Kevin White

Pilgrim and Football Player, cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1928, J. C. Leyendecker

This is on the website of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. The page has fascinating information both about the origins of the association of American Football with the holiday of Thanksgiving, and about Leyendecker’s use of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture of a pilgrim as his model for the pilgrim figure.

In my many Lines and Colors posts about the brilliant American illustrator, J.C. Leyendecker, I’ve often pointed out my admiration for his ability to combine solid academic draftsmanship with a confident looseness in his rendering. Plus, I never tire of the way he spots his highlights.

The following post originally appeared on EVG on Nov. 26, 2012...

On Friday (Black Friday!), the folks at Improv Everywhere, a NYC-based "prank collective," had some 100 people camp out in front of the 99-cent store on First Avenue next to the Rite Aid.



The group even had someone pretend to be an NBC News reporter interviewing people waiting in line...


The store's proprietor arrived at 9 and figured the mob was for Rite Aid... then someone in line told him that it was for the 99-cent store...

When the store opened, the shopping began...



The participants did come in a few at a time and buy stuff... You can read the entire recap at the Improv Everywhere website.

Eventually the Improv leader told the store owner about the gag. "He was really excited about the whole thing and definitely appreciated the business, even if it didn’t make total sense to him why it had happened."

The Improv members also donated some of the purchases to an unnamed local charity.



[All photos via the Improv Everywhere website]

Poster prints of this comic (and your other favorite Incidental Comics) are available at my shop.

[Via @EvillPunki]

The top photo is from East Ninth Street and Avenue C...

And here's another vantage of the sunsetting sky via Shawn Chittle...



Updated

Here's one from Felton Davis from East Third Street (find more of his sunset shots here)...



... and from East 14th Street by James and Karla Murray...



... and from Tompkins Square Park by Lola Sáenz...



... and from wherever exactly Bobby Williams was...

Isn’t that a not-quite-completed Bethesda Terrace and the Central Park Lake on the far left?

Landscape painter George Loring Brown depicts a very rustic Central Park in 1862, after the park had officially opened but with much more work to still be done. The city looms to the south.

Earlier this week we revealed that "hoverboards" are illegal in NYC under NY State Law, which declares them to be motor vehicles that cannot be registered. This means you can own a "hoverboard," but you cannot operate it. [ more › ]

Video shows the man sitting on the landing of the staircase, waving the sword: [ more › ]

As if you needed more evidence that plane travel in the 21st century is roughly the $300+ equivalent of a Greyhound ride, a passenger on an American Airlines flight to JFK yesterday tells us a fellow flier got shwaaaasted, took his pants off, and tried to smoke several cigarettes in the air—all while the flight attendants were pretty much like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. [ more › ]

“I was lucky to visit Varanasi during the [bird] migration. Morning boat rides are the ultimate thing to do during this time,” opines photographer Razz Razalli, who was in India when he captured this flock sweeping over a rowboat at sunrise. “According to the locals, the birds arrive in November and leave at the end of February,” Razalli writes. The annual migration attracts tourists to Varanasi, and for a fee, boatmen take tourists onto the river for an up-close look at the flocks.

This photograph was submitted to the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest.

Browse galleries of editors’ favorites >>

Will New Yorkers embrace the fried chicken chain? Or avoid it for political reasons?

Chick-Fil-A is about to enter the New York crispy chicken sandwich wars. The chain is slated to open its first standalone NYC restaurant on the corner of 37th Street and Sixth Avenue on Saturday morning. The Times takes a look at how the company operates and how it's preparing for the New York opening. Here are the major take-aways:

1) The company is expecting that this location — the largest in America — will see more action than any of its other stores. Internally, the company's head honchos are referring to this restaurant as "the relief valve."

2) As you might have heard, Chick-Fil-A's chief executive Dan Cathy is super religious, and in the past he's been very vocal about his opposition to same-sex marriage. The company's vice president of menu strategy Dan Farmer tells the Times that if protestors show up, the team will "go out and try to talk to them and try to understand their point of view."

