"A simple example taken from the world of culture (and what other world should we take it from?) ..." —César Aira (as translated by Katherine Silver), The Literary Conference

Beware! A Voice from Shadowland by Douglas Dalton, 1887.

[We're delighted to have contributed the following to Long Forgotten's great post about haunted wallpaper.]

Here is revealed how wallpaper can become haunted via the occult powers of trembling moon rays (and it gets better as it goes, with the introduction of ogres, serpents, demons, and conspiring pillows!): "The wall-papers in many private houses and hotels are remarkable for their hideous patterns, which, in the case of nervous individuals are sufficient to induce an attack of nightmare.  These papers are bad enough in the daytime, but at night—lighted perhaps by a trembling moonray—they assume a ghastly aspect.  Great ogres' heads, with eyes as large as saucers, and mouths which seem to open wider and wider every minute, appear to stare down upon one; serpents twist and twirl in endless arabesques, as though about to spring; while little demons perch themselves here and there round the room with hideous grins stereotyped upon their features.  No wonder that a stranger, with the indigestible Berlin cuisine lying heavily on his chest, should imagine himself encompassed by all manner of horrors, and engage in a more or less desperate struggle with the spirits of the air, in the course of which the hateful bag of feathers is certain to overbalance itself and topple to the ground, leaving him shivering in a half-sleeping, half-waking state during the remainer of the night." —Berlin under the New Empire by Henry Vizetelly, 1879, p. 123.

See our previous example of haunted wallpaper here, predating M. C. Escher by about three decades.

An Indian Wizard by Arthur Lillie, 1887.

"Some liquid matter rushed out of the camera and struck Eddard with startling force," from Wonderful Ching-Ching: His Further Adventures by Edwin Harcourt Burrahe, 1886.

From Punch magazine, 1841.

Google delivers zero results for the "opposite of a bedroom farce," but here's what it looks like, from Donna Quixote by Justin MacCarthy and illustrated by Arthur Hopkins, 1879.  The caption reads, "Oh, I am so glad you are not in bed!"

As we see here, the word "hare" is properly followed by four squiggles, as if tracing a leaping gait.  Either a lower-case w or tilde symbol will suffice for typing.  From The Works of John Collier-Tim Bobbin in Prose and Verse, 1894.

Here are some ring imps, magnified, from Imprisoned in a Spanish Convent by Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, 1886.

"The sun is the soul and the light of the world, probably in the same way that the physical letters of the vowels are the soul of the alphabet." —Joseph Dan, The "Unique Cherub Circle": A School of Mystics and Esoterics in Medieval Germany (1999)

We can now reveal that giant, elaborate, even architectural clockwork has always been the engine that generates fairy tales, and our modern age of disenchantment is directly attributable to newfangled flat clocks and (horrors!) portable digital timepieces.  In a nutshell, one can't measure "once upon a time" by a microchip.  Begin contemplating where all the giant clocks are, (recalling that Germany's fabled Black Forest contains the vast majority of the world's largest cuckoo clocks), then contemplate the sources of your favorite fairy tales, and a bell will resound in your head.  Contemplate also why California's Disneyland is better than Florida's Magic Kingdom (recalling that the elaborate facade behind Disneyland's It's a Small World ride is an enormous, elaborate clock with animated figures emerging to mark the hours).  Now you'll have guessed the reason for our pilgrimage last year to the 14th-century fortified East Gate of the town of Warwick, still a working clock tower.  Google Earth imagery of the clock tower verifies that the spot violates the laws of space/time.  The top of the clock tower is revealed to be ethereal (see first and second pictures below).  It's an English version of a "Castle in Spain."  At least equally intriguing, an additional warp in space/time is verified: the yellow line that Google overlays to show the route of street traffic bends upward into space as it nears the clock tower.  This anomaly isn't a one-off but rather appears in multiple photos and angles (see pictures three and four below).  In our final picture, taken more recently by Google's spy cameras, note the optical illusion in the clock tower's windows.  We've paired it with an optical illusion by Gary Barwin, to clarify the exact phenomenon (see picture five below).  Windows begin as glass and end as stone, and vice versa.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, the frontispiece to How to Believe in Your Elf.

Can you find Woodrow Wilson in this mysterious photograph from the University of Cincinnati's Cincinnatian yearbook, 1917?  Is W.W. the figure at the left, who (if we use our imaginations) might be a person with an outstretched arm?  Is W.W. the splotch at the bottom right, which might depict someone's head and shoulders?  Surprisingly, W.W. is neither of those, and now we can reveal our extensive analysis of this photograph.  His Eminence is actually the splotch at the top right of the photo.  See our specially enchanced enlargement below for proof.  "That's Woodrow," you'll exclaim, "or I'm Archduke Franz Ferdinand."  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

It's quite the New Age thing to be present in the moment, to "be here now" as Ram Dass teaches.  But is that wise?  Consider: "Believe me, remembrance is the lesser evil.  Let no one trust the happiness of the moment; there is in it a drop of gall." —Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

"It was not the echoes, said the goblin," from Gleanings from Popular Authors, 1895.

"Riches take wings" (which would explain a lot), from Successful Men of Today and What They Say of Success by Wilbur Fisk Crafts, 1905.

An illustration from La Vie à Montmartre by Georges Montorgueil, illustrated by Pierre Vidal (1899).  Speaking of which, what exactly are a snowball's chances in hell?  See A Snowball's Chance in Hell.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From The Child's Own Poetry Book by Horace George Hroser, 1887.

