23 Jan
About 50,000 years ago, a 150-foot lump of iron and nickel, a renegade from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sliced through the sky out of the northeast at seven miles per second. When it hit it tore up the landscape in an instant, excavating several hundred million tons of dirt and rock and flipping layers of sandstone like pancakes.
22 Jan
21 Jan
In 1590 Theodorus de Bry and his sons published a new, illustrated edition of Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the new found Land of Virginia about the first English settlements in North America (in modern-day North Carolina). His illustrations were based on the watercolor paintings of colonist John White.
More Theodore de Bry here
** See Post Below
21 Jan
John White (c. 1540 – c. 1593), was an English artist, and one of several early “Virginian” settlers who sailed with Richard Grenville in 1588 to the modern day coast of North Carolina. During this journey he made numerous famous drawings with watercolour of the landscape and native peoples. These works are significant as they are the most informative illustrations of a Native American society of the Eastern seaboard, and predate the first body of “discovery voyage art” created in the late eighteenth century by the artists who sailed with Captain James Cook. They were later engraved by Theodore de Bry and became widely known; all the surviving original paintings are now in the print room of the British Museum.
More John White here
** See Post Above
16 Jan
NYT story on the mighty Mt. Washington:
Our destination on this cloudy mid-December morning was the top of Mount Washington in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire. At 6,288 feet, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast. Thousands of hikers make the ascent in warmer months, most often starting, as we did, at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Pinkham Notch Visitor Center on the east side of Mount Washington. In winter, the four-mile hike to the summit, which gains about 1,000 feet of elevation with each mile, attracts a hardier lot.
But it’s not the height or the steepness of the mountain that impresses most people — it’s the weather. The mountain has a long and infamous reputation: Hurricane-force gusts are typically recorded several times a week in winter, with the winds topping 100 miles an hour at least weekly. In 1934, the Mount Washington Observatory measured the fastest wind speed recorded on the earth’s surface, a stunning 231 m.p.h.
15 Jan
13 Jan
In 1973, Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison went down to the Florida Keys to fish for tarpon. Christian Odasso and Guy de la Valdene filmed it and then asked Jimmy Buffett to make some music to go along with the footage. I haven’t seen Tarpon yet, but my oh my do I want to. You can see what it looks like here and, if you’d like, you can get much more information here.
Thanks Kalen.
© 2012 Cold Splinters. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
