The Argus C44 was not a particularly fancy camera. First sold in 1956, it was the latest and greatest (and last) in a line of Argus rangefinders. Most people who know the name Argus know it for the Argus C3, a boxy “everyman’s” camera, but consider that the very next year, Nikon released the famous […]

Listening to episode #2326 of Car Talk, titled “Bill’s Chevy Maliboo-boo,” I noticed an interesting attribution for the Puzzler—it was “inspired by Jef Raskin” of Pacifica, California. The actual spelling is not given, but it seems reasonable that this is the Jef Raskin of Macintosh fame. This Car Talk episode is a re-run (or some […]

Probably relatively well-known in music circles in his day, Herman Wasserman seems to only pop up today in conversation associated with George Gershwin. It seems like he was also a teacher to Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. If you search library catalogs, he turns up as having edited George Gershwin’s Song-Book as […]

Wikimedia Commons holds a few remarkable maps of San Francisco from the 1850s. These maps, done as part of the US Coast Survey (now the National Geodetic Survey) were made a half century before the 1906 earthquakes and show a San Francisco that was largely limited to the Northeast part of the current city. I […]