From The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile, 1895.

We previously noted:

The nuns in The Sound of Music ponder, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

We found the answer in a volume by Eliza Marian Butler entitled The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany (1926):

The "solution of Maria's problem" is her "conversion to the Protestant faith."

UPDATE courtesy of Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

Q. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

A. Borrow Maria's calculator and Maria's pencil.

Which weighs more: an owl or a jester's marotte?  We find the answer in Hampden-Sydney College's Kaleidoscope yearbook, 1919.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

This ornate capital G reminds us of Number 2's signature spherical chair in The Prisoner series.  From Loose Rein by Wanderer and illustrated by G. Bowers, 1887.

"Lord Senfrey gasped and fell forward right into the horrible vapour," from The Crime of a Christmas Toy by Henry Herman, 1893.

The year before Mr. Venn died, it was as if his diagrams hadn't made a dent.  Consider this muddled circle from Thinking: An Introduction to Its History and Science by Fred Casey, 1922.

The UFO of success's levitation beam of temperance is blocked by an alcoholic drinks counter, which is obvious when you think about it.  From The Missionary Visitor, 1907.

From the Mirror yearbook of Bates College, 1921.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

"It is vacation," from Zigzag Journeys in Europe by Hezekiah Butterworth, 1880.

The old-time euthemism "Golly gee whillikers" is of ambiguous etymology, but we've traced it back to this 8-pound fish who went by the name of "G. Whillikens."  From Heston's Hand-Book by Alfred Miller Heston, 1902.

People think, "T & A.  Ooh la la!"  But they have ups and downs like all of us, and the reality is that it's long hours and hard work.  Our illustration is from Lower Eatington: Its Manor House and Church, 1880.

"Don't allow your knees to travel beyond your toes.  We know we said this before, but it bears repeating."
—LaReine Chabut, Weight Training for Dummies

Here are True and False personified.  But how can you tell them apart?

(The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

It's a trick question, becuase "True and false are in fact interchangeable depending upon the perspective and context of their affirmation, but such that for every false proposition there is always a possible world for which it is true.  And vice-versa." —Romano Madera and Luigi Vero Tarca, Philosophy As Life Path, 2008

We actually traced our ancestry to the second, third, and fourth figures in this illustration from The Popular History of England by Charles Knight, 1854.  The secret?  We followed the techniques in Heirs to the Queen of Hearts: Tracing Magical Genealogy.

We like to say that music is timeless, but in fact the notes mature, as we see in Educational Psychology by Kate Gordon, 1917.

From McElroy's Philadelphia City Directory, 1837.  Can you guess the context?  (Highlight to view): An ad for elocution lessons with special instruction in gestures.

"Skipped round it in emulation of the faeries," from The Dwarf's Chamber and Other Stories by Fergus Hume, 1896.

Here are what Jonathan Caws-Elwitt might call "genuine cousins of pearl."  From Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1860.

The Latin phrase says that times change, and we change with them.  But the illustration reminds us that we can face backwards and might even gain an umbrella along the way.  This illustration encapsulates our Oddfellow approach to life.  We're reminded of a moment in childhood, when the family car was passing by a horrendously stinky paper manufacturing plant.  We suggested that everyone breathe through their mouths until we moved out of range of the stench.  Our kid brother — with all the wisdom of the eternal twelve-year-old — sneered derisively, announcing what was obvious to him, that we'd be inhaling the fumes either way.  We remained silent, too dumbfounded to communicate what was obvious to us, that just because one has to breathe it doesn't mean one can be forced to smell it.  So, too, in this illustration — just because the pony is charging ahead doesn't mean we can't look whichever way we choose and keep an eye out for an umbrella and medicine bag to make the journey more bearable.

From St. Nicholas, 1897.

Q: How is a jack-in-the-box like Norma Desmond?

A: They're both still big; it's the pictures that got small.

We've been monitoring this for years and are thrilled to report that a library stamp has leafed and fruited!  It's true, and it's all happening on the last page of Breezes from John o' Groats, 1896.  Rest assured that further developments will appear here first.

Here's a precursor to Edward Gorey's tassel people (inset), from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1860.

Before our smartphones and RFID-chipped credit cards broadcast our every move, folks were tracked by their tattoos.  (From 1896.)

Perhaps Andy Warhol Was Wrong, For a Fascinating Variety of Reasons

[Updated with new wrongness!]

Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.  Now that the future is already here, there are those who beg to differ with Andy, and for a fascinating variety of reasons!

In his novel Rant (2007), Chuck Palahniuk suggests that "Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, people won't be famous for fifteen minutes.  No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes."

Movie critic Frank Schneck posits that the word should be film, not fame: "Andy Warhol was wrong.  It's not just that everyone is going to have 15 minutes of fame.  In the not-so-distant future, every person on the planet is going to have a film made about him or her" (Hollywood Reporter, 2000).  Others seem to agree, in a roundabout way:

Then there are those who argue that the 15 minutes are recurring:

Not fame, but Hitler:

Not fame, but privacy:

Not fame, but Colorado citizenship:

Not fame, but hostage crisis:

"In the future, everyone will be a hostage for fifteen minutes." —William Keckler

Fame, yes, but in the past, not in the future:

Fame, yes, but not 15 minutes exactly:

Fame, yes, but for more like 15 seconds:

Fame, yes, but for more than 15 minutes: