Mental Wires

Programmer, rationalist, recovering brain in jar. Mostly art blog by volume.

[ceruleanheaven]

month starting on a monday we have no excuse guys lets get to work and lock the fuck in

[ceruleanheaven]

yk its actually very chic and avant garde to start on tuesday the second

[ceruleanheaven]

many claim theres nothing more subversive and revolutionary than starting on wednesday the third

[publicdomainreview]

Posters for Harry Kellar (1849–1922) the hugely popular US magician who inspired the likes of Harry Houdini, and reportedly acted as model for the bald-headed wizard in the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900 — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/harry-kellar-s-show-posters

[mentalwires]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_roleplay

[mentalwires]

[em-iliart]

how this week has felt

[stonedrunkwizard]

Another week's worth of bird people.

[toyastales]

René Lalique Serpent Pectoral Pendant designed around 1899.

[craig-h-stuart]

Library Table

Maker: Herter Brothers (German, active New York, 1864–1906)                Date:1879–82                                                                                     Geography: Made in New York, New York, United States 

[thunderstruck9]

Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) (Mexican, 1875-1964), El volcán y la noche estrellada [Volcano and starry night], 1950. Oil on hardboard. Museo Nacional de Arte INBA, Mexico City

[70sscifiart]

Paul Alexander's 1977 cover to The Visible Man, by Gardner Dozois

[shithowdy]

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒷𝒾𝓇𝒹𝓈!!!

[centuriespast]

Ladies Not Admitted Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910) Sambourne House

[nemfrog]

Magazine cover. Byte. August 1983.

[70sscifiart]

Robert Tinney cover art

[unhelpfultarot]

Three of Cups and The High Priestess

You're at the club, but only to take notes on the atmosphere, for a scene in the book you're writing.

[catchaspark]

  Myth of the Brown Recluse: Fact, Fear, and Loathing Rick Vetter Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA

treat yourself to a uc riverside spider researcher rapidly losing his cool over the course of this article as he desperately tries to convince his interlocutors, The Entire State of California, that there is literally no evidence that we have brown recluses

[msmarymillspaulos]

The Soul of a Souless City -New York 1920

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1976)

Cubism, Futurism

[materialist-scumbag-og]

Okay so Wall Drug is one of the cleanest possible case studies in how a specific piece of American roadside infrastructure gets produced by a stack of completely unrelated federal decisions and happens to be run by a Catholic pharmacist from Nebraska, and the reason it's interesting is that almost nobody who stops there has any idea any of the machinery underneath it exists. They just see the billboards. The billboards are the thing people experience. The billboards are not the thing.

Start with Ted Hustead. He buys the drug store in Wall, South Dakota in December 1931, which is a terrible time to buy anything. He's a pharmacist from Nebraska. He has a very specific requirement, which is that he will only open his pharmacy in a town that has a Catholic church — he's Catholic, he needs a parish — and Wall qualifies. The town has 326 people. Nobody has money. The store almost fails for five years. Then his wife Dorothy has the famous idea in summer 1936: put up signs on Route 16 advertising free ice water. It works instantly. By the end of that summer he's put up signs twenty miles out.

But here's the thing: the reason "free ice water on Route 16" worked as a value proposition is that Mount Rushmore was being carved between 1927 and 1941, and the dedication of Mount Rushmore as a federally-funded tourist destination produced, for the first time in the region's history, a continuous flow of Eastern and Midwestern tourists driving across the prairie to look at Gutzon Borglum's four presidents. Without Rushmore, nobody is driving that road. Route 16 was the road to Rushmore. Wall was on the way. The Badlands gets designated a national monument in 1939, which doubles the draw. Wall Drug is essentially a rest stop on a federally-produced tourism circuit that didn't exist before the Depression and wouldn't exist without Rushmore. Dorothy had the idea, Dorothy deserves the credit, and also the idea is only a good idea because the New Deal is, simultaneously, producing drive-to national monuments at scale.

