1,800th Image

"Malcolm, Farnum, and Gilbreth - Walnut Lake, May 1920"
Where is this Walnut Lake? Assuming that these are last names, what are their first names? 
And which are which?  
BTW, this is not the 1,800th hundred image.  Just an example of what I have to work with sometimes.

There is an old saying that everyone dies twice.  Once when the body and soul cease to exist, and the second time, the last time your name is uttered aloud. 

Cookie believes that in the last 170 years or that photography has been a part of people's lives, there are also a third, and a fourth death.  

The third is when the person's gravesite is lost. 

And the fourth, when there is no longer an image of that person or their markers. 

Today, at noon, Cookie uploaded his 1,800th image to Find A Grave.  Of that, about 300 are tombstones and grave markers. 

And 1,500 are pictures of the deceased person.

I write this, Not to brag, but to observe.   It's that whole "fourth type of death" that cookie wants to undo.

So that has meant spending years, pouring over pictures, comparing photographs, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, then scanning, cropping, correcting, restoring, and uploading.  And when I couldn't find a memorial, searching records & census forms, looking at others family trees*, searching old books, registrations, and walking graveyards, then creating the memorials once they have been proven. Then I create the memorials for the descendants and upload that picture, or pictures, of people like you and me, people who never thought about fading from memory. 

Not all of the pictures are what I would call "winning" images.  Many were taken 100+ years ago using crude Kodak box and Brownie cameras, the film for which is horrible at the contrast.  Or they were taken with the color film other than Kodachrome, which presents its own horror as the dyes have long been broken down so that everything is PINK.

And to fix these, I have been teaching myself Photoshop CC.  No easy task because I was taught to use lighter-duty programs.  After two years I consider myself a beginner.   I still have a long, long way to grow. 

I should add that I have never once used an AI program to autocorrect an image, or worse, color it.  

For example, I just finished a photo album belonging to a long-gone cousin who made friends everywhere she went.  100 pages, 500 images of people, places, and events.  Only about 75 people be ID's right off the bat and found online.  Another 100+ had to be fully researched, traced, and their memorials created.   I still have approximately 175-200 people for which I only have first, or last names, like SMITH, TOUEY, McBRIDE, or SUSAN, AMELIA, JIM.  Some have nicknames like SPOTS, WINKIE, SIS, and something called the "The FARQUARTET" whatever that is.  The frustrating ones are the ones like this:  "My relative Suze" and "Liz's ex-husband, SPATS."

Not enough people named DUCKY, UNC, and SPATS.  Where oh where are you, SPATS?

I have a lovely photo of "Dickie in his new Nash" dated "September last".  Is it 1919, 1920, or 1921? 

DAMN IT, these people have names!  Help me, Jesus.  Seriously.  Enlighten me.

And so when I finish this post, I will dive back in, trying to jog something in my head between an early seen image and a later one.

My other push to do this is that while we live in a world of photography, the pictures are surviving as we think they are.  Polaroids are darkening, color snapshots are yellowing, their blacks fading, and CDV and Cabinet card images are slowly fading away for a variety of reasons.  So time is not our friend, my friends.

Mark those pictures, people.  Having something is better than nothing!

So I will do this until I can no longer do this. I will keep at this task.  

No one deserves to be forgotten.  And Cookie is doing his damnedest to make sure that I get through as many of these before the day comes when someone has to make a memorial for me.

The bestest present for a young Cookie

 

Children gather 'round.  The picture above is 1964/1965 PLAYMOBILE, the BESTEST Christmas ever for a young Cookie (I was but a dollop of dough in those years), and oh, how I loved it so. 

It served no purpose but to keep children with imaginations busy.  And how lucky I was to get one, one Christmas from my gentile grandparents (I had a set of gentile grandparents and a set of Jewish parents.)  

