Tuesday 11 May 2021

sleeper car

Via the always interesting Maps Mania, we learn more about the happily resurgent phenomenon of night trains (previously) whose network could once again connect the continent and in response to shifting attitudes, expectations and environmental awareness—including legislation to outlaw short-haul flights where alternative and less polluting modes of conveyance are possible. There’s an informative article and even an interactive route-planner to plan one’s future over-nighter and experience waking up in a new city. 

 

 

Sunday 2 May 2021

9x9

why are you still here: our houses get sick of us never leaving too—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see here)  

fake id: the unfortunately inevitable rise of counterfeit vaccination credentials  

disaster girl: meme as NFT (previously) nets a half-million dollars at auction 

comically overwrought: an oral history of the Crying Dawson gif  

resident evil village: games company produced a musical, gory puppet show to promote its latest instalment  

sunshine state: Florida will make it illegal for social media to deplatform politicians, with a especial carve-out for Disney—via Slashdot  

euphonium: found poetry in the history of acoustic waves  

web curios: Waxy lets us know that the fine and well-connected newsletter returns after a sabbatical of nine months with the folding of Imperia   

windows on the world: artwork by Liam Cobb that fills one with Wanderlust—via the morning news

Saturday 24 April 2021

antimeridian

Courtesy of the New Shelton wet/dry, we are directed towards this helpful and thorough-going comparative resource of map projections (see previously here, here and here) from Jason Davies that covers the range of interrupted maps, two-dimensional flatten of the globe focused on choice areas of less interest that go far beyond the Spilhaus or transverse Mercator projection that’s a favourite television news studio wall-hanging to butterfly maps, the Berghaus Star, Foucaut’s Stereographoc equivalency globe, the loxodrome and the pictured geopolitical bounding box with animation and interactive features.

Thursday 1 April 2021

vss imagine

Expanding its fleet of suborbital space planes with a third vehicle, Virgin Galactic has commenced test flights with its chromed, mirrored craft that’s reminiscent of a space ship from Buck Rogers or Perry Rhodan and has a superb retro-future aesthetic. More at Design Boom at the link above.

Saturday 27 March 2021

tenerife airport disaster

Prompting strict enforcement of standardised instructions, safety protocols and English as a common-working language for air traffic controllers and flight crews, the deadliest accident in aviation history occurred on this day in 1977 when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway in foggy conditions on the Spanish island. Five hundred eighty-three people were killed. Members of the Canary Islands Independence Movement had planted a bomb at the larger Gran Canaria airport and called in the threat, this terrorist incident causing planes to be diverted to the smaller regional Los Rodeos airport in the northern part of Tenerife, causing the taxiway to become congested and arriving and departing planes sharing the single runway had to wait their turn in deteriorating weather conditions. A mutual misunderstanding tragically caused the KLM and Pan Am flights to start at the same time.

Wednesday 10 February 2021

safe countries of origin

Surreal and more than a bit menacing—via Maps Mania—we are referred to No Fly Free Zone and its regular recitation of flight guidelines and entry-restrictions and rule-making exceptions issued by the International Air Transportation Association for member states. The globe with air routes is interactive and a public-address system jingle is used to punctuate announcements.

Wednesday 27 January 2021

ten and two

Things Magazine directs our attention to directed to a thoroughgoing and informative appreciation of the engineering and triangulation of technology, style and their limitations, constraints that have gone into the Apple Watch, including a lesson of the anatomy of classic
watchmaking (lugs, bezel, face and hands) and a historical inventory of the iconic dials that inform and inspire Apple’s gallery, including the “error-proof” California Dial trialled by Rolex, the evolving chronograph with an array of complications, diving watches and models coordinated with Greenwich Mean Time, introduced by Pan Am realising that their pilots and crew needed to reference multiple time-zones.

Wednesday 6 January 2021

if your friends don’t mask—and why they don’t mask, well they won’t fly this airline

Though I think it is going to take a lot more than a catchy commercial to restore my confidence in plane travel, we did like this promotional piece from Alaska Airlines, whose residents are arguably more reliant on that form of travel than many of us—via Pasa Bon! to the tune of Safety Dance. I admire their energy and commitment to mitigating as much risk as possible, in any case. If you let the video play through and forward to the next, there’s a quit good supercut of 1980s television spots for the carrier to watch.

