I recently opened up my genealogy records and snooped around the information that my mother and I had gathered more than a decade ago. And, I started looking around on the web for additional information and media to pad out our combined records. Just the other day Evergreen podcasts recently re-posted an interview that Col. Logan Weston gave on Warriors in Their Own Words. Col. Logan Weston is my great-uncle, served in the special ops force Merrill’s Marauders during WWII, and wrote about his experiences in his book The Fightin’ Preacher. I am terribly proud of my grandmother’s brother and enjoy hearing stories about him and his service to our country. I hope y’all will enjoy the listen as well.
Holidays in the Movies: Passover
There are plenty of thematically appropriate and dramatic representations of Passover in the movies. We will be taking a slightly sleepier and round about approach with Phenomena (1985) because sometimes we just need a comforting and familiar horror movie. What? Didn’t know that a European horror movie set in a girls school had anything to do with Passover? It’s easy to miss.
We may also track down “A Rugrats Passover” (1995). I am a sucker for cartoon holiday specials.
Spring time walk at Lettuce Lake Park
Vintage Recipe books and pamphlets collections
I might be running out of room in the modest space I have allotted myself for my vintage recipe pamphlets. I find it fascinating how the culmination of industrialization, new kitchen appliances, changing class structure, war, depression, and post war boom meant that EVERYONE – including electric companies, food suppliers, government agencies, and more – wanted to teach us how to cook at the end of the 19th century through and past the 1960s. Well, online collections of recipe pamphlets don’t take up space. Here are some:
- The Foods of England Project
- Michigan State University Libraries’ Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
- Wellcome Collection includes a large selection of handwritten personal and family cookbooks
- Henry Ford museum Historic Recipe Bank
- Milwaukee Public Library Digital Collections Historic Recipe File
- Iowa University Libraries, Iowa Digital Library Szathmary Recipe Pamphlets collection
- Indiana University Library and Indianapolis Public Library Service through Sponge Cake collection
- Texas Tech University Libraries Historical Cookbooks
- Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives Online History of Food and Drink Collection
- Library of Congress Gastronomy Books
The prehistory of solar panels
My work sends me looking for all kinds of things that I would never, if entirely directing my own research, be compelled to search and learn. I am grateful for this. This is how I learned about George Cove and his solar electric generator…a little known 1909 precursor to solar panels. The Resilience article “How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?” goes into detail on Cove’s work.
With the picture caption of the photograph from the Resilience article, I was able to find two articles about Cove’s work at the time:
- Homer, René (1909). Harnessing sunlight. Modern Electrics. 2 (6): 243. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051407073&view=1up&seq=5
- Laughter, Victor (1910). Generating Electricity by the Sun’s Rays. Popular Electricity. 2(12): 804. https://archive.org/details/popularelectrici02chi/page/804/
Spirited Horses in AI
I don’t know about you, but my professional life has been filled with discussions on AI generated text and art. The release of and growing proliferation of AI generated and assisted work has people asking many questions about originality, copyright, ethics, plagiarism, and more. I am discussing none of that here.
Instead, I decided to play with one of the AI art generators – an artificial intelligence program trained to create artwork based on a text prompt by synthesizing or learning from a collection of ‘training material’ gathered from various sources. Taking inspiration from one of my most popular posts to date, I wondered if Dall-E could give me a rendition of Spirited Horses that would’ve been compelling in similarity to Henri LeRoy’s had it been a contemporary of that work.
That most popular post is “Chromolithography and the Mystery of Henri and Anita LeRoy,” wherein I attempted to figure out the true authorship of a picture that I inherited from my grandmother, finding out all about chromolithography along the way. If you need a reminder, the first picture in the following gallery is what is often called ‘Spirited Horses’ with the signature of LeRoy. From what I was able to find out, the following two may have been issued as some kind of collect-all-three deal. The final picture is pretty darn similar in my opinion, issued by another chromolithographic company, Prang Co.
Well, I tried a couple prompts with Dall-E. The first try: “spirited horses in the style of a Victorian chromolithography,” said to me that the AI didn’t really know what I meant by chromolithographic style. Chromolithography was more a technique, but as a technique rooted very firmly to one main time period, I think they did have a look about them. A look that these four results did not capture.
I picked the last one, the one I thought most like my ‘Spirited horses’ and had the AI generate a few variations. The variations went to weird places.
For my next prompt I kept with the chromolithography word and tried: “chromolithography of horses running from a storm.” A couple of the examples here reminded me of the Prang, Co. image.
