Newsreel

Same As It Ever Was

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012 — This is a 1:23 scene from Keeper of the Flame, a George Cukor film made in 1942, from a screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart. Katherine Hepburn plays the widow of Robert Forrest; Spencer Tracy is a former war correspondent who had planned to write Forrest’s biography. Seventy years later things still work the same way. In case of technical difficulties, here is a transcript; Hepburn is speaking: The morning of the accident I stole his keys, came here, and opened this. [Opens the door to a large cupboard.] This is what I found: the key to Robert Forrest’s fascist organization. …

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Printing on the Wooden Common Press

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Wednesday, May 9, 2012 — Jack Williams, of Effingham, New Hampshire, demonstrating his wooden common press at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Friday, October 24, 2008. The demonstration was part of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Portsmouth Literary Festival. Jack built the press himself, from plans drawn by Clinton Sisson, of the Smithsonian Institute. Sisson’s plans were drawn up from careful measurements taken from a press in the Smithsonian’s collection which was once used by Benjamin Franklin. The gentleman wearing a black baseball hat at the start of the clip is Harold Whitehouse, a former linotype operator for the Portsmouth Herald. [We could …

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The Vermont Joy Parade Busking in Market Square

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Monday, April 9, 2012 — Human beings trapped by the machinations and depredations of late-stage plutocracy are likely to respond by sinking into numb despair or by defiantly manifesting, in whatever mode best suits them, their utter contempt for the corrupt system that mistakenly believes it can confine the human spirit. In other news, The New Hampshire Gazette’s Newsreel Division stumbled upon the Vermont Joy Parade busking in Market Square this afternoon.

Lowering the Weights

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Sunday, March 25, 2012 — The last section of a 500-ton counterweight was lifted from the south tower of Memorial Bridge between Portsmouth and Kittery about 1:45 p.m. yesterday. At about the 45-second mark, three guys can be seen shoving the 250,000-pound hunk of concrete and steel into place on the barge.

Rhourd Enouss entering and leaving Portsmouth Harbor

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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 — Sonatrach’s Rhourd Enouss is shown entering Portsmouth Harbor at about 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 14th, and leaving at about 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, December 18th. The ship is 670 feet long, has a beam of 108 feet, and carries a little over 2 million cubic feet of propane. Owned by Sonatrach, Algeria’s government-owned petroleum company, it was built by Kawasaki Shipbuilding of Kobe, Japan, and delivered in 2008. The video is made up of a succession of screenshots taken from a pair of webcams owned and operated by Sebtec, of Derry, NH, and converted to a .mov file by …

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