Saturday 12 September 2020

arrivals and departures lounge

Though it was endearing to see a family undertake a cancelled trans-Pacific vacation or to tour airports with a sense of nostalgia and Wanderlust, Singapore Airlines’ plans to take travellers aloft on actual flights to nowhere both starting and ending at Changi airport (the city state bereft of domestic travel opportunities) seems wasteful and perverse. What do you think? Circling the runway is very resource intensive and an economy that need to maintain such circulation seems childish and like a bit of grifting that we’d do better to move beyond and not let a cloying attempt to save a market with no rehabilitation further take down the environment with it.

Thursday 30 July 2020

omiyage—voyage, voyage

This Japanese word for souvenir (ใŠๅœŸ็”ฃ) are representative meibutsu (ๅ็‰ฉ, literally famous things) applied to regional specialties and are often exchanged among work colleagues and family members upon the return of one who was away not just as a keepsake but as a way to apologize for one’s absence and a consolation for those whom did not get to make the trip this time. Via Present /&/ Correct we are directed towards this rather brilliant and wonderfully granular map of the country from Haconiwa design studios. One can explore on any section on the grid to learn about local delicacies and take a virtual vacation. Much more to explore at the links above.

Thursday 16 July 2020

8x8

houstonia: a century of the Texas city told though iconic photographs—via Things Magazine

bovine flatulence: a strange fast food campaign touts its efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and improve animal welfare

triple word score: a Star Wars round-up including Scrabble tiles in the script of Galactic Basic, Aurebesh (previously)

eggs over easy: an introduction to Britain’s influential pub rock scene of the 1970s and its lasting legacy

when she walks, she’s like a samba: a deconstruction of the complex Girl from Ipanema (see also July 2019), the second most covered song in history

le vetture tranviarie: engineer Arturo Tedeschi redesigns a tram car for social distancing (see previously)

eponymous first album: quarantined residents in of a senior assisted living centre recreate iconic record covers

unclaimed baggage: more on the small town Alabama store (previously) that resells the world’s lost luggage—via Duck Soup

Thursday 2 July 2020

we have clearance, clarence

While—courtesy of our faithful chronicler—it’s worth noting the anniversary of the general release in North America on this day in 1980 of the supremely silly Jim Abrahams and Zucker Brothers comedy for its own sake, it does strike me as hard to reconcile the rapidity of contemporary riffs, among them the mostly overlooked meta-reference that the action-drama franchise Airport (1970 – 1979, based on the Arthur Hailey novel and became the epitome of the disaster genre of the decade) had just concluded and cycled out of theatres.
Enjoying three sequels—with the first two being big box office hits—the final flop Airport ’79…The Concorde (even called Airport ’80 in some markets due to the distribution schedule, whereas Airplane’s sequel didn’t fare so well), it reminds me how the Kennedy White House took the metonym Camelot not because it was particularly courtly or chivalrous in its own right but rather due to the concurrent popularity of the Broadway play.

Friday 26 June 2020

6x6

morning edition: artist paints sunrises on newspapers as a dawning juxtaposition to the headlines of the day

free parking: aerial views of grounded planes at the Frankfurter Flughafen—see previously

b&b: designs for a horizontal hive with human sleeping compartment

๐Ÿ‘️๐Ÿ‘„๐Ÿ‘️:the ubiquitous string of emoji signals a tautology

if it ain’t baroque: another in a growing chain of art restoration failures, via Miss Cellania’s Links

2020: a spa odyssey: a day retreat in Caracas inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetic

Wednesday 24 June 2020

status non gratis

As cases of COVID-19 again surge in the US after the rush to reopen, the European Union mulls adding America to its no-fly list—along with Brazil and Russia, all countries which have not only spectacularly failed in containing the pandemic within their borders, have through their neglect and mismanagement been net exporters of virus and its deleterious effects.
According to twenty-seven-member block’s epidemiological threshold for designating a country safe zone, all three still exhibit dangerous levels of new infections which threaten to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure should more be imported. In mid-March, the Trump administration imposed a foreshadowingly reciprocal travel ban (since lifted) covering all of Europe, excepting the UK and Ireland, though that carve-out might get Britain similarly blocked. Talks are ongoing but failure to reach consensus could result in more internal border controls and restrictions on regional travel.

Sunday 7 June 2020

jetway 707

Having a cameo in no less than All the President’s Men featuring Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and clocking in at an impressive eight-and-a-half metre length, via Things Magazine, we’re pleased to be acquainted with the wonderfully outlandish airport stretch limousine (produced from 1968 to 1970) from Oldsmobile and its subsidiary American Quality Coach designed to shuttle VIPs (seating twelve to fifteen) and their luggage from the terminal to the tarmac (see previously). Much more to explore at the links above.

