A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
While searching for something or other in Flickr Commons, the wave of images included some attractive sketches of people struggling with umbrellas in a storm, elegantly attired dancers, and various other everyday happenings. I soon discovered that they were from Thackerayana: Notes and Anecdotes, a book published in 1875. The book is tribute to William Makepeace […]
This is part two of a two-part series about fruit crate labels. Part 1 of the series was about the early history of fruit crate labels. “Accidental Artifacts” In the excellent Pat Jacobsen’s Millennium Guide to Fruit Crate Labels, the author calls fruit crate labels “accidental artifacts.” It’s a good description. They were never meant […]
(Disclosures: the farm tour was a pre-conference excursion arranged by the International Food Bloggers Conference. Although I paid to go on the excursion, it is possible that California Endive or the California Pear Board provided some subsidies to reduce participants’ costs. In addition, I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing […]
Not wanting to learn to take high-quality photos for my blog, I often rely on the vast collection of public domain or Creative Commons materials on the internet to illustrate my posts (and frankly, sometimes I think it’s more fun to see a picture of a 1940s valentine with a squash and ear of corn than […]
In a previous post about ancient Roman dining habits — tossing bones, shells, and scraps on the floor — and shared a mosaic that records this practice in exquisite detail. At the time, there were two things bothering me. First, what do we know about the mosaic? Second, it seemed a little strange to me that […]
A dinner party for the elite in ancient Rome was often as much about politics and social climbing as about food and drink: who was and wasn’t on the guest list, who sat next to who, who sat where, what foods were served, and so on. The food was often carefully chosen to illustrate the […]
Blood was running International Orange in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012 because its most famous structure, the Golden Gate Bridge, turned 75 in May. Celebrations and commemorations are all over the place, including a multi-artist show called International Orange at Fort Point National Historical Site.* In the historic 19th century fort, sixteen artists […]
Update, 4/22/12: Replaced two broken links to Ellsworth Kelly’s art with one that worked today and removed a link to “To Hell with the Birds.” It was just another crow flying across the way until its wings and tail flayed out and it made a sharp turn to chase a huge fly. The fly escaped, […]
Some of my favorite architectural features of Thai buildings are the creatures on the roofline: birds and serpents that guard boundaries of the sacred structures. The chofas (sometimes spelled chofah, cho fa, or cho fah) are bird guardians and live on the peaks of each gable. In areas with many religious buildings, like the Wat […]