Although prior commitments and pledges had already set withdrawal from Afghanistan in motion and the US is made to face the parallels and comparisons to the fall of Saigon that it tried to dismiss or downplay, it was a grave failure of the imagination to be shocked at the thinnest veneer of stability and superficial democratic values that the West brought—standards imposed—and expect it to be robust or enduring and not swept away in the power vacuum filled by the resurgent Taliban government. Like regime change in American itself that vacillates between extremes that does not bode reliability or ongoing responsibility, the abrupt abandonment set off a military offensive in May that saw one regional capital after another be subsumed by Taliban forces. As belligerents approached the capital city of Kabul, president Ashraf Ghani relinquished control and fled to Tajikistan, disestablishing the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, replaced with the re-established Emirate, and the movement’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (released from a Pakistani jail in 2018 at the request of the US) assumed control, announcing from the busy airport where thousands are seeking to evacuate, that the “War is over!”
Monday 16 August 2021
Sunday 15 August 2021
i have directed secretary connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interest of the united states
Effectively ending the economic arrangement among Canadian, Western Europe, Australia and Japan since 1944, the Bretton Woods system (see previously), the first fully negotiated monetary order recognised across independent polities that regulated exchange rates by pinning national currencies to the price of gold under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund, American president Richard Nixon announced, unilaterally, that on this day in 1971 the dollars could no longer be freely converted to their worth in gold. Rendered a fiat currency instead of a representation of intrinsic value, only upheld by the consent of the parties engaged in trade for goods or services, many other signatories soon followed suit and untethered their money. This jarring economic policy change was the culmination of several intervention strategies undertaken by the Nixon administration to curb inflation incurred as the world reserve currency (privilรจge exorbitant as the US could print money at virtually no cost, but subsidised by the rest of the world, each bank note expatriated cost face value in actual goods), preceded by wage and price freezes and raising tariffs. Loosing the ability to service indebtedness over the war in Vietnam, Nixon accused other nations of gaming the system and using established conventions to devalue their currency to maintain a competitive advantage. The US dollar dropped precipitously in value shortly thereafter and led to the the stagflation that typifies the decade and general failure of wages to rise proportionally with the increasing prices of vital things like healthcare, education, rents and food.
Friday 13 August 2021
6x6
clink clink: a snappy little animated short of guests at cocktail hour
samarkand: an East German couple’s tour of Uzbekistan fifty years ago with photography from 1971 and 2021expectation management: a comprehensive look into how the Delta variant changes the pandemic endgame—via Kottke
noah’s violin: the twelve metre long wooden stringed instrument is a floating stage, inaugurated along with Project Moses to protect Venice from flooding
the rural juror: a spoof streaming service (see also)—via JWZ
the effect is shattering: a vodka advertising campaign that became a snow clone
Monday 9 August 2021
9x9
form follows function: a Bauhaus poster generator—see previosly—via Kottke
reddy made magic: a gallery of images plus the Walter Lantz theme song for mascot and industry shill, Reddy Kilowatt
dining car: vintage railway menus (see also) illustrate the evolution of American cuisine—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links
ฮด ฮด ฮด, can I help ya, help ya, help ya: a guide to joining the right sorority this falljeux de la xxxiii
attention k-mart shoppers: Americans emerge from the pandemic less patient, less empathetic than before and the service industry culture that fuels the cruel fantasy
cycles pour animaux: a 1907 patent for a bicycle for horses to amplify their speed and le cheval-vapeur
divergent association task: help science gauge creative reflexes by thinking up ten words as different as possible (in English only for now)
betaplex: colourful retro cinema space in Ho Chi Mihn City recalls Saigon’s Art Deco architecture
Sunday 1 August 2021
schmetterlingsflieder
Graced with half a dozen flitting European peacocks (Tagpfauenauge, Aglais io), H got this flowering shrub Buddleja davidii as a present from his colleagues, commonly known as the summer lilac or simply, appropriately a butterfly-bush. The ornamental plant is native to Hubei in Central China and named after the European missionaries and botanists Reverend Adam Buddle and Father Armand David who first collected and described it for the West, and just put in the ground. With the fragrance of honey and a rich source of nectar for pollinators, the perennial plant flowers in the summertime for six weeks, thriving in more temperate areas to the extent that this opportunistic and “perfect”—as in botanically being both male and female, self-propagating plant is sometimes classed as a noxious weed. We defer judgement to the butterflies, however.
