W. Reginald Bray

Sep 4, ’12 8:06 PM

I was browsing in an ultra cool book store in Brooklyn and came across a title I could not pass up. John Tingey’s “The Englishman Who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects,” tells the story of how accountant and postal regulation enthusiast W. Reginald Bray became “The Human Letter” and “The Autograph King.” From the 2010 review in the New Yorker:

Bray (1879-1939) was an avid collector who amassed stamps, postmarks, train tickets, and girlfriends, and who, after reading the entire British Post Office Guide, impishly determined to take the rules as challenges. He tried posting an unimaginable array of things, to see whether the post office would deliver them. At one point or another, he mailed a bowler hat, a rabbit skull (the address spelled out on the nasal bone, and the stamps pasted to the back), a purse, a slipper, a clothes brush, seaweed, shirt collars, a penny, a turnip (address and message carved into the durable tuber), an Irish Terrier, and a pipe, among other curios.

Needless to say I loved it and it inspired me to send a few return address experiments of my own today. Will my letter to PJ reach all the way to the fictional address in Saipan before it reaches him in California? Who knows, but it’s worth 45 cents to find out.

More on Bray on the author’s website.

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Bannack on the Straightaway

Aug 26, ’12 4:29 PM
http://youtu.be/2zF-wMRU42E
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Aurochs and Angels

Aug 25, ’12 7:09 PM

I saw a beautiful movie this weekend, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s completely emotional and magical and I recommend getting to a theater if you can find it playing and seeing it. Set in the disappearing Louisiana bayou and told from the perspective of an six year old girl. She’s living with her father in a doomed shanty town that they call The Bathtub. It’s an incredible story, but the geography is real and so are the consequences for the people who live there.

Here is a short documentary about the Isle de Jean Charles. It’s worth a look.

The movie has a very imaginative and homemade quality about it. It stars community actors and was shot on 16mm film, it’s the work of American director Benh Zeitlin. If you’re curious you can watch his short film Glory at Sea, it shares a lot of the magical elements and themes of Beasts.

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Just My Luck

Aug 23, ’12 5:39 AM

Maybe I was 18 and I got a scratch ticket for my birthday, but I can’t remember the last time I gambled. I would have dropped a nickle in a slot machine while in Reno, NV but they only take cards. Maybe that trip to Reno loosened me up though. We were eating dinner in a big old air conditioned restaurant on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota looking at the weekly specials. There was something about something called pop-tabs. I’d never heard about that before so I asked the waitress, “what’s this about pop-tabs?”

Turns out we were in a restaurant with a lottery booth where you could buy little cardboard lottery tickets. There are three little perforated doors on each ticket that you can open up and see if you’ve won. I bought five.

I had the lady that sold ’em to me show me how to do it and explain the whole thing for me. Then brought the other four back to the table and passed them out to try our luck.

Chris won $2 on his ticket and Bannack won $202, that’s the jackpot for pop-tabs! Of course he’s not allowed to gamble until he’s 18, so I claimed his winnings and paid for our dinner and beers. When he’s old I’ll pay him back and tell him why it’s a terrible idea to gamble. But until then I’ll keep my winning streak alive by never gambling again.

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Rest Stop Wibaux

Aug 18, ’12 8:10 AM

We rolled through 615 miles this first day, from breakfast at the No Sweat Cafe to the less than succinctly named Best Western Plus Ramkota Hotel Bismark here in North Dakota. Sara, Chris and Bannack are heading home to New York City and I’m along for the ride.

This trip seems like an extension of my recent trip to the Italian consulate in San Francisco. When I count it all together my summer road trip miles will have reached over 4500 when I arrive in New York. That’s 77 hours of car time according to Google Maps. As you can imagine, rest stops are precious.

Bannack and I were both in the same kind of stir-crazy mood when we got to Wibaux, Montana. The empty deck at the brewery wasn’t a perfect playground but it meant running, airplane rides, bull fighting, getting thrown in the air, Tootsie Rolls, and donkey kicking. We visited Wibaux’s real playground too, but it was the empty kind with painful spiky grass, swings that pinch, and those metal horses on springs that look like they should be really fun but still aren’t.

Sunday we’ll be in Chicago for a night or two, Wednesday night we’ll arrive in New York, and I’m looking forward to every rest stop along the way.

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