Victorian Prank 96 Years In The Making

Here’s my latest eBay acquisition – a wonderful 96 year old postcard featuring currently 340 year old Van Pelt Manor (aka Van Pelt Mansion and Van Pelt Homestead) located at 18th Ave & 82nd St. in Brooklyn.

Ethics of publishing other people photographs and letters are rather questionable to me. This seems to be a gray area. For instance I feel that many posts in found_objects, foundphotos and vintagephoto communities of photos that were ripped up and thrown out, or of embarrassing nature, or personal letters overstep some ethical guidelines. But on the other hand I enjoy them nevertheless.

I don’t think that the writing on this postcard could likely hurt or embarrass anyone, so I decided that I’ll publish it.

It came from someone at 182 Garfield place. A little note on the right says “look under the stamp”.

On the back it says:
New York is a great place, we are “Forty five minutes from Broadway”. Do you see “Kitty” very often. She ran away and never did say good-bye to me. Pump up your Airship and sail over to see me some evening soon.
Youre “Soda Water Tessie”.

The stamp was still attached. The mystery of what was under the stamp was solved rather quickly : being a stamp collector I know how to properly take stamps off. My wonderful espresso machine provided some steam and I carefully peeled back the 1 cent green Ben Franklin (Scott Catalogue # 300). “Was it hard to get off?” – the little prank that “Soda Water Tessie” pulled on Mr. Ray Feathers of Toledo, OH finally saw light of day 96 years later.

I wonder, did Mr. Feathers actually own an airship?

P.S. Taking stamps off is generally a capitally bad idea. Dang early collectors liked to steam off stamps so much that we have very few surviving stamps on envelopes (which are often referred to as “postal history”). “Postal history” items usually sell with a high multiplier to the value of every stamp on the envelope.

Piled Higher And Deeper

I visited my college recently to pick up my diploma. As usual I looked through the college newspapers.

Well, the political climate is rather interesting at good Old BC. There are two political parties – PHD (conservative) and USL (liberal). For most of my college career PHD, which name as far as I know is not an abbreviation, but like Häagen-Dazs® just a pleasing combination of letters had a long winning streak. That streak ended right after I had a pleasure of being quoted by a college newspaper reporter saying something to the effect that I think that PHD will win again.

What is interesting to note is in the last election United Students League had a very narrow victory amongst allegations of running a smear campaign. By just 21 votes Mohammed L. Hussain won over Yehuda Katz. I am not making this up, people.

New And Improved Deadprogrammer.

Now with 20% more rantolioum!

No, I am not on vacation. And no, I am not reading the Harry Potter book. And of course I haven’t run out of ideas. I was just a bit busy. In fact, I am still busy. But I will steal time from sleep, reading and Tivo to bring you more good stuff.

Coming soon to a browser near you:

  • Deadprogrammer’s favorite skyscraper (this is going to be a good one)
  • Really awesome artifacts of Art Deco era
  • Pen computing, mind mapping, memex and friends (continuation of the rant)
  • NYC subway mosaics
  • Rants about Tablet PC
  • Some more artsy fartsy pictures, why not
  • Sci-fi book that I want to plug
  • Livejournals you should read
  • Brooklyn College Research

    The research at my soon to be Alma Mater is on the cutting edge.

    From “The Straight Dope”:
    Alexander Graham Bell suggested “ahoy!” as the standard telephone greeting, but it didn’t catch on–for obvious reasons, you may think. Don’t be so sure. Brooklyn College professor Allen Koenigsberg, author of The Patent History of the Phonograph, argues that the word that did catch on, “hello,” was previously unknown and may have been invented by the man who proposed it, Thomas Edison.

    As I always said, one year at Brooklyn College is like 2 at MIT. And this fall it’s going to be my 7th year there.

    Interesting trivia about my college education: I’ve had a Pulitzer prize winning professor.