Dec. 30, 2012 - Jan. 5, 2013 Discussions

My comment for Sunday, December 30 was mostly about a new book by Edward Jay Epstein, Ph.D., that is coming out in February.  It's called "The Annals of Unsolved Crime," and it will include a section about the anthrax attacks of 2001.

Dr. Epstein's opinions about the anthrax attacks of 2001 are well known, and I've commented about them on my web site numerous times over the past 11 years.  He appears to be a dedicated "conspiracy theorist."   Here are some of the other "unsolved" crimes he writes about in his new book:

           The Lincoln assassination
           The Lindbergh kidnapping
           The Reichstag Fire
           The Marilyn Monroe "suicide"
           The Kennedy Assassination
           The case of O.J. Simpson

There have been "conspiracy theories" that Marilyn Monroe was killed by the Kennedy family.  And, of course there were many conspiracy theories about who really killed John F. Kennedy.  And, if I remember my history correctly, there were actual conspiracies behind the Lincoln assassination and the Reichstag fire.  So, it appears that Dr. Epstein's book may compare actual conspiracies from distant history with conspiracy theories of his own from more recent times.

I'll probably buy Dr. Epstein's book just to debunk the section about the anthrax attacks.  It should give me several weeks of material to write about on my web site.

Meanwhile, I've more-or-less completed the digitizing of the slides and photos I took between 1952 and 1992 or so.  I've got 4,713 digitized images.  But, there are probably other envelopes of negatives tucked away in some box in some closet somewhere.

The photos can be combined to make interesting collages.  Here's a collage I assembled of 16 photographs of Mississippi riverboats that I took over the years around Dubuque and Clinton, Iowa, and New Orleans:    

Then I remembered I had some others that I took in St. Louis, including one of the famous riverboat "Admiral" next to the St. Louis Arch just after the arch was completed:

It's a dust-specked slide that needs to be digitally cleaned up.  (Click on the picture to view a much larger version.)  And, when I found that slide I found another dust-specked slide of two different riverboats:

and a totally different riverboat from somewhere else nearby:

Trying to figure out how to combine those three additional photos into the above collage helped make me lose interest in the whole idea .... at least temporarily.

I also realized that such a poster on my wall would cause visitors to ask, "How did you ever get such an interest in riverboats?"  And, I'll have to repeatedly explain that I didn't.  My interest is in photography and in boats, planes and big machines of many kinds -- and the science involved.  The photos above are just 19 from 4,713, which means that 4,694 are NOT pictures of riverboats.  So, Mississippi riverboats are no more than 0.4% of what interests me.

Maybe I'll eventually get back into making collage posters from my photographs.  But, Dr. Epstein's new book tells me I should be doing more to get my own new book before the public.  His book is going to tell people his theories.  Hopefully, after reading his book, there will be a lot of people who will want to know what the actual facts say.  If so, I need to help them find my book.

Ed