Plan 59 has a fine collection of photographs and artwork featuring mid-twentieth century cars and trucks.

Some pretty good station wagons, too.

David Neufer and his colleagues have created panoramic composites from films of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. 

(Via Coudal.)

Stefan Nadelman’s Food Fight. A short history of modern warfare, fought with egg rolls, chicken nuggets, sushi and falafel.

An index of warring foodstuffs. Related: Warfare with nuts and ribbon.

Time, I mean. Tomorrow will mark one year since I started this website, during which close to 400,000 visitors have paused to look around. Both of these things amaze me. Feedback has been surprisingly positive and, inspiration permitting, I’m hoping to spend more time working on it in future. As regular visitors will know, the content is pretty eclectic (by disorder, not design) and includes essays on art, academia, Islam and politics, along with interviews, news commentary, over 1,000 bits of ephemera and quite a few short films, some of which are touching, while others are just peculiar or in questionable taste. 

Suggestions, comments and corrections are, of course, welcome. As are PayPal donations, which help keep this place running and make me feel important. 

That is all. Carry on.

With Scientology in the news again, now seems a good time to revisit this 1983 Penthouse interview with the estranged son of L Ron Hubbard, the late Ronald Edward DeWolf.

In 1950 L Ron Hubbard opened a Dianetics clinic, where the hopeful and newly converted could come, for a fee, and their ills – from loneliness to cancer – would be cured. Dianetics was the new Scientific Revolution and Hubbard was its prophet… Soon the New Jersey authorities and the American Medical Association challenged the veracity of the new faith. L Ron Hubbard met the challenge by fleeing the state (not the last time this was to happen). A frequent memory of Ron Jr. is his father’s packing up shoeboxes with thousands of dollars to move on to greener and safer pastures.

“We attracted quite a few hippies but we tried to stay away from them, because they didn’t have any money.”

More. And. Related: The L Ron Hubbard audio collection.

(h/t, Discarded Lies.)