The Minority Report Blog » vintage

Nat Geo – Excellent Vintage Photos

Candice Lanier — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:54:31 +0000

Great Pyramid and Sphinx, Giza

Photograph by Hans Hildenbrand, National Geographic

Men on camelback ride past the Sphinx and Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt.

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Photograph by Walter Edwards, National Geographic

A man and woman look out at the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial.

View the Slideshow!

Titanic: How the News Covered It: Photos

Candice Lanier — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:02:14 +0000

April 15, 2012 — Exactly 100 years ago, at 11:40 p.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. At 1:20 a.m. on Monday, April 15, the ship sank to a depth of more than 12,400 feet. More than two-thirds of the 2,224 passengers and crew died. More

What Ever Happened to Quicksand?

Candice Lanier — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:01:16 +0000

The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. Thirty years ago, quicksand might have sprung up at recess, in pools of discolored asphalt or the dusty corners of the sandbox—step in the wrong place, and you’d die. But not anymore, a boy named Zayd tells me. “I think people used to be afraid of it,” he says. His classmates nod. “It was before we were born,” explains Owen. “Maybe it will come back one day.”

For now, quicksand has all but evaporated from American entertainment—rejected even by the genre directors who once found it indispensable. There isn’t any in this summer’s fantasy blockbuster Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or in last year’s animated jungle romp Up. You won’t find quicksand in The Last Airbender or Avatar, either. Giant scorpions emerge from the sand in Clash of the Titans, but no one gets sucked under. And what about Lost—a tropical-island adventure series replete with mud ponds and dangling vines? That show, which ended in May, spanned six seasons and roughly 85 hours of television airtime—all without a single step into quicksand. “We were a little bit concerned that it would just be cheesy,” says the show’s Emmy-winning writer and executive producer, Carlton Cuse. “It felt too clichéd. It felt old-fashioned.” More