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| May 1, 2011 |
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| Chlorostilbon poortmanni |
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| THE MOUNTAIN BROOK |
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| IRONCLADS |
| USS ST. LOUIS, James Ead's first 'City Class' Ironclad Gunboat, renamed BARON DE KRALB, October 1862. |
| When the Civil War broke out, neither side were prepared for naval battles on the western rivers. The inevitable result was an urgent and innovative period of warship experimentation.
Before the war, James Buchanan Eads (1820-1887), an inventive self-taught engineer living in St. Louis and familiar with the Mississippi River, proposed that the U.S. government invest in the development of steam-powered, ironclad warships. He had recognised that the emerging conflict would, in large part, focus on the control of the country's river systems. His idea was cooly recieved. But when hostilities began, he was summoned to offer the U.S. government advice on how to wrest control of the lower Mississippi River from the Confederacy. Eads proposed building seven armor-plated, shallow-draft gunboats to assist the Union Army against Confederate fortifications protecting their supply lines downriver. He was awarded a contract, and in a remarkable feat, completed his monumental task in less than one hundred days. The CAIRO, CARONDELET, CINCINNATI, LOUISVILLE, MOUND CITY, PITTSBURG, and ST. LOUIS, collectively known as City Class Ironclads, were commissioned and in service on the western waters by January 1862. These gunboats were the first ironclads built in the United States. Heavily armored and mounted with heavy rifled guns capable of piercing the thickest Confederate armor, they formed the backbone of the Union's river forces. James Eads also converted commercial steamers into ironclads at St. Louis shipyards, by reconfiguring them with the sloped armored superstructure that characterized his purpose-built ironclads. Though slower and less heavily armed than the City Class vessels, the were successful additions to the Union's "Western Flotilla." |
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| USS ESSEX, Converted Ironclad, Coaling at Baton Rouge, July, 1862 |
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| DESTRUCTION OF THE UNION IRONCLAD INDIANOLA |
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| BOMBARDMENT OF FORT MCCALLISTER BY IRONCLAD FLEET |
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| THE MONITOR MONTAUK ON THE OGEECHEE RIVER |
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| DESTRUCTION OF THE NASHVILLE BY THE IRONCLAD MONTAUK |
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| MEMORIES |
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| The first Wheaties commercial (live) aired when host Red Barber promoted it during a Brooklyn Dodgers game. Later the Dodgers did a promotion dressed in street clothes saying 'Yum, Yum Stuff!'
Wheaties radio broadcasting in the 1930s touched the early career of Ronald Reagan, who was at the time a sports broadcast announcer in Des Moines, Iowa. He was asked to create play-by-play recreations of Chicago Cubs baseball games using transcripted telegraph reports; his job performance in this role led to his selection in 1937 as the most popular Wheaties announcer in the nation. He was awarded an all-expenses paid trip to the Cubs' spring training camp in California, and while there he took a Warner Brothers screen test. This led to his eventual film career, thus the Wheaties claim of perhaps leading Reagan into show business, and later politics as governor and 40th president of the United States. |
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| LE CHATEAU NOIR |
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| Edo--once also spelled Yedo or Yeddo--is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868. | |
| The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the last masterwork of the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige (also known as Ando), is a series of landscape ukiyo-e prints whose subject matter is views of the city of Edo and its outskirts.
It is composed of 118 prints designed by Hiroshige I, one print by Hiroshige II and a Table of Content, totaling 120 prints as a complete set. The series, along with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, is not only the most renowned polychrome woodblock prints of famous placesby Hiroshige, but also, with its bold compositional contrast between foreground and background and assimilation of the Western linear perspective, represents an apex of the landscape ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period. |
Its superb artistic quality was also recognized in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, and the marked influence it exerted on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters such as Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin is well-known.
Furthermore, since the Tokyo Association for the Crafts of Traditional Woodblock Printmaking completed its project of reprinting the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 2003, the number of exhibitions and publications related to the series has risen. At the same time, new scholarly works on its development of pictorial compositions and its place in a wider historical background have been undertaken in recent years, showing its continuing vitality as an object of research. |
ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER FORTY-EIGHT |
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| SUIDO BRIDGE AND SURUGADAI |
| If one imagines this view without the three implausibly immense carp banners, it is a classic depiction of samurai Edo. We look to the southwest across the Kanda River, over the gray expanse of the densest single concentration of samurai in the city, extending from Surugadai on the left through Bancho in the distance.
Over Suido Bridge to the lower right passes an impressive samurai procession. The tall banners jutting up here and there indicate that the time is the Boy's Festival, the fifth day of the Fifth Month. Each of the samurai households flying such banners is celebrating a boy of age six or seven. In the very lower right corner, there appears to be a young samurai carrying an oversize helmet--another Boy's Festival ccoutrement. |
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| Gazami |
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Staurikosaurus ("Lizard of the Southern Cross") is a genus of early dinosaur from the Late Triassic of Brazil.
Staurikosaurus is one of the earliest dinosaurs that is known. At just 6.5 feet in length, 31 inches tall, and weighing just 66 pounds, Staurikosaurus was tiny in comparison to later theropods like Megalosaurus. Newer research seems to confirm that Staurikosaurus and the related Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus are definite theropods and evolved after the sauropod line had split from the Theropoda. | |
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| pixdaus.com |
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| AMBER ART GLASS BOWL |
| DISCLAIMER: Material used in Bitts and Bytes is gathered from various sources--mainly the World Wide Web.
Authorship cannot always be credited nor the source defined. Authenticity of material is assumed to be correct, but is not guaranteed. |  |