3) After Cathy's remarks about same-sex marriage a few years ago, the mayors of Denver and Chicago at the time said that they didn't want the chain expanding in their cities. But a Chicago outpost that opened in 2013 went on to become the chain's highest-volume location. A restaurant consultant named Aaron Allen remarks: "Unlike any other restaurant organization we’ve seen, there’s more religion baked into Chick-fil-A as a brand — and it works for them."

4) Chick-Fil-A splits the profits 50/50 with its franchise operators. Also, as a general rule, the company does not allow operators to run more than one store.

5) The company requires its dining room staff to exchange pleasantries with guests when they walk in, order their food, and leave.

6) The landlord of the building is actually the owner of M&J Trimming next door, and for years, the space actually housed another trim shop. Chick-Fil-A's architect remarks: "We had never designed a store over three levels, and we knew immediately that we were going to have to serve the maximum number of customers possible on the street level."

As noted earlier this week, the first 100 customers in line on Saturday will get free chicken sandwiches for a year.

1963 Mooney Airplane on a

1984 Corvette stretched frame and suspension with a

1998 Dodge V-6 fuel injected engine automatic transmission

furnished are, all the necessary major components to finish the project ... or .... my shop could

Unusual ... one of a kind

It seem I have come under ridicule for my creation, which is in actuality recycling. The Plane crashed in a field never to fly again and was headed to the scrapyard as was the Vette and Dakota truck. As to me making this thing fly, I believe I can get it up to speed. [...]
all U need is Vision and capital, anything is possible

>

A polarized-light photomicrograph reveals a crystallized drop of Aperol, a brand of bitter liquor that lends its orange color to the popular Italian aperitif spritz. “I had never taken photomicrographs of drinks ... because there's somebody—Michael Davidson—who does this job at an unbeatable level,” writes Your Shot member Bernardo Cesare. After showcasing Davidson’s work alongside his own rock photomicrographs at a conference, Cesare received a suggestion: Try Aperol. “I did it, and the result is what you see here.”

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now >>

WONDER, the first exhibition at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum since its two-year renovation, brings together nine contemporary artists that each created room-sized installations inspired by the building in which they were produced. Jennifer Angus, Chakaia Booker, Gabriel Dawe, Tara Donovan, Patrick Dougherty, Janet Echelman, John Grade, Maya Lin, and Leo Villareal each work with objects that are often considered mundane, producing large-scale works from everyday objects like toothpicks and hoards of marbles. Each work in the exhibition demonstrates the labor that went into each piece, normalized elements that have been transformed into mind-bending arrangements.

John Grade created a plaster cast of a tree the same age as the Renwick building, rebuilding the tree’s form from 500,000 segments of reclaimed cedar. Tara Donovan also utilized wood in the form of toothpicks to build her mountainous works, building her towering heaps with other trash like straws and Styrofoam cups to prompt the audience to reexamine the daily detritus seen on city streets.

Other works like Gabriel Dawe’s “Plexus A1” and Janet Echelman’s “1.8” are much more colorful, Dawe’s rainbow weaving mistaken for a prismatic stream of light and Echelman’s red and orange sculptural waves brightly expressing the energetic power of one of the most devastating earthquakes in recorded history.

The Renwick Gallery was the very first building in the United States to be built specifically for the purpose of housing an art museum. You can see how WONDER transformed its newly renovated galleries through mid-2016, with a closing on July 10. (via Art Ruby)

A drunk real estate agent who allegedly attempted to steal a taxi early last Friday was caught after she was forced to pull over and throw up. [ more › ]

"I’m certainly not the first person to use the public taxi data to make maps," writes Schnieder in his analysis. "But I hadn’t previously seen a map that includes the entire dataset of pickups and drop offs since 2009 for both yellow and green taxis." [ more › ]

Somewhere between giving every homeless person a BMW, providing affordable housing for all police brutality protesters, and setting all the prisoners free, Mayor de Blasio forgot about white people. [ more › ]

If you’re not already using Google Photos, you just got a damn good reason to start. Thanks to a new update, the app now offers a handy “Assistant” that will free up space on your phone with two taps. And you won’t lose the photos either!

