Contact Juggling - You Won't Believe This is Real

This held my attention right to the end.  I must have lived a sheltered life because I don’t believe I had heard of contact juggling before, but now I have I am an immediate fan!  It differs from toss juggling in a number of ways (have a look at the Wikipedia page for a full explanation).  However, essentially it involves rolling a ball around one’s body, spinning the ball and finally manipulating it so it appears to be hanging in mid-air.  The young man in the video above does all with dexterity and grace. I honestly thought I must have been watching a CGI trick!

The video is by Kuma Films and was made at the National Taiwan University.

1910s America in Color

In this color photograph you can see a group of children who have dressed up to back the war effort, one proudly bearing the US flag. Is this from the Vietnam War? The Second World War?  Neither – the picture was taken about 1918 and it is the troops sent to fight in what became known as the First World War that they are supporting. This extraordinary photograph is almost a hundred years old: it is highly unlikely that even the longest lived of these children is still alive.

We often perceive the past in black and white – after all, the vast majority of photographs from the 1910s through in to the 1930s and 40s are monochrome.  Yet a color photography process called the Autochrome Lumière was patented in 1903.  It remained the foremost color process until the second half of the 1930s. The pictures you are about to see are mostly dated about 1915-18 with some earlier and a few from the 1920s.