M.J. Rose

We were out for a week, but now we’re back. We missed you.

Now, please enjoy some genuine old portraits, and then some newfangled alterations of old portraits.

Old portraits of children with creepy ‘ghostmothers’ in the background show how far mums would go for a good photo

By Daily Mail Reporter

“In the early days of photography, many well-off families jumped at the chance to have their precious children’s likeness captured for eternity.

The one trick that they had to deal with next, after finding photographers willing to set up the bulky equipment and travelling to the portrait location, was getting the little babies to sit still for the entirety of the session.

As a result, many photographers enlisted the help of the children’s mothers, with often creepy outcomes…”

Read more here.

And now these lovely wonders…

History Meets the Strangest Animated GIFs

by An Xiao

Decoy Howizter [Remastered] (all images via fluxmachine.tumblr.com)

“OAKLAND, Calif. — In an era of ubiquitous photography and advanced editing, it’s fun to look back on old images and bring new techniques to play with them. There’s the popular topic of colorizing historical images, which has been making the rounds lately. And the NYPL made waves when they turned old stereographs into animated GIFs that are surprisingly effective at showing their 3D quality. And meme land has given us the history photobomb.But what about completely deconstructing historic images all together? I recently encountered the wacky and amazing animated GIFs of Kevin Weird…”

The rest here.

There once was a very creepy and morbid tradition of post-mortem photography –

Click the photo below for the gallery…

M. J.’s  novel THE MEMORIST centers around the hunt for an ancient flute made out of bone that looked just like these and were just about as old…

9,000 year-old-flutes found in China

(www.ancient-origins.net)

“Researchers in China have discovered six complete ancient flutes made of bone belonging to the Neolithic period carbon dated to about 9,000 years old. Fragments of many more flutes were found in the same area too. The flutes are complete playable flutes made of the bones of the red-crowned crane with five to eight holes. The area that they were discovered is Jiahu of the mid-Henan Province.

What is interesting is that the music played through the seven holes correspond to a tonal scale extremely similar to the eight note scale used today. Although this sounds like a minor detail it is a very important discovery that is also quite amazing. The seven musical notes that we use today and the tone scale used have harmony that is distinct and is based on complex acoustic properties. Is it coincidence that whoever made those 9,000 years old flutes and generally people from all over the world (Africa, Asia, and Europe) were able to come up with scales reflecting all these acoustic properties just by simple chance?…”

See more here.