This article appeared in some newspaper at some undetermined point in time, but amazingly, one never hears about the vast cavern in Nevada full of eight-foot-tall corpses.

Click on the image above to view the full-size clipping.

I found this hand-painted title on a colleague’s 1919 panoramic photo of the Burk-Waggoner oil deposit. The lettering reminds me of the title block I posted a while back from about the same time. Evidently, this was a golden age of freestyle display lettering by photographers and engineers.

My apologies for the poor image quality. My phone was the only camera at hand.

These maps are from Battles — How They Are Won, by Mary Elting and Robert Weaver, published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1944. I remember reading it as a child, and recently rediscovered it.

The book is an overview of tactics and strategy for young people, with examples drawn from World War II, not yet finished at the time of printing.

Click to open a larger image:

This defense of the Mediterranean campaign makes a few suspect assertions (“Our troops became seasoned fighters,” for instance, is a classic post-facto justification for military futility):

Here’s Sputnik, the (ahem) male, on the scanner:

In California a few weeks ago, my wife and I were blessed with the opportunity to visit the Monastery of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco at Point Reyes. Here is the chapel, surrounded by pines and fog:

The pines were pitted with cavities from woodpeckers. Nearly every hole contained an acorn – plugged snugly in place by the growth of the bark around it:

This was my introduction to the acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus)

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