Here’s another item to put on the list of Everyday Stuff We Grew Up With That’s Now Consigned to the Dustbins of History: Polaroid photography.

I just read that the Polaroid company plans to stop making its “instant film” as soon as there’s enough stockpiled to carry it through the rest of this year. (The company already stopped making Polaroid cameras a while back.) There is some talk of licensing the technology to other manufacturers, in order to keep die-hard niche enthusiasts supplied, but for all intents and purposes, the photo technique preferred by grandmas everywhere in the 1970s and ’80s is dead.

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Catching up on some of the news from over the weekend, I see that the mysterious “Poe Toaster” made his annual visit to Edgar Allan‘s grave, leaving behind the customary tribute of roses and cognac for the author’s birthday. This pleases me; I was afraid the controversy last fall over the Toaster’s identity might have disrupted or even ended the tradition for good, and that would have been a real shame. We need these strange rituals and half-legendary figures, I think. If we ever clear up all the mysteries, the world will be diminished for it.

I was a little bummed to hear, however, that “the visitor no longer wears the wide-brimmed hat and scarf he donned in the past.” That’s too bad. I’ve always liked the idea that the Toaster was actually Lamont Cranston…

I think part of the reason why the American Civil War continues to hold such a grip on the popular imagination is because it was the first major historical event to be extensively documented by photography. Even the most realistic painting doesn’t have the immediacy of a photograph, that realization that the person in the image was once a real, living, breathing, sweating, honest-to-god human being rather than somebody the artist made up, coupled with the eerie sense that maybe, if you could somehow figure out how to extend your fingers through the surface of the photographic medium — the paper, or tin, or glass — you could actually touch that person, even if they’ve been dead for decades. Photos from the Civil War are doubly eerie because of the technique that was used to make them, something called collodion, or “wet-plate” photography. For various technical reasons I don’t entirely understand and won’t attempt to work out here, wet-plate photos are simultaneously very detailed and yet they have kind of a ghostly quality, too, as if the subject isn’t entirely of this earth. Every individual whisker stands out on a man’s chin, but if the person has blue eyes, they appear to be inhumanly transparent. You can see swirls of the chemicals used to create the image, since they were literally wet and oozing down the surface of the negative, or “plate,” at the moment the picture was taken, and this lends a curious, otherworldly patina. And then you add in artifacts created by the cameras of the day, the dark circular vignetting around the corners of the image, the shallow depth of focus, or the slight motion blur created by very long exposure times, and it all adds up to something we’ve been conditioned to interpret as the look of old photographs. But it isn’t really chronological age that produces this unique appearance; it’s simply the photographic technique that was used. The pictures looked that way the day they were taken.

For some examples of what I’m talking about, have a look at The Soldier Portraits Project, in which modern-day soldiers are photographed using the 150-year-old wet-plate process. The results are hauntingly beautiful and timeless. The image I’ve posted above is one I particularly like; I think if this man weren’t wearing a wristwatch, it’d be tough to place exactly what era he comes from, and I find that fascinating. It reinforces a truth which I think is lost on a lot of high-school kids as they nap through boring history classes, namely that people who lived 150 years ago were no different from the people you see everyday on the street. Go check out the complete portfolio; it’s really neat stuff…

I just came across some very exciting science news: two separate research teams have announced that they’ve found a way to turn ordinary adult skin cells into stem cells, those amazing little shapeshifters that can become any of the 200 types of cells found throughout the human body and which hold the potential of solving any number of illnesses. Not only is this an impressive technical achievement, but it offers a way out of the pesky ethical debate that surrounds the use of embryonic stem cells for research or therapy.

(For the record, I personally have no problem with using embryonic stem cells for research or therapy. Fertility clinics all over the country dispose of thousands of embryos every day. What’s more immoral: chucking them in the dumpster with last night’s Chinese take-out, or repurposing them to ease human suffering? Pretty simple equation in my view.)

This new breakthrough isn’t without its own problems, of course:

Their enthusiasm notwithstanding, scientists warned that medical treatments are not immediately at hand. The new method uses genetically engineered viruses to transform adult cells into embryo-like ones, and those viruses can trigger tumors.But the cells will be instantly useful for research — “to move a patient’s disease into a petri dish,” as Daley put it. And some scientists predicted that, with the basic secret now in hand, it could be a mere matter of months before virus-free methods for making the versatile cells are found.

Nevertheless, it feels like we’re really, really close to something truly wonderful. Close enough that I can’t help but feel impatient for its arrival. How long before anyone who needs a new heart or liver can get one, a perfect genetic match grown from a simple arm scrape in a matter of days or weeks instead of forcing them to wait for years for a suitable donor to die? How long before men and women like the late Chris Reeve can get up out of their chairs and walk again, thanks to a regenerated spinal cord? How long before the dreaded words “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” cease to have any meaning? The end of all that “vale of tears” shit can’t come soon enough for me.

In a lot of ways, I despise living at this moment in history. The future we’ve been given, full of political turmoil, economic uncertainty, and plain old fear, isn’t the one we were promised by popular culture. But there are compensations for all that, aren’t there? A few, anyway…

Here’s another in our ongoing series of Random Factoids About Me™: I like swords.

