Thanks to my across-the-hall colleague Gordon Smith for linking my site to his!

I'm jealous of the fancy side bar and so on, but glad to be linked over there. I'll upgrade this site when it can be done. I have some pictures I'd like to put up. I just bought a photo scanner and have been ransacking my house looking for the old negatives of photos I took in 1980 when I bought a good camera and wandered about New York City taking pictures of unusual signs and torn posters and the like. I got the pictures printed at one of those ordinary photo places, which systematically chop off the edges. I'm sure they think they are doing you a favor, the theory being that people just waste the edges. But I had compositions that were based on corners and edges, and it was irksome to see images were missing. If I could just find the negatives, I could scan them and see those images I intended for the first time.

But I can't find the negatives. I'm going to assume that this is for a reason and I will find other things. Sunday I found an envelope containing various documents from my mother's house, including the "Women's Army Corp Song Book," published "1 August 1944" by the War Department. It has some excellent 1940s line drawings of WACs and a nice image of the goddess Athena on the front. (Pictures of Greek goddesses on government songbooks may or may not violate the Establishment Clause.) There are also some pretty interesting song choices, like "The WAC Is a Soldier Too" and "Yes, By Cracky" ("Yes, By Cracky, I'm a little WAC-y, I'm a little soldier girl..."). The "Songs of the United Nations" chapter includes the lyrics to "Ch'i Lai": "With our own flesh and blood/Let us build our new Great Wall/China's masses have met the day of danger...."

"A singing Army is a happy Army."