| Herself: Really had a great day…..all but “his” grumpies which are something I can’t do anything about. Saw Marion B’s new floors. So lovely. Food: We took our lunch with us yesterday rather than eat out. It worked. Dinner…..oh, I confess I poured too much olive oil on the asparagus before I roasted it. Perhaps I could have blotted it off, but I didn’t. Tomorrow is weigh day. Duck: Duck’s Flickr album: easily accessible. |
- Did I also mention that I love ephemera? I’m passionate about the stuff. I’d still be volunteering at the HS if they had any interest in collecting ephemera any more. Budgetary constraints cut their passions too.
Personally, I collect cooking pamphlets. Sometimes randomly. Usually stove and refrigerator cookbooks. The old appliances always arrived with really good ones. Very helpful for those who had always had an icebox. Those older pamphlets charm me. The earliest electric refrigerators came with hard bound cookbooks that had watercolor illustrations. Later they became soft cover still with their illustrations now using guash. Now giant, expensive appliances come with one huge sheet of paper folded twenty times with forty “do-not-do-this’s” on every fold. Not good at all.
Yesterday, we found cooking ephemera at two estate sales. While I’m out there doggedly looking for a small mixing bowl for Marie’s 1939 Sunbeam Mixmaster, things like cooking ephemera always turn up. The first house belonged to a doctor and collector. I walked into the kitchen and found one long counter covered with jade bowls of all kinds that included two big jade colored Mixmaster bowls, one small jade bowl, and a nice 1936 mixer. There was not one white bowl to be seen. A whole shelf of cooking ephemera tho. I brought the best four home.
“They are moldy,” G told me late in the day. He hustled them out onto the deck table in the sunshine. There they sat baking. I forgot about them. Totally. Until I was in bed. “G, the cooking stuff is still out on the deck,” I said, out loud, thinking it was foggy and damp and the mold was now really growing in those pamphlets. That kind man went down and got them. He’d forgotten too.
That put the kibosh on going back and getting the rest at half price today. Darn. - Speaking of ephemera. I love websites that offer ephemeraistic stuff too. Imagine whole pages that look like the best of your junk drawers, or your attic, or your furthest basement corner. The best load slowly…..perhaps it’s the amount of junk one finds that slows them down. Dark Roasted Blend is about the best junque drawer around. Look, there’s that broken spoon of Aunt Mildred’s. Look, here are the best of the best shots of Bejing’s fast foods. Do they really eat that? Test cars, robots, and perhaps best of all from yesterday, a blanket covered gas station. It looked like the AIDS Quilt to me. Lovely. Magic links to more and more stuff too. Just what we all need every day.
- Museum pages, they too are ephemera in a way. A Repository for Bottled Monsters is really the august, tho unofficial blog for the National Museum of Health and Medicine (nee the Army Medical Museum) in Washington, DC. “Visit for news about the museum, new projects, musing on the history of medicine and neat pictures,” they tell us.
There’s government blogs too. The Smithsonian’s SITES Blog is wonderful. Across the ocean, the National Library of Scotland has a nice blog. Our own Library of Congress has a nice blog too, but I read faster than it updates. It’s our government, after all.
Ephemera explores the world of old paper. Today there’s an Olympic tribute with Chinese Spirit Papers. Further down on his page is an interview with Sharon Becker. She also collects cookbook pamphlets. The Flickr Cookbook Pool page will lead you into a marvelous world of cooking where the color is a little different and mom’s wore aprons and dad’s ran the BBQ.
Then there’s
Morbid Anatomy. “Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture.” Boy…At least it is not at all boring. Check out the gangrenous toes, and download the famous film “Freaks.” The links on this page will keep you glued to your monitor forever.
How about Curious Expeditions, “Traveling and exhuming the extraordinary past,” and they do. Look at those links….shall I ship in “Take out” as you are now chained to your desk? - I’m not chained to my desk this beautiful day. I’ll be back later to read your blogs……slowed down by the sun and good cheer around me. How can one not be cheerful on this sunny day.
Thanks for mentioning our blog! http://www.shows2go.si.edu. You're right--it's filled with random, juicy bits of information. This is the first time I've read your blog--very nice. I'll keep reading!
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