A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself. Like the Parthenon, […]
I was browsing through the amazing digital archives of the New York Public Library recently, looking for fun stuff to pin to my Slices of Blue Sky Pinterest boards, and I ran across an old postcard from Los Angeles that caught my attention. The photo isn’t much — it’s a pretty big Spanish-style house — […]
One of my less productive minor obsessions is with the 1970s TV show “Emergency.” It began when a saw a bit of an episode set in San Francisco, which led me to buy a set of DVD that included the episode when “Emergency” filmed in San Francisco so I could learn the details of the […]
This post has a few more old San Francisco images from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. The first two of postcards were taken before the addition of a major landmark, and the last was taken before the destruction of a major landmark. Before the Bridge The first photo is an undated postcard from […]
As a child, I sometimes watched the TV series “Emergency”, which ran from 1972 to 1979. Even though it featured crises and injuries that could easily happen to me or my friends or family, the show must have had some kind of attraction. Perhaps it was all of the heavy equipment or the explosions. With […]
Updated, June 2016, May 2017 Sometimes I see something so mysterious and compelling — like “Ice cream, bisque of black bread, a la Delmonico” — that I need to track down its story. Most of the time, I lose interest or have no hope of finding the answer, but sometimes lightning strikes and I find […]
San Francisco is a great postcard city: dramatic views of the Bay and hills, the Golden Gate, old and new buildings. And so it’s not surprising to find a bunch of San Francisco images in a collection of early 20th century postcards. This particular postcard collection was produced by the Detroit Publishing Co. and are […]
The Golden Age of Whaling attracts my interest because it was such a dramatic and absurd undertaking. During its peak years, the industry had a few hundred sailing ships searching vast areas of open ocean for the earth’s largest living creatures so they could kill them and process their carcasses at sea to obtain valuable […]
I find it easy to get lost in the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections, which contain hundreds of thousands of images and a massive collection of menus. One recent morning I was looking for something and stumbled into a large ‘box’ of early 20th century postcards from the Detroit Publishing Company. While browsing through […]
Portuguese whalers based in New Bedford, Mass. If you worked on a whaleship during the Golden Age of Whaling (ca. 1820-1860), you wouldn’t have known your salary. From the lowliest “boy” all the way to the captain, the salary wasn’t a fixed daily amount, but something distinctive to the whaling industry known as the “lay.” […]