Nothing But Mortimer

By AuthorAuthor

[robert-hadley]

The World of Interiors, November 1996. Photo - Andreas von Einsiedel

[bmasiac]

David Hockney

Pembroke Studio Interior

Date1984

[hideback]

Cicada, Stages of Conventionalization

Hugo Froelich, Keramic Studio Magazine, 1905

[huariqueje]

North Point - Fairfield Porter , 1975.

American , 1907-1975

Watercolour on paper , 12 x 16 in.

[random-brushstrokes]

Scoppetta Pietro (Italian, 1863 - 1920) - Figura in controluce

[redlipstickresurrected]

Augustin Rouart (French, 1907-1997, b. Paris Arrondissement 7, France, d. Paris Arrondissement 13, France) - Metro at Night, 1947, Paintings: Oil and traces of Graphite on Panel

[signaturecosmique]

THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS I WANT TO READ

I am looking rn at work on Asian American history from 1850-1900 (which is a period/context I am not super familiar with) and I'm just like. oh that book looks good. ooh that one also. ahhhh that one too. and then I become overwhelmed trying to figure out where to start and by the fact that I simply cannot read all of these books at exactly the same moment

[signaturecosmique]

what I really want is an account of the early transpacific networks from like, the Pacific Northwest (esp British + various multiethnic peoples living around the forts there), Alta California, Hawaii, Alaska, and Guangdong, in the first half of the 1800s. People writing about the post-goldrush era are always just dropping things like the fact that there were mixed-race Native Hawaiian and First Nations communities and Metis people from the prairies on the coast and sailors from South America and India and China BEFORE the Gold Rush and no one ever feels like telling me about how the fuck they all got there????

[signaturecosmique]

like hello???? why are you not FASCINATED that a British fur trader in San Francisco sent a ship to Hong Kong bearing California gold dust and newspapers from Honolulu, IN THE YEAR 1848

[sanguinarysanguinity]

What you're looking for is variously called the Maritime Fur Trade, the Pacific Fur Trade, or the China Fur Trade, in which sea-otter pelts from Pacific Northwest and Alta California were sold by Boston traders in China. (To vastly oversimplify who-all was here and what they were doing!)

Here's the Wikipedia article on it, which includes sources and further reading:

Maritime fur trade - Wikipedia

You may also find helpful:

Soft Gold, the catalog for an Oregon Historical Society exhibition on the fur trade. (Available on Internet Archive: Soft Gold)

The Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820, by Keith Lloyd.

Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787-1898, by Jean Barman.

Hail Columbia: Robert Gray, John Kendrich, and the Pacific Fur Trade, by John Scofield. (Alert to the tall ship nerds: the Lady Washington, a replica of which is still sailing in the Pacific Northwest and sometimes stars in films, was Robert Gray's ship.)

I haven't read any of the above books, that's just what a search of my local county library turned up. (This is all local history for me.) Hope something there helps!

Fun fact: in chinuk wawa, the Pacific Northwest indigenous trade language, the word for white people (and also for the English language) is bastən, i.e. Boston, referring to the numerous trade ships from Boston who came in to buy furs here and sell them on elsewhere.

[sesiondemadrugada]

Thomas W. Schaller.

[urgetocreate]

Winslow Homer (American 1836-1910), The Water Fan, 1898-99, Watercolor on paper

[weepingwidar]

Onrie Radovic (Australian, 1985) - Refuge (2025)

[nemfrog]

A record player used to introduce penguins to music. Ice bound in the South polar seas. 1925. Illustration by Olive Lofts.

Internet Archive

[polpotpie]

What if water didn't have surface tension and whenever you spilled some, the whole floor of your entire apartment was covered in a 2 micrometer deep puddle

[teaboot]

you've taught me to count blessings I didn't know were mine

[kedreeva]

This is a quail gizzard!

This little thing contains grit used to grind up anything tough in the GI tract. Since my quail are pretty exclusively fed a processed feed, there nothing too cool in there

But clean it out and you can see the INCREDIBLY tough inner lining

It feels a little bit like wet sandpaper in there. Really cool to open up and look at.

Larger birds like chickens and turkeys that free range have gizzards full of small stones, called gastroliths. There's even a hobby some hunters have, of collecting "turkey pearls" and displaying them!

If the quail have any they are very very very small. I do wonder what the peafowl gizzards...

[weekendviking]

Here's my collection of Moa Gastroliths, mostly agates, collected in the area of Aotearoa New Zealand that I grew up in, by my grandfather, uncle and myself. In our area the local rocks are Cretaceous Basaltic Andesites, Dacites and Rhyolites, and so there's a lot of agate and quartz geodes, amygdaloids and veins. Just like a hen will go for a shiny rock for gizzard grit, Dinornis Maximus and the other Moa species in our area seemed to go for the agates particularly for gizzard stones, so you find the small ones that had been polished away too small to be useful scattered around in singles, wherever they passed in the droppings, while the larger ones you can find in clusters around where a moa died. Sometimes even in a distinct pile if the skeleton was not disturbed or even still present when fossilised/subfossil remains.

There's a distinct variety of polish that identifies a gizzard stone - pits and grooves from the pebble's original morphology are often left untouched, while high areas and corners are smoothed, but with a pitted or matte polish, rather than smoothly shiny, and often a striated or scratched texture to the polish that's quite diagnostic of gastrolith origin. If the stone is polymineralic, especially porphyritic, softer minerals will be both physically and chemically eroded more deeply than harder minerals, giving a careous texture to the polish.

[kedreeva]

This is maybe the coolest thing anyone's ever added to one of my posts. Ancient gizzard stones from an extinct giant bird??? I'm in love.

[weekendviking]

But wait, there's more! Here's what we used to call Weirdstones when we found them. Agates, but not local to our region and geology, and also polished with gizzard style polish on the high points but with the low points and voids still relict texture, but way too big to be Moa stones, even from Dinornis Maximus (The biggest I've ever found from a Moa is about half this size.)

I'm pretty certain that these are much, much older than Moa gastroliths, and my working hypothesis is that because I only find them in, or downstream of, late Cretaceous or Paleocene coal measures and conglomerates that were derived from coastal deltaic river gravel sediments and beach deposits, that they are either Seal ballast stones of Palaeocene seals (Some seal species swallow stones to store in the stomach as ballast, apparently, and they get the same sort of polish as gastroliths) or they are gastroliths from Sauropods or Plesiosaurs if they mainly coming from the older rocks. (The marine transgressive rocks in our area that these stones are found in or from, are diachronous, straddling the K/T boundary.)

[kedreeva]

I'm ridiculously jealous of everyone's Big Stomach Rocks.

[thejawsdevour]

Hannelie Coetzee (South African) - Hyena Clan V (ink and rooibos tea on paper, 2023, Eco Queer Creature Series)

[rosieandthemoon]

church of St Mary, Clipsham, Rutland

[emungere]

@louiselux sent me this card years ago and when I saw the bird in this post, I was sure it must be from the same place, but this guy is from York Minster. Same artist maybe? Anyway, I love him.

[nevver]

Once upon a time in the West, Brett Allen Johnson

[random-brushstrokes]

Alfred Joseph (A.J.) Casson (Canadian, 1898-1992) - Blue Heron