Flickr set of the spirit photographs of William Hope shared by the National Media Museum.

The group became renowned as the “Crewe Circle” with William Hope as its leader. During their early efforts, the circle destroyed all of the negatives of the photos they took for fear of being suspected of witchcraft. However, when Archbishop Thomas Colley, a lifelong enthusiast of both the supernatural and Spiritualism, joined the circle, they began to make their work public.

Ironically, Hope’s first brush with exposure as a fraud came when Archbishop Colley arranged his first sitting. According to the story, Hope doctored the photograph with the wrong spirit extra, substituting another elderly woman for Colley’s mother.

When Hope tried to confess his fraud to Colley, the other man dismissed his confession as “nonsense”– he would recognize his mother when he saw her and the extra in the photo was certainly his mother, he stated. To prove his case, he even put a notice in the local newspaper and asked that all of those who remembered his mother should call at the rectory. No fewer than 18 people selected Hope’s mistake from among several others and said that it definitely showed the ghost of the late Mrs. Colley.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a proponent of Hope’s, and his book The Case for Spirit Photography was written in support, after a separate controversial incident involving suspected fraud.

She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes.

Dan Mcpharlin’s Cardboard miniatures of analog audio gear.

Edith Macefield’s tiny house, built in 1900, surrounded by development in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. She refused offers of $1 million to sell it to developers.

She passed away in June and left some mysteries behind, including her novel, Where Yesterday Began.

The book is 1,138 pages long, not counting the musical references, from Scottish folk songs to a 1915 work by the English composer Albert W. Ketelbey, and a 16-page glossary of the French, German and Italian phrases sprinkled throughout.

The book is dedicated to “B. Robert Aigner, M.D.,” with no explanation why. Reached by phone at his home in a Seattle suburb, Dr. Aigner, 80, said he remembered Ms. Macefield was a patient, but nothing more.

Dr. Aigner, a neurologist, was amazed and amused that Ms. Macefield would have dedicated her ambitious work to him. He had never heard of it.

An ecotopian fighter plane with tensile hang-glider wings on hydraulic “fingers,” husband-and-wife teams in the cockpit, and composite construction of titanium and bamboo with teflon-coated fiberglass wings.

One of Craig Hodgetts’ 1978 drawings for a proposed adaptation of Ecotopia.

The Vampire Squid

PDF available here.

Love this photo from Joseph O. Holmes.

About a year ago, I bookmarked this fragment of Old Avestan script. It was part of a lost blog post that had to do with Old Avestan in some way; maybe it was about zoroastrianism and its relationship to christianity, maybe it was about modern Parsis in India, maybe it was about how the whole “nation-states” community can’t really get down with Persia. I don’t know, the ideas, like the speakers of Old Avestan, are lost.

Jobs in New York, late 70s or early 80s. Rumor is he caught a sweet Theoretical Girls show after this.

John “Red” Murray, 1911.