Jean Valjean and the 7-10 split

Yet another reason why I love Shorpy, the “100-year-old photo blog”: Les Miserables Bowling Alleys.

Cool pictures

Yesterday, while searching for random images, I ran across Today’s Inspiration. This blog discusses illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s. If you’re into this stuff (as I am), you should check it out.

And I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Shorpy, The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog also totally rocks my world.

The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before, but I love this site to pieces.

The site is currently displaying a picture of a pawn shop that was taken in 1899. Their motto: “You Can Pawn from a Shoe String to a Locomotive”. This picture is now my desktop background.

The way they were

Found a wonderful link today, courtesy of Metafilter: Shorpy, The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. This is a collection of photographs from the past, usually of people at work. Many of these people are very young.

Here is the caption for this picture of Eugene Dalton, taken in November, 1913, in Fort Worth, Texas:

For nine years this 16-year-old boy has been newsboy and messenger for drug stores and telegraph companies. He was recently brought before the Judge of the Juvenile Court for incorrigibility at home. Is now out on parole, and was working again for drug company when he got a job carrying grips in the Union Depot. He is on the job from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. (17 hours a day) for seven days in the week. His mother and the judge think he uses cocaine, and yet they let him put in these long hours every day. He told me “There ain’t a house in ‘The Acre’ (red-light district) that I ain’t been in. At the drug store, all my deliveries were down there.” Says he makes $15 to $18 a week.

17 hours a day, seven days a week. For $15 to $18.

More odds and sods

Something I’ve always found frustrating: why is healthier food more expensive than unhealthy food? Tonight, I gave in and bought a medium pizza from Pizza Pizza, which set me back only $6. A healthy dinner would have cost more than that (given that I’m too lazy to cook). Argh.

Just finished watching the Raptors beat the Lakers. Toronto’s basketball team is a lot of fun to watch – especially Bosh, Bargnani and Calderon. They’re worth checking out.

According to the Globe, the percentage of the Canadian working-age population currently employed has hit an all-time high: 63.4 percent. But, according to this interactive graphic from the Globe, Newfoundland’s unemployment rate is still 15.4 percent. Toronto’s is 6.6 percent, Calgary’s is 3.8 percent (up from 2.6 in December), and Vancouver’s is 3.2 percent. Saskatoon’s is even lower, at 2.6 percent.

Metafilter has a link to a collection of short videos of suburban landscapes called, wonderfully enough, Blandlands. (Aging suburban landscapes have a place in my heart because I grew up in what is now an aging suburban landscape.)

Weren’t they predicting a very mild winter this year, because of El Nino and/or climate change? Toronto is currently at -7C; according to the Weather Network map of Canada, it is by far the warmest spot in the non-British Columbia part of Canada. (Winnipeg is at -25. Poor Winnipeg.) And we’re due for only a couple of days of normal winter temperatures before it’s back into the deep freeze again. Sigh, brrr, etc.