Elaborate stage illusion - updated

An illustration from an 1897 book "Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography."  (with a hat tip to reader S. Norma for that online fulltext link)

Found at Vintage Blog, where no further explanation is offered.   I'll bet the participants sit in the group swing, which swings back and forth, and then the "room" surrounding them is rotated the opposite way, to give the illusion of near-inversion.

Clever.  I wonder if any modern amusement parks incorporate this idea into their rides.

Addendum:   In the Comments section, several readers have noted that this type of illusion still exists in amusement parks - for example the Villa Volta in the Netherlands and a Dutch Wonder House in Pennsylvania.

This type of ride is often referred to as a Madhouse ("designed to be an optical and physical illusion, consisting of several rows of seats attached to a swaying gondola within a rotating drum. The ride creates the impression that the rider is turning upside down, whereas it is actually the room that is moving around them.  The ride is a modern implementation of a haunted swing illusion.")

I may have given the impression while writing the post that I am totally unfamiliar with amusement parks.  Au contraire, mon frere.  I grew up in a Excelsior, a suburb of Minneapolis, home to the Excelsior Amusement Park.  Built in the 1920s on the shores of then-pristine Lake Minnetonka, it was an attraction for Minneapolis city-dwellers who arrived at the park via a (long) streetcar ride.  The featured attraction was this roller-coaster (cropped for size from the original at Minnesota Reflections):

Photographed in the 1920s, when it had a field of grain on the shoreward side.   I last visited the park in the 1960s when the field of grain had replaced by suburban homes and businesses.  The roller-coaster was constructed from wood, which had survived 40 years, but pieces of it were scattered on the ground underneath, and as I recall I opted out of testing its integrity.

The coaster was demolished in the 1970s (memoriam here) and the lakeside amusement park replaced by the inevitable condominiums.  I've not been to an amusement park since then; I don't suppose they've changed much...

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Lifehack for the winter blizzard season

Found at Meanwhile, in the Sticks.

Addendum:  Before trying this, view the link in the comments.

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Desks with pedals for preschoolers

Via Reddit.

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"Sand-activated' puppets

YouTube link.

You pour the sand in at the top.  And it comes out... well, at the bottom.

Via A London Salmagundi.

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"The times, they are a-changing"

According to The Moscow Times, Russia is demanding that Bulgaria take steps to prevent vandalism of soviet statuary.

This is what the Monument to the Soviet Army used to look like:

On June 17, 2011 the monument was painted overnight by unknown artists, who "dressed" the Soviet Army soldiers as American comics heroes and characters: Superman, Joker, Robin, Captain America, Ronald McDonald, Santa Claus, Wolverine, The Mask, and Wonder Woman, with a caption underneath which translates as "Abreast with the Times" (in Bulgarian "V krak s vremeto", literally "In pace with time"). The monument was cleaned in the late hours of June 20, 2011. The event was widely covered by the international media and provoked serious pro and anti-Russian discussion in the Bulgarian society. The story was filmed in the short documentary In Step With The Time directed by Anton Partalev and includes anonymous interviews with the artists. The film won the second prize in 2013 IN OUT FESTIVAL in Poland.

Top photo: Ignat Ignev / Wikicommons

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Flour sack clothing

"When they realized women were using their sacks to make clothes for their children, flour mills of the 30s started using flowered fabric for their sacks, 1939"  Via Earthly Mission.

I found the following photo at Living History Farm:

 

And this image via Jennifer Lewis:

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Using pine sap for indoor lighting

Indoors, pine sap was seldom made into candles.  It was unnecessary.  A piece of sap cut or pulled from a tree—about the size of a little finger from the tip of it to the knuckle—would burn for longer than an hour.  It was laid on something flat that was heatproof, like a carefully chosen rock with a depression in the top of it.  A lamp in a seashell would not drip tar on a table or cause the shell to break from the heat.  A wick of twisted thread or string was pressed into the sap and lit.  The flame would char the wick until it reached the sap and then set it on fire.  

Text and image from an article about colonial indoor lighting at Colonial American Digressions.

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Why you might want to have an eel in your well

A 155-year-old eel living in a Swedish well has died.

"My family bought the cottage in 1962, and we always knew the housepet was included," Mr Kjellman said.

Before public water systems were developed in the 1960s, it was common practice to drop eels in to household wells to get rid of flies and bugs.

"Eels normally only live to be seven years old, they usually get so fat and their intestinal canals stop working. But this one just lived and lived and lived,” said Mr Kjellman...

Åle became something of a celebrity during his decades at the bottom of the well, featuring in numerous Swedish books and TV programmes. 

For some of my years in Kentucky I lived in a semi-rural location with the home's water provided by a cistern rather than a well.  The cistern was recharged by runoff from the roof of an outbuilding.  Because I was not meticulous in cleaning the gutters of leaves and other organic debris, various insect larvae would get washed down the downspout into the cistern and eventually appear in my tapwater.

I should have kept an eel in the cistern.

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