in upstate New York.…

The Compendium of Awful Library Books, Made by Awesome Librarians

When we think of librarians, stereotypes have taught us to think of ladies wearing sinister pointy glasses who sit there and shush us when fits of uncontrollable giggles comes over oneself while reading up on the complete mind-numbing history of something or another. But today, I stumbled upon the secret world of the librarian in the…

The Man who snuck into the Vietnam War Zone to Buy his Best Friends a Beer

“A lot of my friends were serving in Vietnam. I just wanted to go over there and buy them all a beer. That’s what I did”. John ‘Chickie’ Donohue was a civilian merchant marine from New York City who conned his way into Vietnam at the height of the war to search for his enlisted three best friends and…

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