(Roughly) Daily

In 1936, 16-year-old Ria van Dijk from Tilburg, Holland, fires a gun in a fairground shooting gallery. She hits the target, triggering a camera to take her portrait as a prize.

At the age of 88, Ria van Dijk still makes her annual pilgrimage to the Shooting Gallery.

– Lens Culture

Watch Ria’s progress in Retronaut’s “Shooting Gallery, 1936-2009.”

As we remember to exhale, then squeeze, we might recall that it was on this date in 1519 that Moctezuma welcomed Hernando Cortez and his 650 explorers to his capital at Tenochtitlan.  The Aztec ruler, believing that Cortez could be the white-skinned deity Quetzalcoatl, whose return had been foretold for centuries, greeted the arrival of these strange visitors with courtesy– until it became clear that the Spaniards were only too human and bent on conquest.

Cortez and his men, dazzled by Aztec riches and horrified by the human sacrifice central to their religion, began systematically to plunder Tenochtitlán and to tear down the bloody temples.  Moctezuma’s warriors fought back against the Spaniards; but Cortez had thousands of Indian allies (resentful of Aztec rule), Spanish reinforcements, superior weapons and disease; he completed the conquest of the Aztecs– approximately 25 million people– late in the summer of 1521.

Moctezuma imprisoned by Cortez (source)