The Globe and Mail ran a couple of features on significant events of 1904. This one is about Alice Seeley Harris.
Alice Seeley Harris walked into the fetid jungle in 1898, a mild-mannered young Englishwoman in the wide-brimmed hat and layers of ankle-length skirts of a young missionary. She emerged five years later, thinner and aged by what she had seen -- and carrying a box of photographs. By 1904, Ms. Seeley Harris's pictures of tortured Congolese slave labourers had sparked the first international movement for human rights. For the first time, Europeans and North Americans had seen proof of the ugly reality of African colonialism, and the outcry prompted a pioneering inquiry, where those photos were used as evidence. The probe brought about the end of slavery in the Congo, and served as a model for investigations throughout the coming century.
She used a Kodak Brownie which allowed ordinary people to take photographs. "You push the button, we do the rest".
In 1905, Mark Twain published King Leopold's Soliloquy, an imagined set of musings by the king on those troublesome human-rights campaigners; in it he cited the particularly irksome camera. "The Kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us. . . . The only witness I have encountered in my long career that I couldn't bribe." (The Kodak Brownie, introduced in 1900, cost just $1, and caused a huge popularization of photography.) In 1908, Leopold was finally forced to turn his colony over to the government of Belgium, which served to end the worst of the forced-labour practices.
As far as the music thing goes, the guitar market is largely focused on middle-aged guys who spend money on Gibsons, Fenders and so on. This Wired article about Gibson is enlightening.
The desperation isn't driven by sales. In the US alone nearly a million electric guitars were purchased in 2002 - three times as many as a decade ago - to the tune of $477 million. Most of the guitars - roughly 85 percent - were knockoffs of the Les Paul and its only real competition, Fender's Stratocaster. And since Juszkiewicz took control of Gibson, in 1986, revenue has soared. The Music Trades, an industry journal, estimates Gibson's annual revenue increased from $12 million to $130 million in 2002. (Gibson, a private company, will not reveal figures.)
Hint, it's real folks, not "professionals" who are buying all that gear. And of course, Garageband is supposed to work easily with an electric guitar, providing easy bed tracks to play along with. Sounds like a market to me.
Here in Canada, we've had an outbreak of Mad Bishop Disease in the face of the government ratifying the rights of all citizens to be treated the same under the law, both civil and criminal.
This, again, made me wonder where these men in dresses came up with the delusion they have any authority. They are supposed to be celibate, forbidden to have sex, to marry, to have or raise children. And they want to tell other people how to do all of the above. I think it is time they start minding their own business.
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