Eideard

Rick Norsigian’s hobby of picking through piles of unwanted items at garage sales in search of antiques has paid off for the Fresno, California, painter.

Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45 — negotiated down from $70 — are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million, according to a Beverly Hills art appraiser.

Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates…

The photographs apparently were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams — who is known as the father of American photography — became nationally recognized in the 1940s, David Streets said…

Photography expert Patrick Alt, who helped confirm the authenticity of the negatives, suspects Adams carried them to use in a photography class he was teaching in Pasadena, California, in the early 1940s…

While most of the negatives appear never to have been printed, several are nearly identical to well-known Adams prints, the experts said…

“I have sent people to prison for the rest of their lives for far less evidence than I have seen in this case,” said evidence and burden of proof expert Manny Medrano, who was hired by Norsigian to help authenticate them. “In my view, those photographs were done by Ansel Adams.”
Norsigian, who has spent the last decade trying to prove the worth of his discovery, is now ready to cash in — by selling original prints of the photographs to museums and collectors.

RTFA. Interesting tale in several chapters: discovery of the negatives at a garage sale; why had they ended up in storage in the first place; Norsigian appears to have been casual about validating the negatives until about 6 months ago; how they were authenticated.

The answer is always “No”. I hope I haven’t missed something.

“I’ll give you 5 bucks for the hat, Joe”

The detritus of occupation comes in all shapes and sizes.

In Iraq, it’s M-16 ammunition clips, rifle bipods and body armor at Baghdad’s Haraj market. Or Playboy DVDs, Irish Spring soap and military-issue MREs (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) at a store in Karrada district, scavenged from the trash or more often skimmed off supplies at U.S. bases by industrious local contractors.

For traders in U.S. cast-offs, now is the last hurrah.

The remaining 85,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq are pulling out over the next 18 months, and the Pentagon is getting rid of the fixtures and fittings of the bases they live in, some of it at auction, some bound for the black market.

Among the items hitting the streets are air-conditioners and refrigerators from 500 bases the U.S. operated at the height of its presence in 2007, when some 170,000 soldiers were trying to keep Iraq from tearing itself apart. The size of the U.S. force in Iraq meant many of the bases were like cities, with PX shops as big as Wal-Marts, and Burger King and Krispy Kreme stores…

Such are the spoils of modern war, while stocks last…

In Iraq, the United States isn’t sticking around. Or so we are told.

Combat operations end in August and troop numbers drop to 50,000 by September 1, before a full withdrawal by the end of 2011. Much of their hardware goes to U.S. forces in Afghanistan or is repatriated. Some equipment goes to the Iraqi government.

More than 370 bases have been handed over, and the military says it is “transitioning” to Iraq 62,000 excess items, including vehicles and office furniture.

RTFA.

None of this should surprise you – including the official lies. Maybe there will be a few enterprising hustlers who will pack up some of the leftover, ship ‘em back to the United States to sell to the fools who willingly paid for this crap with tax dollars a hundred times over.

Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

It started with a snippet we read on page A23 in Thursday’s Washington Post. The McCain-Palin campaign was going to sell its used office inventory at low prices.

When we got there…most of the good stuff was gone. The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple. And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support. And – most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers. “They should have wiped that stuff out,” one said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

After the McCain closeout staff put out a statement saying secure procedures were being checked, he sent a blank email CC’d to his entire address book – which apparently still included the ex-staff Blackberry – with the subject line “We’re so screwed.”