12 December 2021 - WORLD'S LARGEST COWBOY BOOTS

 

WORLD'S LARGEST 

COWBOY BOOTS

G'day folks,

Naturally, these boots are in Texas.

In 1979, on a vacant lot three blocks from the White House, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade began building a pair of 40-foot-tall ostrich-skin cowboy boots. Well, concrete and fiberglass made to look like ostrich skin, which he felt gave the giant duo a real Texan style.

Bob Wade’s art has been shown in museums and spaces around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the 1977 Paris Biennale (alongside Marina Abramović). After seeing his giant iguana sculpture called Iggy on the roof of the LoneStar Cafe in New York City, an arts nonprofit commissioned Wade for a public art piece in Washington D.C.

 After six months at 12th and G streets, the boots were taken—with a considerable amount of trouble—on flatbed trucks to the North Star Mall in San Antonio, Texas, a process Wade memorialized in the song “Too High Too Wide Too Long.”

In their first few years at the mall, a DJ broadcasted live from the top of the boots during the San Antonio Rodeo. People would have tailgate parties just outside. During a particularly rowdy year, someone got excited and kicked a hole in one of the heels, making way for a homeless person to stay for a while. He was discovered and booted after mall-goers noticed the billowing smoke from a Sterno can he used as a stove.

In 2016, the Guinness Book recognized the giant pair as the world’s largest cowboy boot sculpture. While everything might not be bigger in Texas, Wade can certainly proclaim his boots are.

Clancy's comment: Wow. They are big boots to fill, eh?

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24 March 2021 - ANCIENT BOOT FOUND IN SIBERIA

 

ANCIENT BOOT 

FOUND IN SIBERIA 

G'day folks,

This exquisitely-designed women’s boot was discovered in Siberia's Altai mountains in 1948. 

 

This stunning shoe is believed to be 2,300 years old and was worn by a Scythian woman around 300–290 BC. Ancient Scythians, also called Scyth, Saka, and Sacae, were nomadic people who traveled through the Eurasian continent. This shoe features elaborately bedazzled patterns and is made of leather, textile, tin, and gold. The immaculate condition of the shoe has mystified historians.

 

 Many believe that this might be because such shoes were particularly made for Scythian burial mounds. Scythians were known to construct wooded structures deep in the ground to place their dead. Each body was placed inside a log coffin, along with many of their essentials, which they thought their dead needed for the eternal rides of the afterlife. This red cloth-wrapped leather boot, now a part of the State Hermitage Museum‘s collection in St Petersburg, Russia, is likely to have belonged to a high-ranking woman.

 

Clancy's comment: That is one flash boot. Nike would be proud of it.

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