The Original Cast of Sesame Street

Note the pre-green orange Oscar.

Scene in the City

This photographer for the NY Times was in the right place, at the right time (Canal Street at 4:59 pm to be exact).

Louis Agassiz in an Earthquake

A statue of Louis Agassiz, a prominent naturalist and geologist, on Stanford’s Zoology building fell during the 1906 earthquake that hit San Francisco. This was the reaction on campus:

People came running from the quad with such sober faces, but when they saw him they couldn’t help laughing, and one fellow went up and shook hands with him.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan later wrote, “Somebody-Dr. Angell, perhaps-remarked that ‘Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.’”

Amazingly only his nose was broken in the fall.

Today this looks like a contemporary art piece one would find at Art Basel or The Armory Show.

First Photo of the Boston Marathon in 1904

Here’s the first known photo which was taken in 1904 of the Boston Marathon.

Sammy Mellor is shown leading at 22 miles of the 8th running of the Boston Marathon. This amazing photo shows wonderful detail of children, bicyclists and horse-drawn carriages accompanying the leader. Its a shame Sammy dropped out of the race shortly after this picture was taken.

See more photos from the marathon’s history here.

Taxes in 1913

Submitting your federal income taxes only required 4 pages of paperwork in 1913. You could take deductions arising from losses sustained in shipwrecks.

Update

Browse some recent photos from my life here.

During my flight back to New York City the other day I watched “Hitchcock” (2012) starring Anthony Hopkins in the eponymous role. It was a terrific film that explored the tumultuous dynamic between the director and his wife Alma Hitchcock during the making of “Psycho.” Coincidentally, soon after seeing this film, I came across this photo of Alma cheerfully posing in front of their fridge stocked with a wax bust of Alfred.

Clever Advertising

To promote its online tutoring business, The Tutor Crowd is correcting spelling and grammatical errors on graffiti dotted across London.

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To express their support for gay rights during this week’s gay marriage hearings at the Supreme Court, many Facebook and Twitter users changed their profile image to the red and pink “equals” sign.

The large LGBTA organization Human Rights Campaign, which was the first to display this soon to be iconic symbol, collected their favorite variations and progeny of this image.

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

Gerald Ford and Pelé kicking around the soccer ball.