Read more...

Pasta is a serious subject. It’s so serious, in fact, that there is a secular religious order called “Pastafarian” which has existed in secrecy for hundreds of years and has “millions, if not thousands, of devout worshipers.” Pastafarians attend the Church…

The post ‘Pastafarian’ Granted Permission to Wear Spaghetti Colander on Her Head in Driver’s License Photo appeared first on First We Feast.

A 21-year-old woman was grazed by a bullet while standing on a Manhattan sidewalk earlier this morning. [ more › ]

In addition to its hangover healing powers, coffee consumption has been linked to preventing liver cancer, soothing computer work pain and helping to ease depression symptoms. The latest study on the beans, reported by the Chicago Tribune, may be the most encouraging yet, with evidence suggesting that people who drink coffee live longer than people who don't. Better get that IRA up and running. [ more › ]

While in police custody for his alleged connection to a fatal shooting near the so-called "Zombie McDonald's" by Penn Station, "person of interest" Vincent Arcona pulled something interesting out of his person. According to a criminal complaint from the Manhattan DA, Arcona was in a police station interview room when he "reached into his buttocks area" and produced a small package containing heroin. Magic. [ more › ]

How does a man take a bubble bath?

He eats beans for dinner.

The Germans had Kleindeutschland in the East Village. The Chinese had Mott Street. Eastern European Jews settled on the Lower East Side.

And from the 1870s to 1890s, approximately 20,000 French immigrants lived and worked in today’s Soho, roughly between Washington Square South and Grand Street and West Broadway and Greene Street.

Bakeries, butchers, cafes, shops, and “innumerable basement restaurants, where dinner, vin compris, may be had for the veriest trifle” occupied the short buildings and tenements of this expat enclave.

An 1879 article in Scribner’s Monthly took readers on a wildly descriptive sojourn through the Quartier Francais, as the writer calls it.

It’s not always so flattering. “The Commune has its emissaries and exiles here. There are swarthy faces which have gladdened in mad grimace over the flames of the Hotel de Ville and become the hue of copper bronze under the sun of New Caledonia.”

The writer of the article walked readers past tenements, with young girls fabricating fake flowers inside, to cafes where patrons drink absinthe.

A shop run by an old woman features this sign: “sabots et galoches chaussons de Strasbourg.” A restaurant called the Grand Vatel (right) “has some queer patrons.”

On Greene Street is the Tavene Alsacienne (left), with its “impoverished bar” and worn billiards table, and groups of coatless men absorbed in their games.

Table d’Hote restaurants abound. “In the French Quarter in the vicinity of Bleecker Street, and elsewhere downtown, are several unique and low-priced establishments of this character,” according to King’s Handbook of New York, published in 1892.

Like so many ethnic neighborhoods, this French Quarter didn’t last. By the turn of the century, the city’s small French colony relocated to West Chelsea.

“Twenty-sixth Street west of Sixth Avenue begins to take on the air of the old French Quarter,” reported The Sun in 1894.

“It has several French restaurants, three or four French shoemakers . . . a French grocer or two, and several French bushelling tailors.”

[Top image: NYPL Buttolph Collection of menus; sketches from Scribner’s Monthly, November 1879]

PolygamousRanchKid writes with the news (widely reported, here an excerpt from the story as carried by Immortal News) that [i]n the Massachusetts city of Lowell, a woman identifying herself as a follower of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), otherwise known as Pastafarianism, has been approved by the state's Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) to wear a spaghetti strainer on top of her head in her state issued driver's ID. The approval to wear the helmet was initially denied. However, citing religious grounds, Lowell resident Lindsay Miller filed an appeal. Following intervention by the American Humanist Association's Appignani Humanist Legal Center, the RMV reversed their decision and allowed her to put on her colander and get her driver's license picture taken. According to the church's website, while there are those who perceive the religion to be satirical in nature, it "doesn't change the fact that by any standard one can come up with" the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is "as legitimate as any other" religion. Asks PolygamousRanchKid: "Now what about my tinfoil hat . . . ?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.