(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘Beauty

Tonsorial Technology…

Hairdressing in the days of yore:  Ptak Science Books shares a series of photos from the late 20s [originally in The Illustrated London News, 20 October 1928, page 720]… it’s enough to curl your hair.

[TotH to Everlasting Blort]

As we wonder if Louise Brooks ever sat in such contraptions, we might wish an elegant (if slightly smashed) Happy Birthday to F. Scott Fitzgerald; the author of that seminal exploration of Twenties hairstyles, The Great Gatsby; he was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on this date in 1896.  His parents named him in honor of his distant cousin, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Keys.

Readers can ready themselves to bid on a rare dust jacket from a first edition of Gatsby to be auctioned next month at Sotheby’s – New York; it’s estimated to fetch about $175,000.  (The first edition book, worth a measly $5-7,000 is included gratis…)

Carl van Vechten’s 1937 photo of Fitzgerald (source)

The pursuit of the hirsute…

From the doers…

…to the done…

… it’s all at The Hair Hall of Fame.

As we let it all go to our heads, we might wish a mystically happy birthday to mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist/occultist, navigator, and champion of English expansionism John Dee; he was born on this date in 1527.  Widely regarded as the smartest man and/or most powerful magician in the Europe of his time, Dee was an intimate advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and her closest ministers.  But Dee, a student of Copernicus and a friend of Tycho Brahe, was also a serious scholar (his library was the largest in England, perhaps in Europe) and  one of the most learned men of his day– a central figure in the development of modern science… and underneath that cap, he had a killer head of hair.

source

 

1 picture, 1000 words, and all that…

Readers will recall David McCandless and his site, Information is Beautiful, on which he reminds us, day in day out, that good design is “beauty that works”– in his case more specifically, that gorgeous graphics can also be powerful communicators about issues that matter.  Consider his recent depiction of relative personnel commitments in Afghanistan:

click here for accompanying graphics

As we cherish perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1791 that Mozart’s blissful Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute) premiered in Vienna.

Librettist Emanuel Schikaneder performing in the role of Papageno

 

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