The signage style is also borrowed from a specific source: Burma-Shave. The jingle-across-six-boards format — "GET A SODA / GET A ROOT BEER / TURN NEXT CORNER / JUST AS NEAR / TO HIGHWAY 16 AND 14 / FREE ICE WATER / WALL DRUG" — is directly modeled on the Burma-Shave highway campaign, which ran from 1925 to 1963 and was itself one of the first commercial uses of sequential billboard narrative in American advertising. Hustead says this openly in his memoir. He saw Burma-Shave, he copied the format, it worked. Which is interesting because Burma-Shave eventually died in 1963 when the interstate system made rural highways obsolete — you can't read six sequential signs at 70 mph — but Wall Drug adapted by going big-single-billboard instead and survived the transition that killed its model.

The other piece of federal machinery nobody talks about: Lady Bird Johnson's Highway Beautification Act of 1965. This bans most billboards along federal highways, which, if you applied it consistently, would have destroyed Wall Drug, because the whole business model is billboards. The actual implementation of the Act carved out massive exceptions for existing signs, for commercial and industrial zones, for specific state-level interpretations, and Wall Drug had, by that point, 3,000 signs in all 50 states and the political capital to keep most of them. The Act ended up banning roughly the competitors that hadn't yet scaled. Wall Drug was grandfathered into its own strategic moat.

Then I-90 gets built and in the late 1960s it bypasses Wall. This is the kind of thing that kills most small-town roadside businesses — the Midwest is littered with dead Main Streets that got bypassed by interstates — but Wall Drug responds by building an 80-foot brontosaurus visible from the highway, commissioning it from Emmet Sullivan, the same sculptor who did the Dinosaur Park in Rapid City. The brontosaurus is not whimsy. The brontosaurus is interstate-scale advertising infrastructure designed to pull drivers at 75 mph off at exit 110. It is, functionally, a 1960s billboard that happens to be a three-dimensional concrete dinosaur.

And then the military layer. Ellsworth Air Force Base is fifty miles west of Wall. The Air Force operated Minuteman II ICBM silos across western South Dakota from 1963 to the mid-1990s — Delta-01 and Delta-09 are preserved as a national historic site now — and the missileers and maintenance crews drove back and forth to Ellsworth along I-90. Wall Drug started giving them free coffee and doughnuts. They still do, for any active military. So for about thirty years one of the things Wall Drug structurally was, underneath the free ice water and the jackalopes and the cowboy kitsch, was a rest stop on the logistics route for the American nuclear deterrent. The silos are decommissioned now. The coffee tradition persists.

What I love about Wall Drug is that the received story — plucky pharmacist in the Depression has a sign idea, it works, American dream — is true and is also almost entirely downstream of federal infrastructure decisions the Husteads had nothing to do with. Mount Rushmore made the road. The Badlands designation fed the road. Burma-Shave provided the advertising grammar. The Highway Beautification Act grandfathered their moat. The Interstate built the bypass they had to beat with the brontosaurus. The Cold War provided the missileers who got the free doughnuts. Every element of the Wall Drug experience is a response to a specific federal action. The Husteads were talented operators of a business whose entire environment was produced by someone else.

Which is the thing, I think, about American small-business mythology generally. The plucky-individual narrative is real AND the infrastructure underneath it is real AND neither one cancels the other out. Ted Hustead is not a fake. Dorothy Hustead had a genuinely good idea. They also were standing on a continent's worth of federally-funded tourism circuit, advertising convention, highway law, and nuclear logistics, and the brontosaurus is pointing at all of it if you know how to look.

Also the bumper sticker says "Where the heck is Wall Drug?" which is a great piece of copy because the answer is genuinely nowhere, which is the whole point.

[alexanderwales]

Salt was hugely important before refrigeration, and one of the ways of getting salt was from the sea or from brine springs. There were a few ways of doing this, which depended on the natural resources available in the area. You could put the saltwater into a large, flat pool and wait on dry air and the sun to do evaporation until there was no water left and you just had the salt, or you could boil saltwater using enormous quantities of fuel to get rid of the water.

But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.

Enter the graduation tower!

The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.

Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.

And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.

There are still a few working thorn towers that you can go visit, mostly in Germany or Poland, but they're either historical curiosities keeping a tradition alive, or health and wellness centers, distilling down a brine spring for supposed special properties.