Ye Olde Ronson Ship

Recently I bought one of those all-in-1 machines for the computer that allows one to scan, fax, print and copy in color and black-and-white. I scanned some photos in and using Microsoft Windows Live beta products (Photo Gallery and Movie Maker) put these photos together, wondering how it would come out. Since they also let you store 5 Gigabytes free on-line, with Windows Live SkyDrive, I thought why not try, no streaming from here off my whiz-bang PIII Tualatin, a chip once actually used for “servers” though two at a time and a place in Oregon. Now there's several cores in a CPU! CPU within CPU! This blog is also written with the Windows Live Writer Beta. I

recall the third “deep test” in the old ballast loaders material, i.e., brain coral, coconut husks, and other debris from the past laying below the surface of New York City’s early shoreline, at various times filled a few blocks east to the East River, actually an arm of the Long Island Sound, once helpful for both wind and tide, before motorized sea travel. Finding the smooth curve of black wood descending to a great depth, deep for a backhoe, we asked Norman Brower over at the nearby Seaport Museum to give it a look and he agreed, there be a ship in the ground! He said they had very little funds, their money tied up in a “Black Ball” clipper once used as a wharf-side warehouse in the Falkland Islands, and couldn't imagine what to do with it other than sling it in pieces in a cargo net over the side in the water, but the teredo or ship-worms, making a comeback in the cleaner water resulting lately in the port would get to it. Which was funny, the first “sacrificial plank” or a repair I picked up had horsehair (and hemp?) and tar on one side and stopped the ship-worms from boring into the wood further. I thought maybe a lost formula had been found perhaps. The origin of those species of “worm” was found to have been in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic.

As it was, we had significant pieces dragged to a low wet tank we had made. I took pictures of "knees", etc., against clear Mylar 2” grid attached to a large piece of plywood. Selected ones were tied-up, wrapped in burlap and placed in a dumpster, with a bit of Lysol we had lined with plastic sheeting to waterproof it. Later examined, the parts had been transported to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, once an important airfield in the city, he a famous aviator from Warrensburg, NY. It then went to Michael Roberts’s barn in Massachusetts and large “1 to 1” drawings made of some of the parts I had photographed that winter.

Recently I've been watching Cecil Hepworth’s “Alice in Wonderland” (1903) several times. A huge collection has been found of photographs of George Bernard Shaw and the “father of cinematography” Eadweard Muybridge, has also a huge cache of still photographs, many from his travels here in America both being exhibited! Ye Olde Ronson Ship or slideshow of original scans. YouTube here, faster! For the most recent on the WTC ship see DiscoveryNews "WTC Ship Gives Up Lucky Coin". For a recent publication of the report of 175 Water Street, Manhattan click here: “Ronson Ship” at Lulu Press. I met a woman in archaeology who played on the “Lulus” softball team. It’s also old slang for what politicians got as “perks”.