With batteries, you could make the turn indicators blink and I think the windshield wipers swept to and fro.   The dashboard was made from good quality Styrene plastic, which was stable, but the windshield was made from acetate plastic, which was the only fly in the ointment.  Acetate plastics over time warp - and like every other Playmobile set up like this I have seen since on eBay, the windshield developed a sunken sag along the top middle. 

Overtime, mine was tossed and I think my parents left it at our old house for the children of the buyers to play with. 

This is something that I never forgave my parents for.  

And I am not joking. 

Alas, now I am too old, and have too much fine art to accommodate one should I find one at an antique market. 

This makes me sad - not for me - but for children to come. 

Driving the Playmobile required a lot of imagination.  And that's something that I think children are being robbed of by all this new technology today.  On the other hand, I am sure what people in their sixties in the 1960s thought about those of us born in the 1960s.

In any event, whenever I see one of these, for a moment, I am again a three or four-year-old and I marvel at it.  And part of me really wants Santa to bring me one. 

Meat PARTY!

 

This is from an ad for the American Meat Producers Association.  

The message?  Do you want a party that people will remember for ages to come?  Serve MEAT.  And plenty of MEAT. 

Because only MEATiest pieces of MEAT can give your guests the energy to get through an evening of square dancing.  A night of Pictionary.  A night of Disco. 

Only MEAT can help you throw a real barn burner, metaphorically, speaking.  Because burning a barn is probably illegal, and besides, that is where you keep your beef cattle.  

So maybe not a barn burner.  

But be sure there is plenty of MEAT to go-go around. 

Cookie is done with "SCOTT"...

We have all been there, right?

There you are: you are living your life, and the phone rings CONSTANTLY with people in poor countries pestering you with robotically dialed calls.  They tell you their name is something hard to believe because it seems unlikely that someone from that part of the world would name their child "Darrell" or "Betty", but we knew that isn't their real name.   And they are constantly trying to sell you something that no one would ever buy over the phone, like Medicare coverage.  

This morning, it was SCOTT, and it was a doozy of pitch: 

"Hello, my name is SCOTT, and I am calling from the FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF VISA AND MASTERCARD." 

As if.  A "Federal Department" of Visa and Mastercard?  Seriously? 

Cookie was tempted to just hang up - after all, I once worked with financial institutions rolling out new credit card programs.  

I know how it works.  From the accounting to the "online or batch" processing, to even designing the face of your card.

I even remember the cardboard wheel of "chargeback" calculators we used to use.

But Cookie is a picker.  Pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. 

So Cookie said: "my, you sound important?"

"Yes," says he, "and I am calling to tell you that you must provide me with your credit card number now or I will discontinue and have you arrested."

Oh, SCOTT, do you have any idea that this isn't the way anything is done?

"YES! You must do this now as there are security police and the FBI on their way to arrest you for noncompliance!"

Reader, do you know what Cookie did?   Cookie said: SCOTT, Isn't this a bit like a ten-year-old screaming a threatening 'My father is going to sue you for being mean to me,' to another kid on the playground?

I mean, really, SCOTT.  Security Forces AND the FBI?   But there was SCOTT on the other end of the phone getting ready to have a seizure over this make-believe acting gig.

So, I hung up on SCOTT, even as he continued screaming at me into the phone. 

Cookie is so done with these people.  SCOTT needs some weed and mellow, because, dude, it wasn't working. 

But if they are going to keep calling, I am going to be irascible. 

The Cuomo Affair: Missing the point.

 

UPDATE: CNN Terminated Cuomo's contract and his employment on Saturday, November 3, 2021.

As Cookie continues to mourn the collapse of American society and education, there is a growing roar that is proving to men that we are no longer a nation of the Free, but a Confederacy of Dunces. 

The latest kerfuffle is the shockingly high number of social media who feel that Chris Cuomo should be reinstated at CNN.  CNN put Cuomo into a permanent suspension mode after it came out last week that Cuomo used his position at CNN to do background workups on the accusers of his brother, former Governor Mario Cuomo Jr. who is facing legal action for his sexual harassing of women, including those on the governor's payroll.

