Interwar Postcard

Drawings above and below by Jamie Fales, a/k/a Noosed Kitty, on the envelope in which she sent me a print of “Minor Headache.”

Via Caitlin Burke, I discovered the art of Noosed Kitty, especially her drawing “Minor Headache,” which depicts the genesis of the protagonist’s headache as a miniature walrus of dubious intent and secure perch. Formerly subject to daily, severe and major headaches, I ordered an 8″ x 10″ print straightaway.

When the print arrived, I was delighted to discover that Jamie had added a couple of postcards with her drawings to the shipment, gratis. She had also decorated the outside of the envelope with the Shipping & Handling Walrus and the cat depicted above.

It’s kimodo, by and © Derek Chatwood, All Rights Reserved.

Having either mounted a 600 mm super-telephoto lens to his Rolleiflex or crept up really close, Derek Chatwood has an intriguing quartet of black-and-white, medium-format animal portraits shot on film at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. The Komodo dragon photograph above is accompanied by two of a gorilla and one of a leopard, both animals similarly in some form of repose. (more…)

Anthropologist Lye Tuck-Po has been dipping into the colonial memoirs, as she puts it, and reading Ronald McKie’s 1965 book The company of animals: A naturalist’s adventures in the jungle of Malaya. Dr. Lye discusses a portion of that book that describes an encounter with a “‘wild and angry’” elephant, noting the book’s position in a long line of tomes concerning “‘heroic white men tramping through savage jungles…’” Fortunately, both man and pachyderm seem to have survived the encounter at issue with their respective skins and dignities intact. Orwell’s elephant should have been so lucky.

delilah…always so worried, by and © hollywalnuts.

This gorgeous portrait of a sad-eyed chocolate labrador brings to mind “faithful dog Hachikō,” the loyal and determined Akita who, for a decade after his human’s death while away, returned every evening to the train station to wait for his old companion. Wikipedia’s page on Hachikō has a photo of him, showing a similar expression.

 

Casting, by and © thupancic.

I love the way the sun flares down on Ty here.

   

Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun. (more…)