Footage from the front of a cable car, traveling down Market Street, circa 1906. Fantastic. I absolutely adore these old videos of San Francisco!

Originally, this video was thought to have been recorded sometime in 1905. Recently, someone analyzed the weather, vehicles, and shadows from people / objects and concluded it was filmed four days before the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906!

This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!). It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for processing.

[Via Long Now Foundation and Flixxy]

Earlier today, I decided to look for more work by Isaacson and found that he wrote another great biography, this time about Benjamin Franklin. The book was titled, “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.”

The tagline, “an American life,” struck a chord with me because it sounded so familiar. Where else have I heard that term recently? Ah yes.

Seriously? It’s kind of insulting and sad that these books share the same tagline. Here are a few differences between the subjects of each book.

• One book is about a great person, who had a profound effect on the founding of our country. The other is about someone trying to inadvertantly destroy it.
• One book is about an inventor, intellect, and scientist. The other is about someone who despises those descriptions and the people behind them.
• One book is about is about someone who strived to persevere in all facets of life. The other is about someone who perpetually quits when things get too tough.
• One book is about a great American. The other is not.

Just read this fascinating article about the dark side of Dubai, posted by the Independent in April of this year. The article is quite long, but it’s a pretty gripping exposé on the seedy, behind-the-scenes underworld of Dubai and the blind eye that rich tourists, ex-patriots, and locals take to the city.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means “City of Gold”. In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Of course, there are numerous choice quotes in this piece, and it’s pretty hard to cherry pick just one.

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. “Well, how could I?” she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. “I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything,” she says.

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. “Oh, the servant class!” she trilled. “You do nothing. They’ll do anything!”

You can read the rest of this article here.

More information about Dubai can be found via this write up I posted to Laughing Squid earlier this year, titled, “BASE jumping off the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building.”

[Via personal correspondence with Mark Rebec]

Last night, Kerry surprised me and took me to see the King Tutankhamun exhibit that is currently on display at the de Young museum in San Francisco. This is an exhibit I’ve been wanting to see for a long time and it was an absolute blast.

It’s hard to believe some of the artifacts on display were so well preserved and over 3500 years old. I mean seriously, how much of the stuff that we have today will still be around 3500 years from now and be in immaculate condition. (Note, my mom mentioned all our plastic products. Hah, good point I guess.)

Anyway, it was a fascinating opportunity to peer back in time and contemplate what life was like so long ago.

Bonus: We bought print outs of our cartouche, allegedly spelling out our name in hieroglyphs. Here is “David.”

Posted via email from Dave Schumaker’s Posterous

[Via History of Atlantic and Submarine Telegraphy]