Cookie is a former journalism student, and Cookie is a former HR professional.  My view is that Cuomo should be told to pick up the contents of his office and the contract canceled.  Why?   Because he more than likely breached his contract with CNN.  

Normally employment contracts between BIG name talent and their employees (in this case, on-air talent) who have signed employment contracts have two clauses that are pretty constant.  Under the breech section, contract employees can be dismissed for a variety of reasons, but of those varieties of reasons, two are pretty standard: misuse of company resources for personal enrichment, behavior, or acts that cast the employer in a negative light.   In Cuomo's case, he did both, according to reports.  And if he did those things, there is a very real possibility that he could be charged with gaining information for illegal purposes, and/or witness intimidation. 

NORMALLY, in these forums, you find members of the political extreme railing against the other side's media outlets, real or imagined.  However, on this matter, I am seeing a lot of accounts (or sockpuppets) on the left (or pretending to be) railing against CNN for suspending Cuomo.  

Well, of course, there are those who love Cuomo.  And there are the people who hate him.  But Cookie is finding the flimsiest of arguments emerging: He was defending his brother so he should be allowed on the air. 

Now the Constitution does make a provision for the spouse of an accused cannot be made to testify against a legal spouse.  A wife cannot be compelled to testify agist her wife, or her husband, and the same for a man testifying against his husband or wife.  But the legal doctrine of this nation provides no shield for siblings of the accused.  Never has, never will. 

Yet these idiots find what he did (breach of contract, and any misdemeanors or felonies) acceptable and excusable because he was helping his big brother.

Never mind that aiding and abetting, or the perception thereof, tarnishes his reputation, they find what he did acceptable.  And Cookie is very afraid of that concept. The law makes no provisions that allow a shield of protection to those who willingly or unwittingly do stupid things that infringe on the rights of others, period. 

But Cookie also suspects that there are a good number of very twisted ideologues who are championing his reinstatement because then they get a chance to undermine CNN by employing the type of people like Cuomo who have no ethics.  

NOW, the other end of this is that because Donald Trump has made such behavior acceptable by building an entire administration around this concept of "the ends justify the means" doesn't we that it OK for anti-Trump people to stoop to that level.  And yet that is another argument why Cuomo should be reinstated. "But what about Fox News? They do things like this all the time!" they complain. The problem with that is it's a false equivalency.  

(And Cookie should put the cards on the table about FOXNews - its dishonest propaganda, and it presents a very real threat to any democracy, conservative, moderate or liberal.)

If we do not fight for what is righteous, if we abandon our principles, then we have nothing left to fight for. 

So Cookie thinks and knows that CNN has to off-load Cuomo.  Once legal reviews this, he needs to go. 

As a warning to others, as a punishment to him.  

It has to happen.  And since I wrote this originally, they have terminated his employment. 

Hello, it's been a while

 

And it has been a while - like six weeks. 

I wish I could report back and say that we have been on a madcap caprice around the world, but alas, Cookie is pretty much COVID precaution homebound here. 

And suffice it to say that the only excitement in the coming months is travel to Cincinnati for a wedding, ugh.  Luckily, my friend is the mother of the bride and the bride and groom are very loveable.  Still, no huggie wuggies of physical contact from any guest and full face mask on.  "Really aunt Trudy, so nice to see you, but let's not potentially pass on a deadly disease.

Cookie won't even partake in communion!

But I do wish it was someplace other than Cincinnati. Cookie has just never warmed to the place. Never will, either. 

If we were going to Columbus, or Cleveland, well then, Cookie has scads of things that could be done or friends visited.  So alas, we are literally flying in, and then turning around and leaving. 

On the plus side, Husband and I are fully vaccinated and boosted. 

I wish there was something earth-shattering to share, but maybe peace and quiet is a gift.