Thursday 12 March 2020

march madness

As the World Health Organisation (WHO) declares the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, meaning there is little to no pre-existing immunity in the human population to this novel contagion, Trump—noted soi-disant germaphobe whom was ignorant of the fact that his own grandfather was a victim of the 1918 Influenza or that the flu could be fatal in general, declares a thirty day travel ban on foreign nationals coming to the US from twenty six European countries—the Schengen Area excluding the UK and Ireland and US citizens being repatriated, with the intimation that free movement exported the disease and that passports are personal protective gear—more and more public events are cancelled, including US National Basketball Association (NBA) games and political rallies ahead of the US presidential election. Given that there are already over a thousand confirmed cases in the United States and that military movements of America’s global army have demonstrated their efficacy as a reservoirs and spreaders, Trump’s efforts at quelling the outbreak is too little, too late and is pandering to base fears and insecurity as a means to assuage them rather than fight the infection and instead contributes to its comorbidities.

Tuesday 10 March 2020

black monday

Already jittery and fragile in the face of the evolving thread and response to the efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, world stock markets experienced a sharp, precipitous decline—a drop fast enough to trigger a breaker-switch that suspended trading on Wall Street for a quarter of an hour to give investors a chance to regroup, when the mood was yesterday exacerbated by an oil war that erupted once Russia and OPEC were unable to come to a consensus on the right production numbers to ensure fuel retain value as a commodity during a steep decline in demand due to disruptions in shipping, travel and manufacture over said pandemic.

Saudi Arabia signaled it would flood the market with cheap crude and undercut the competition from Russia and the US—whom both have large reserves but lack the refining capacity, constricting further the prospects where the market could move its money with the retreat en masse to bonds having reduced the yield to under one percent, raising the spectre of defaults and bankruptcy. Italy’s expansion of its quarantine measures nationwide and North Korean missile tests did nothing to elevate spirits. With interest rates at historic lows and many companies’ portfolios just a tick above junk status (a comfortable, low-effort place to be until it suddenly wasn’t) national banks nor advocate stakeholders have really been painted into a corner and can do little to intervene. Though the Trump regime is more interested in the stock market and how his reelection hinges on its performance, the government may be forced to entertain extending the basic right to workers of paid sick leave, though such reform probably smacks too much of creeping socialism to allow it to gain a foothold.

Friday 21 February 2020

7x7

en nat pรฅ bloksbjerg: the incredible art work of Dutch illustrator Kay Nielsen—see previously, whom contributed to Fantasia but Disney let go

band camp: an overlooked and not unlistenable resource: Can This Even Be Called Music?—via Kicks Condor

theire soe admirable herbe: English colonist discover what the natives have been smoking in seventeenth century India

winter stations: interactive installations of Toronto’s beach to encourage outdoor play in the cold months

cabin-crew: the JFK retro TWA terminal hotel (previously) turns the body of a vintage jet into a bar and museum space

salon d’automne: a neural network trained on cubist art produces an infinite stream of paintings, via Waxy 

a parade of earthly delights: scenes from recent annual aquatic celebrations of Jheronimus Bosch (previously) held on the waters of ‘s-Herogenbosch—the next event begins in mid-June

Thursday 20 February 2020

‘lil proportional globes import/export map

Musing for Medium, geographer Tim Wallace takes us, courtesy of tmn, on a disorientating windshield tour of superannuated mapping and chart styles. Many of these data visualisations, in the same vein as persuasive, political maps, are sobering reminders that we did not invent obfuscation but are rather heirs to a long tradition of it and many of these representations are rightly consigned as forgotten but also serve to make one appreciate excellence in interpreting and communicating trends, facts and figures. Check out the whole collection including the “air mass potato,” “oversized presidential lollipop” and “swoopy arrow planet” maps at the link up top.

Thursday 2 January 2020

iata

Via Pasa Bon’s inaugural curated links of the decade, we enjoyed this visual registry of airport codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association, with an explanation of the three letter geo-locater especially helpful for when the decoding the directory designation isn’t always so straightforward.
The –X appended at the end of many aerodromes and a few feeder train stations is a marker for older stations that retained their original US National Weather Service name for consistency with the new naming conventions and many cities have retained their historic call-signs as a flag-of-convenience: SGN for Ho Chi Mihn City (formerly Saigon), TSE for Astana (formerly Tselinograd now named Nur-Sultan) or LED for Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) for example. The Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport serves three Switzerland, France and Germany and has the codes BSL, MLH and EAP.