The First Selfie?

By Jack Brummet, Photo Ed.


The Oxford Dictionaries recently announced their word of the year for 2013 is “selfie”, which they define as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” 

The picture considered by many to be the first photographic portrait ever taken was a “selfie”. The image was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast named Robert Cornelius. Cornelius set his camera up at the back of the family store in Philadelphia and took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. 

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The Statue of Liberty and her Morton's toe

By Jack Brummet, Statue and Monument Ed.


Did you know the Statue of Liberty has the condition known as Morton's toe (or Greek foot or "Royal Toe" or "LaMay toe" or "Sheppard's Toe" or Morton's syndrome?  According to the Wikipedia:  "Long toe) is the common term for the condition of a shortened first metatarsal in relation to the second metatarsal. It is a type of brachymetatarsia."

"The metatarsal bones behind the toes vary in relative length. In Morton's foot, the first metatarsal, behind the big toe, is short compared to the second metatarsal, next to it. The long second metatarsal puts the joint at the base of the second toe (the second metatarsal-phalangeal, or MTP, joint) further forward. If the big toe and the second toe next to it are the same length, the second toe will be longer than the big toe," as shown in the photo below:

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Faces No. 585 - The Founders

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Drawing: Faces No. 584 - just married

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Photos: Shaky Santas

click to enlarge

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Poem: Going Mad Might Be Like A Bad Eight Track Tape Deck

By Jack Brummet

You're not sure you hear the faint overtones

Layered under the music like static in a skipping signal

From a distant 50,000 watt radio station.
It's subtle at first, like music from another room.

Soon it becomes more than an echo
And you hear two songs at once

As the azimuth of an 8-track head becomes misadjusted
And adjacent tracks  bleed into the signal.

Hearing voices must be like that.
You brush it aside at first, doubting your own ears.

When it emerges with authority,
You can’t tell which voice is real

And which voice is a doppleganger.
Soon, bleedthrough takes precedence.

You can no longer differentiate

Between Jiminy Cricket’s voice and the one ordering you

To leave your house at 2 A.M. to dice up

The first luckless person to cross your path.

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Drawings: Faces No. 580 and 581

By Jack Brummet

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Ballard Cedar mill, Seattle, 1919

By Mona Goldwater, Seattle History Ed.

Photo from the Seattle Museum of History & Industry 

The Seattle Cedar mill, just west of the Ballard Bridge, was the largest sawmill in Ballard. Logs were cut into lumber and then dried for nine months before being sold. The stacks of drying lumber were at least 50 feet high.

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Opening a wine bottle with no corkscrew

Pablo Fanque, Beverage Editor

These work far better than my old improvisational methods: 1) breaking the neck off using a car bumper, or b) using a pencil or other object and hammering the cork down into the bottle. Image from Uproot.

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Poem: The Clock

By Jack Brummet

-1-

The fast hand sloughs seconds
Onto the clock dial, tugging
Hours and minutes along
As time burnishes our masks.

-2-
A paring of grey moonshell
Wheels over our shoulders,
Waltzing a sea surge
Across the ocean floor.

-3-
Under a red sun, night retracts its stars.
Starfish lounge on rocks,
The sun in Japan sinks
In water at sight's end,

Flares of light appear
In the opposing hemisphere,
And earth surrenders its heat,
Trading degrees with the shifting winds.
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Poem: The Painting

By Jack Brummet

The figure you brushed in,

Stuck under static skies,
Wants off the canvas.
He will not be your Man With Blue Banjo anymore.
He wants to be what he will be,
Not sailing scumbled seas
Under impasto thunderheads.

He is tired of the dark sun.
He wants to lie down and rest.

No news comes from a far country.
The real estate around him —
A confabulation of blue and red stone —
Chills in an un-harbored sea.

The black sun was pushed, fell, or jumped,
To shine back upon itself.

He knows the sun will never set.
He cannot open his mouth to scream.
The oars will never move.

The island of color
Will always be eight inches away
And the boat
Will always be sinking.

The tattered sails hang in the wind.
The next day refuses to begin.
He clutches that blue banjo
As his ship tilts toward heaven.
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Started 1997, finished 2013

Drawings: Faces No. 576, 577,578, 579, and 580

By Jack Brummet

[Pencil and Sharpie on wooden box]

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