Polish photographer Tomasz Gudzowaty has a photoessay of Shaolin Temple monks meditating and practicing kung fu.

Hat tip to Visual News via Vanderleun.

These photographs by Walter Arnold of the derelict Scranton Lace Company were recently linked on a North East Pennsylvania Genealogy list.

Incorporated in 1897, the Scranton Lace Company in its heyday employed 1400 people, and was the world’s largest producer of Nottingham lace. It possessed the largest looms ever built, each of which stood nearly three stories tall, was 50 feet long, and weighed over 20 tons. During World War II, the company expanded its production line to include mosquito and camouflage netting, bomb parachutes, and tarpaulins. After the war, the company returned to producing cotton yarn, vinyl shower curtains, and textile laminates for umbrellas, patio furniture, and pool liners.

Its factory complex boasted “bowling alleys in the basement, a fully staffed infirmary, a staff barber and a gymnasium, and owned its own cotton field and coal mine. Its clock tower was a city landmark. U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s father and grandfather worked there.”

The Scranton Lace Company closed abruptly in 2002 with an announcement from the company’s vice president, in the middle of the daily work shift, that the company was closing “effective immediately.”

The photo essay is a moving testament to the scale of everything that has been lost as the American economy changed in recent decades to a postindustrial era and manufacturing in most cases moved overseas.

“Close to the Rialto Bridge is a small bronze head which is often overlooked by tourists. The sculpture was once the symbol for an apothecary, Alla Tesa d’Oro (At the Golden Head) and dates from a period when most of the population would have been unable to read a written sign. The shop was one of the major producers of theriaca d’andromaco, a mysterious “cure-all” concoction that was very popular in the city.”

I normally prefer to avoid linking slideshows designed to extort large numbers of page views by playing on readers’ curiosity, but the Telegraph this time came up with a collection of photos of mostly quite interesting curiosities in Venice.

Eagle Falconry, Altai Mountains, Mongolia

This 7:28 trailer for Human Planet, a BBC Ethnographic Travelogue series scheduled to begin broadcasting in March, has some striking images. Photographer Timothy Allen did the voice-over.

The Ant Nebula (Menzel 3): Fiery Lobes Protrude From Dying, Sun-like Star. click for larger image.

I tend to try to avoid posting unsourced, unidentified photos, but consistency is the hobgoblin and all that. Click on the image for a larger version.

I once learned that rather more of these ancient colonial era fowling pieces survived in New England farmhouses than I ever would have suspected. It was probably the combination of unwieldiness and striking decorative value (once they became obsolete, they were the ideal object to hang over the mantelpiece) that caused them to be preserved.

From Nothing Via by way of Vanderleun.
————————————
Gerard Van der Leun identifies the original source as the Jooney Woodward site, from Britain (!).

Chairs were made from bears

From Buzz Feed: “30 Ways (some facetious) That the World Used to be Cooler.”

(click on image twice for larger versions)

I make serious efforts to bar my wife from publishing photographs of me at sporting events and in the hunting field, but for some unaccountable reason I do feel a sense of gratification when I find myself accidentally present in a photograph of that kind of event published elsewhere completely independently.

I was, therefore, tickled to find, in the latest Virginia Sportsman, a feature article on last Spring’s Virginia Hound Show, which shows me sitting and leaning on my cane while watching professional huntsman Dennis Downing putting a couple of our own Blue Ridge foxhounds through their paces in the English ring. (My face is hidden behind the elbow of a photographer snapping a picture.)

The LA Times reported recently that a pair of sharp-eyed brothers apparently discovered two previously unknown photographs of Old West legend Wyatt Earp, one as a small boy, in a family photo album that they purchased in an antique shop in San Bernadino County for $50.

They could make a lot of money selling the photos at auction (if experts agree on the identification), but they have expressed the intention of keeping and licensing the images.

Chances are that it would not take them over ten years to rebuild a destroyed landmark.

A nice car interior shot from Rodger the Real King of France via Vanderleun.

The photograph seems to come from Go Moose via Theo.

Hat tip to Curmudgeonly & Skeptical via NothingVia via Vanderleun.

Hat tip to Push the Movement.