Sunday I explored the remnants of a 1910 road-building project east of Lyle, WA in the Columbia Gorge. Yes, built by convicts. Still lots of road left, despite really poor geology for stable road building. Some exciting sections knocked out, and lots of poison oak arising. Full (too full?) report posted on Portland Hikers forum.

Who are these people?
It’s interesting that the “high five” was not widely known until the late 1970s. As a a NYC kid (at least since age 4) I knew “slap me five” but that’s not the same thing as a high five–apparently that’s a “low five” or just

Found this old postcard for a Trike/Sprague show, at the Charleston, a bar/pizza joint where the owner would swing flashlights around as makeshift spotlights. Circa 1996?

(via the always-delicious Retronaut.)

..

The transcribed contents of Work and Win, No. 787 on the Stanford site do include this great joke:

“Since I learned to run my own automobile,” said Scadsbeigh, “my acquaintance has extended.”

“How so?” inquired his friend.

“I have come in contact with so many people.”

A gallery of severe but beautiful engraved stamps, used to mark that a beer keg had been properly taxed–like cigarette stamps or playing card stamps. 

“Beer revenue stamps are stamps used to collect taxes and fees. Breweries purchased them from the government and attached them to taxed items. The stamps were printed on sheets, without perforations. Brewers had to cut the stamps apart, cancel them, and paste them over the bung of the beer barrel so that tapping the barrel destroyed the stamp.” [via Annyas]

An only-somewhat-exhaustive (it’s exhausting to read, but is almost certainly not the last word on this topic) article has examples of many other revenue stamps (including for canned fruit and patent medicine). This are a subset of stamp collecting I knew nothing about, but the registration and air-quality stickers on our cars are clearly descendants of these. All can be looked up in the latest Scott Catalogue.

This week a dam that’s blocked salmon runs since 1913 on the White Salmon River in Washington State was breached. Don’t expect to see the whole dam explode, they take out a bit of the bottom with 700 lbs of dynamite and the water pours out. The “after” view of the lake that was behind the dam is really impressive.

Not only will the salmon be able to get back up the river (past BZ Corner, where there’s a big waterfall?) but white water rafting and fishing on the river is going to get even better in a few years.

The power company that ran the Condit Dam had to add a fish ladder for the salmon if they were going to get the dam re-certified–they decided the cost of constructing the fish ladder was more than the profit the dam made them, so they are dismantling the dam instead.

National Geographic has another version of the video which includes nice time-lapse of the lake emptying out, but also includes really annoying ads.

This old safety manual over at retronaut could also be called There are many ways to die, kids.

(via Mad Art Lab)

My step -grandpa Donald “Casey” Schwarz was with Patton’s army in Europe in 1945. His unit was able to visit Hitler’s country house and his “Eagle’s Nest” in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria in April-May 1945, soon after it was captured. Being in Army Intelligence, they had cameras. Just started scanning these photos this week.

Nice use of airplane graphic and a punch in the gut at the end.

Someone felt very clever when they came up with this motto. Entiat is a town along the Columbia River in Washington state that was once a native American town, then a pioneer/timber town, then burnt down in 1913, was rebuilt, then was destroyed again and moved uphill when the townsite along the river was flooded by the Rocky Reach dam in 1961.

More pics.

A “multitool” (aka Swiss army knife) from 3rd century Roman Britain, from the FitzWilliam museum.

[via Kottke]

Got a bunch of old “letter” postage stamps around and can’t figure out what they’re worth? Wonder no more:

G is for G Stamp… OR ALL the nondenominated stamps issued by the USPS

[OK, the painting has little to do with it, but google "usps postage H rate images" and look what you find...Jesus on a dinosaur!]

R did not believe me when I told her about Cookie Puss. And then she doubted Cookie O’Puss! So here is the proof. Shield your eyes.

And this here ditty actually gets stuck in my head sometimes:

I love it when they say “freshhhhhh” near the end.

Gotta dig Wikipedia’s reasoned notes on Cookie Puss:

In his television commercials, Cookie Puss has the ability to fly, though he requires a saucer-shaped spacecraft for interplanetary travel.

I had a dream on Tuesday night in which someone explained to me that before records and wax cylinders, snakes were a choice recording medium. I don’t know how you’d use or play them back, maybe like a wire recorder? Anyhow I recall looking into a basket of snakes and each one was a different song. I think a label on the basket lid told you which was what.

It wasn’t this.

One mile west of Tillamook Head on the Oregon coast sits a lonely rock with an empty seagull-poo-splattered lighthouse. This is its story.

On October 21, 1879, four laborers were put on the rock. The rest of the crew followed five days later. Putting men on the rock entailed stringing a 4 ½” line from the U.S. Revenue Cutter, Thomas Corwin, to the rock. The men would then use a “breeches buoy” to cross the line. With the cutter rolling and pitching in the swells, the line was never taut, and the transported fellow was often drug [dragged?] through the icy water.

The first two weeks of construction found the crew totally exposed to the elements. Barren of caves, overhangs or ledges, the rock could not even provide minimal shelter. The workers chipped, chiseled, and blasted away. And then it hit.

January 2, 1880. A dying Nor’easter*. The seas crashed above the crest of the rock. Rocks flew as breakers tore off chunks of the rock and tossed them at will. The perilous storm pounded the rock. The storehouse was swept away taking most of their tools and provisions. Then the water tank, the traveler line and the roof of the blacksmith shop were ripped away. Clinging on for life, the men stayed in their shelter, the safest place on the rock. Hungry, soaked, and with no place to go.

The lighthouse is now a decertified columbarium (the site is broken, but has a great picture).

[The Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board] said the owners have not kept accurate records and, because urns sit on boards and concrete blocks and not in niches, the lighthouse does not even qualify as a columbarium.

* (squidocto points out that this couldn’t have been a nor’easter, as they are, well, in the northeast (USA). A little digging reveals that this was The Great Gale of 1880, which doesn’t sound so bad (“gale” just doesn’t sound so scary) until you read about the damage it did.)

Museum of the Phantom City is a free iPhone app that catalogs and maps the unrealized grand visions people have had for New York City in the past 100 years. Put another way: Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder designed the Phantom City iPhone app to “transform the city into a living museum of speculative proposals for the city of New York.”

The sites include well-known projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Midtown Manhattan … as well as less famous proposals like Fuller’s “Mini-Earth”—a miniature globe that would have been suspended by cables across from the United Nations building….

You can only read about the locations you are near; white dots represent locations you are too far to read about, and pink dots represent entries you are near.

iTunes link, the creators talk about their app; via urbanomnibus.net

Technically, petroglyphs (carvings) and pictographs (paintings). Along the Colorado River canyon near Moab there are lots of drawings and carvings made by ancient and more recent native peoples. We got a little guide book at the excellent Back of Beyond bookstore and got to see a half-dozen sites on both sides of the river just a few minutes out of town. The sun was setting and it was just us and the rock climbers.

Vocabulary bonus: A petroglyph that represents a landform or the surrounding terrain is known as a Geocontourglyph.