I think they’re beautiful objects, and there are few things as thrilling as seeing one wielded by someone who knows what they’re doing. (I’m speaking, of course, of seeing them used for demonstration purposes only; seeing one put to the use for which they were actually designed would be… unnerving.)

Of all the different types of swords produced by nearly every culture on the planet, however, none has acquired a greater reputation than the Japanese katana. There are stories of master swordmakers testing their newest creations by seeing how many condemned men the blade would slice through on a single stroke. According to legend, katanas routinely shattered brittle European broadswords. And according to the movies, the damn things were only one step away from acting like lightsabers, capable of just about anything.

In that spirit, allow me to present the following video, which is apparently a clip from a Japanese television show that set out to see if a katana could, in fact, split a bullet like you often see in anime and martial-arts flicks:

Pretty impressive, no? Well, it looks good anyway… I guess if you think about it, it’s really no surprise that a tempered steel edge could slice through a soft lead slug. And, as the boys at Boing Boing pointed out in the post I ganked this from, this ability wouldn’t really be of much use, since you’d end up with two pieces of fast-moving metal coming in your general direction instead of only one. Still… it’s a sword slicing a bullet, man! As the kiddies say, that’s kewl…

A couple of weeks ago, a story went ’round the Interwebs that the mysterious “Poe Toaster” — a man dressed in black who has been visiting the grave of Edgar Allan Poe annually on the writer’s birthday for decades, always leaving behind three red roses and a bottle of cognac — had been identified as a 92-year-old former advertising exec named Sam Porpora. Porpora claims to have made up the story of the Toaster in the late ’60s, and to have donned the concealing fedora and scarf himself, as a publicity stunt to raise funds for the dilapidated church and graveyard where the famed poet rests.

Being as I am a hopeless romantic — what, you hadn’t noticed? — I’ve loved the idea of the Toaster ever since I first heard about it back in college. And part of the appeal was, naturally, the mystery of who the Toaster actually was. Was he — everyone’s always been certain it was a man — a distant relative of Poe’s? A fan with a flair for the dramatic? The Shadow? Frankly, I never wanted to know, just like I don’t want to know for certain whether Butch and Sundance died in Bolivia or if D.B. Cooper‘s rotted corpse is hanging in a tree somewhere in the northwest. The truth is always much more disappointing than the fantasy; it certainly was in this case. A publicity stunt? It doesn’t get much more pedestrian than that…

Except maybe there’s more to the Toaster than Porpora would have us believe. In an article in the Washington Post, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, flat-out denies that Porpora is either the Toaster himself or the inventor of the tale. Apparently, there were newspaper accounts of the tradition as early as 1950; Porpora’s story evolves with each re-telling; and Jerome claims to have some kind of information about the real Toaster that he’s not at liberty to disclose.

I like it better this way, an elegant tradition and a secret known only to a small handful. And even if Porpora did invent the whole thing, I suspect the tradition has acquired enough of its own life to continue. I’m willing to bet somebody with flowers and a bottle will be in that graveyard on January 19…

If you, like me, are interested in the strange, sad tale of Melvin Dummar, Howard Hughes, and the so-called “Mormon Will,” check out this profile of Melvin in today’s Salt Lake Tribune. I think it provides a reasonably balanced overview of Melvin’s life and his claims about meeting Hughes, neither supporting nor denouncing him but simply presenting the evidence — which, at this point in time, is mostly hearsay — for both points of view. As I’ve said before, I personally think he’s on the level about giving Hughes a ride, and I also think it’s plausible that the Mormon Will was the real thing. That said, I highly doubt he’s going to see any of the money he’s now trying to so desperately to sue out of Howard’s surviving heirs. Even though Melvin’s experience with Howard sounds like something out of a movie, in real life the little guys almost never win the fight and earn their reward in the end. The odds are too much against them. But I do love them for trying…

Two of my favorite stories in my younger days were Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core. (Notice I said stories, because, as it happened, I first knew these tales through their movie incarnations, and only came to the original novels later on, with a detour through the Classic Comics versions in between.) Both works stem from the premise that our planet is hollow, or at least contains vast subterranean open spaces, and that there is life, usually some weird mishmash of prehistoric beasts and highly advanced civilizations, in this interior realm.
It’s actually a pretty common idea within a certain subset of fantasy-adventure pulp fiction. But just recently I’ve learned that there are apparently people out there who think it’s more than just a good idea for a story. Some people really think the Hollow Earth theory is possible… and one guy aims to prove it:

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There were a couple of developments last week in the ongoing saga of Melvin Dummar, the Utah native who claims to have done a good deed for gazillionaire Howard Hughes back in the ’60s and has spent the last four decades getting hosed because of it. Neither event was especially good news for poor old Mel.

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Here’s a vintage photo of a B-24 fresh off the assembly line, ca. 1944. Why? ‘Cause I think it’s a cool photo, and because, if you’ll recall, I took a ride on one of these babies a few years back and I have a real soft spot for the model:

Click to embiggen. Source here.