The Dog Cafe, circa 1930

By Pablo Fanque, Reluctant Dog Editor (meaning Jack & Mona are definitely NOT "dog people")


The Dog Cafe, ca. 1930. Interestingly, if you search for Dog Cafes now, the results are for cafes that serve dogs (I didn't say serve dog). . .

1930

2013

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Adolph Hitler enjoys a console game?

By Mona Goldwater, German Studies Ed.

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for passing this one along.  We don't know the context or provenance, or the 'shopper!

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The Cuban Missile Crisis: On the brink

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.

I recently read a book about the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, and the JFK (+RFK)  White House response. It's incredible how close we came to incinerating everything, and somehow bumbled through it with Russia and Cuba, ending up more or less whole.

This photograph shows an anti-aircraft gun on Key West that week, pointed out over the Florida Straits.

click to enlarge

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Poem: A touch of evil

By Jack Brummet

1.

Darkness, having been eliminated,
furtively obtrudes again.

2.
Does the wind blow over the earth
or does it blow under heaven?
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Painting: Burbles

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Hobo Sign: Tell Sad Story

Painting by Jack Brummet

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LBJ drives his car into a lake

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.

LBJ driving his amphibious car.  He liked to scare visitors to his ranch by driving them downhill in his Amphicar into his property’s lake, "while shouting that the brakes had broken.”

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President Ronald W. Reagan rides a missle

By Jack Brummet

This is a 1981 photo of a statue of President Ronald Wilson Reagan of the United States on a missile. This was a protest sculpture on the street Nieuwezijdsvoorburgwal (really?!) in Amsterdam.  RWR appears to be emulating the final Slim Pickins scene in Dr. Strangelove.

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Jimmy Webb's Highwayman by The Highwaymen

By Jack Brummet, C & W Music Ed.

The Highwayman is an incredible tune by Jimmy Webb, and this version, by The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson is as good as it gets.

                                                    "Highwayman" by Jimmy Webb

I was a highwayman. Along the coach roads I did ride

With sword and pistol by my side

Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade

Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade

The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five

But I am still alive.

I was a sailor. I was born upon the tide

And with the sea I did abide.

I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico

I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow

And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed

But I am living still.

I was a dam builder across the river deep and wide

Where steel and water did collide

A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado

I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below

They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound

But I am still around..I'll always be around..and around and around and 

around and around

I fly a starship across the Universe divide

And when I reach the other side

I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can

Perhaps I may become a highwayman again

Or I may simply be a single drop of rain

But I will remain

And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again..

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A maintenance man rappels down Lincoln's nose

Provenance and photographer unknown.

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Alien Lore No. 252 - Google Doodle celebrates 66th Roswell Anniversary

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.

Google's doodle today commemorates the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash in 1947. Many UFOlogists believe Roswell was an alien landing outside the New Mexico town.that went wrong. The Google doodle allows users to control a small alien through a series of tasks in a Roswell-like desert.

Conspiracy folks believe that that US military captured a crashed alien aircraft a/k/a flying saucer  in July 1947.  The Air Force and others insisted that the incident merely involved the recovery of debris from a secret surveillance balloon.

A press release issued that day by a local US military base says that the crash involved a flying disk.  But the Army quickly changed their story. 

In 1995, Ray Santilli in London claimed that he possessed film footage showing an autopsy being performed on one of the Roswell aliens. Santilli said later that the film was a reconstruction of what he insisted was real events.

Fifty years later (!) the US Air Force released 1997 231-page report--Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash--stating that the alien bodies witnesses reported seeing at the crash scene were actually life-sized crash test dummies.

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Painting: The Frown

By Jack Brummet

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