Oh, just a Miniature Global Village in China

Hey, you know what’s better than actually travelling the world and seeing its wonders and historic sights first hand? Hitting up a Chinese miniature theme park, of course … ‘Windows of the World’ is a 480,000 square-meter global village theme park in Shenzhen, China, accommodating over a hundred miniature replicas of world famous historical sights. A fantasy…

Blondie, the Living Room Lion

In 1955, LIFE photographer Joseph Scherschel spent a day shooting a rather unusual subject for a spread in the magazine entitled, “Living Room Lion – Blondie, A Docile 200-Pound Texan, Becomes A Member of the Family.” The oversized house cat belonged to Charles Hipp, an oil businessman based in Graham, Texas. You’re probably thinking, ‘another bored…

The Kowloon Walled City Replica: Historical Accident turned Amusement Park!

If you’ve been following this blog for a while or have had the chance to dig through the archives, you might remember we looked at Kowloon “Anarchy” City, the most densely populated place on Earth for most of the 20th century that belonged to no country and where law had no place; an interconnected urban enclave that was for…

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

1. An Abandoned Victorian Treehouse A two-story, child-size replica of a Victorian-style home photographed by Florida-based photographer Drew Perlmutter. The article, found on Huffington Post Home, does not reveal the exact location or a story as to why the treehouse was abandoned. The photographer will only reveal that the treehouse is in South East Florida, to…

The Real Jessica Rabbit

What I remember most about Jessica Rabbit is how she was always wearing that provocative red dress, cut oh so inappropriately low at the back, even just to run around town. Meet the real-life Jessica Rabbit, Miss Vikki Dougan, the 1950s ‘It girl’ who inspired the iconic cartoon sex bomb… Photographs by Ralph Crane for…

The Most Quoted Man in News (who is now Banned from Newspapers)

With no special skill or expertise, Greg Parker’s campaign to be the most quoted man in news has been so successful that the Associated Press sent its staff a memo that essentially banned interviews with him. That hasn’t stopped Greg’s “career.” Individually, his quotes are utterly unremarkable, but, considered as a whole, they add up to…

My Little Secret Montmartre

This is not Montmartre, the cupcake hilltop village of Paris where Miss Amélie Poulain resides. Today we escape to a different corner of the city in the 20th arrondissement with just as much charm and just as many steps. Upon first discovering it, my faithful walking companion duly declared, “It’s like a little Montmartre!” So…

Meanwhile, in a Parallel Universe…

When we think of the great surrealists, artists from another era such as Dalì, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Duchamp usually come to mind. But who have we got today? I’m going to put my money on Thomas Barblèy as an artist whose name will be spoken of in generations to come as one of “the greats”.…

An Interview with an Icon: The Lost Tape Recordings

For as long as the technology has been available, journalists have preferred documenting their interviews on little tape recorders rather than relying on their note-taking skills. Who can scribble down notes fast enough to catch every precious word anyway? Recordings give us that extra embellishment; something said under the interviewee’s breathe, a laughter that wouldn’t…

New York Crime Scenes: Then and Now

New York Daily News photographer Marc Hermann loves history and lucky for him, he has the key to the Daily News photo archive. With those two things in mind, he embarked on a project to bring the newspaper’s most infamous photographs back to life, superimposing them onto modern photos of the same location. The result is…