So I tried variations on the last one again.
Overall the experiment was interesting. I can see that the text prompt I give is of supreme importance. So, I tried ‘painting of two horses, one black and one white, with the black horse in the foreground, running from lightning.’ The results were different than the two previous tests but not any more ground breakingly similar to the chromolithographic prints I had studied previously.
Was I trying to get something that looked like an existing picture? Maybe. I’m not sure really. Knowing that the AI is trained on existing images from other artists has led many to worry that the images that result are copies, infringing on other artists rights. Of course each art AI I have played with is obviously trained on different images. If Henri LeRoy’s original Spirited Horses was in the training set, would I have gotten a more similar result from the AI? My playing around isn’t really meant to answer those questions. There are researchers trying to do this exactly: get a generated image that obviously infringes on one of its training images.
A Reminder
Holidays in the Movies: Mardi Gras
- Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) : a serial killer roams the streets of Mardi Gras to make sacrifices to a Peruvian god
- Dracula 2000 (2000) : yes, we have previously lumped this in with our Halloween watching, but we are trying to make it right
- Mardi Gras (1958) : as yet unseen by us musical with Pat Boone
- Interview with a Vampire (1994) : so natural and yet it almost slipped my mind
- Flesh and Fantasy (1943) : provided we can get a hold of it, this occult anthology seems right up our alley at the Schmidt house
- A Woman’s Secret (1992) – Italian thriller with Margeaux Hemingway.
- Hatchet (2006) – gory slasher!
- Death Spa (1988) – gory supernatural thrillery thing. Why does everyone keep going to this place?
Giggles at work
Everyday cosplay
A few years ago I was inspired to overhaul my closet. I wanted to alter things that, with a little change, could be made more wearable. I wanted to weed out things that stood in the way of me finding the pieces I like to wear. And, I wanted to make sure I had a ready supply of outfits that made me feel powerful, playful, and attractive. I wanted my daily attire to delight me, to become a special part of my day instead of simply a necessary one.
And then I was introduced to Disneybounding by the various YouTubers I was watching. Disneybounding, to my understanding, is creating an outfit that evokes your favorite Disney character without overstepping Disney’s regulations on adult costumes, or even wearing something that looks like a costume. Relatedly, historybounding involves dressing to evoke a fashion period from the past, either by dressing in vintage or reproduction styles or by creating an outfit that resembles them.
The best part of everyday cosplay is that it includes completely normal everyday clothing. I just needed to obtain some key items for my wardrobe to make sure I had pieces to put together an outfit I thought evoked the character I had in mind. For instance, I already had a red and green striped shirt so all I felt I really need to evoke Freddy Kruger were some brown gloves. I obtained some snazzy black and white wingtip-esque t-strap shoes as the final pieces for a Joker outfit. Otherwise, creating the outfits just challenged me to think about the pieces in my closet a little differently – like I was pulling markers from a box to color in a character.
Circular Spam
In search of the perfect honey cake
I have been both searching for, and working on, the perfect honey cake recipe for some time now. I love honey, especially the flavor varietals produced by honey from certain plants and locations. But I don’t love how heavy honey cakes can be, thus the search. So far, I have come up with a pretty good recipe for small cakes:
INGREDIENTS
- 1 c honey
- 2 eggs
- 1 tbsp vinegar
- 1 c applesauce
- 1 c sugar
- 2 c flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- spices to taste: dried orange blossom, bee pollen, anise seed, cinnamon, cardamom
360 for 30 minutes if in muffin molds
Originally had a 1/2 c of vegetable oil in with a 1/2 c of apple sauce, but the last time I made them I used a whole cup of apple sauce and forgot the oil – they came out wonderful. And by wonderful I mean, they were light and springy, admittedly a little sticky to the touch on the outside, but not heavy like many honey cakes can be.
I also gave this recipe a try recently:
I also gave the Spiced Honey Cake recipe from a 1938 “Season to Taste” baking pamphlet. It too was not overly heavy, but it didn’t taste as strongly of honey. The lack of heaviness and honey flavor were both probably due to only 1/2 cup of honey.
Belated blogiversary and Happy New Year
I haven’t gotten a lot of art up on the site this year and I am late in celebrating the birthday of my dear blog. Happy 15 years, Bean! And, Happy New Year to y’all. Thanks for sticking around. Here’s the doodlin I got out this year:
Cats in art – a diversion