Wednesday 28 July 2021
7x7
imprint and intaglio: a treasury of antique book illustrations—via Swiss Miss
antipodes: find the furthest populated place away from your home town—via ibฤซdem
endless loop: a superb collection of vintage Japanese cassette tapes and related accessories
dolce come il sale: an Italian town furnishes the Pope with an annual delivery of gourmet salt
full-house: the Guardian profiles the outdoor venue in Cornwall, the Minack Theatre, as it welcomes back audiences
down periscope: the Viewfinder installation affords visitors to Sydney’s coast a look at the roiling ocean below
etidorhpa: John Uri Lloyd’s 1895 pharmacologically inspired science fantasy novel
Tuesday 6 July 2021
7x7
snuck out in the middle of the night: The Onion forecasted the West’s hasty departure from Afghanistan a decade ago
fjรถgurra daga vinnuviku: a pilot experiment reducing what’s defined as full-time a stupendous success in Iceland
nine seasons: geniuses from the Hood Internet (see previously) remixed the Seinfeld theme with a hit song from every year it airedcarriage shift: a LEGO typewriter inspired by the model of the toy’s creator
subrident: a story told with some edifying vocabulary words
15-minute cities: natural language map queries
low-level pokemon, normally easily defeated, stuck guarding locations, perhaps indefinitely: augmented reality sites abandoned at Bagram Airbase
Thursday 17 June 2021
endianness
In what sounds like a passage out of Gulliver’s Travels (which etymologically speaking, it does and I think about the Big-Endians when I put eggs in the egg-cooker for breakfast on the weekends and sometimes have difficulty telling which way goes up) the little-endian method of day-month-year described the sequence of expressing dates (numerically) in most European countries. In German dots are used as separators to indicate ordinal numbers, “der zweite erste” for the second of January for example or the 2.1.—and while a leading zero for days of the month under ten is permissible in Switzerland or Austria, the grammatical rules particular to Germany do not allow for it. The format leading year-month-day, going from general to specific, is called the above big-endian method and used in China and much of Asia and the style employed in the United States, uniquely, month-day-year, is called middle-endian, used as an auxiliary method by virtually no other polity.
Tuesday 15 June 2021
durgan script
The always engrossing Language Log of the University of Pennsylvania acquaints us with a endangered and diffuse language—spread across Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Mongolia—in the Sinitic (Chinese) family but written with Cyrillic and uniquely not Sinographic characters (see also). The continuum of Gansu, Mandarin and Dungan (Kansu) is mutually intelligible to a large extent. Tones are marked with the glyphs front yer and back yer (ะฌ / ะช) from the Old Church Slavonic (see above and here too) and the current orthography is a compromise dating back to the 1920s when the Soviet Union banned Arabic and Persian-based writing systems, looked on disfavourably from the beginning as merchants along the Silk Road could conduct trade deals in a language that was secret to their neighbours.
Monday 7 June 2021
orelhรฃo
Referred to as “big ear” in Portuguese, Design Boom celebrates fifty years of the iconic egg-shaped public telephone hoods that were configured for privacy, discretion and to parabolically focus sound by architect Chu Ming Silveira (*1941 – †1997). Though now the installations are mostly ornamental—though also subject to repurposing, just like the red telephone booths of London, are an essential part of the streetscapes of Rio de Janeiro, Sรฃo Paulo and dozens of other metropolitan areas in in Central and South America, Africa and China. The open shells were created in response to complaints of compromised reception with traditional call-boxes that took up too much real estate on the sidewalks and were prone to vandalism and expensive to replace, whereas the acrylic hoods were compact and low-cost.
Monday 24 May 2021
ruby characters
Originally typesetters’ lingo for interlinear citations for a letter with a five-and-a-half point (about a pica) height—the US using a standard called agate which is also in newsprint the smallest legible text, the title refers to mark-up notations or glosses that appear above or to the side of logographic glyphs to aid in or clarify pronunciation—and sometimes as a means to communicate puns or entendre. In Japanese, the phonetic courtesy characters are called furigana and in Mandarin, Bopomofo—from the first four letters of the system: ใ , ใ, ใ and ใ.
Thursday 6 May 2021
mary celeste
Spotted first by Present /&/ Correct, we quite enjoyed contemplating these compositions by artist Jan van Schaik in his Lost Tablets series which explores the vacillation between the familiar and grounded feeling of children’s toy blocks and the untethered nature of architectural vernacular. The cut-up grammar of building elements out of place, to-be-placed reminded us of these model frames sculptures yet unsprued. The pictured piece is called the Sea Bird, all named for ships found abandoned and adrift. More at the links above.
Sunday 2 May 2021
franking privilege
Via the always engaging Present /&/ Correct (check out their sundries and notions), we learn that the postal authority in the Kingdom of Bhutan in 1973 issued commemorative stamps that were tiny vinyl records that could be played on a full-sized turn-table with a stylus, most featuring traditional folk music and acoustic samples of the country. More at the links above including a rendition of the Bhutanese national anthem replayed from phonographic postage.
Tuesday 27 April 2021
native land
Via the morning news, we discover this interactive map of the world, which instead of the usual geopolitical boarders and boundaries rather presents us with overlays of the territories and ranges of indigenous peoples. One can toggle to see native endonyms and treaties between aboriginal populations and colonisers and settlers, encouraging one to think critically about place and displacement.
Sunday 18 April 2021
point danger
Erected on the headland marking the boundary between New South Wales and Queensland near Coolangatta and Tweed Heads and inaugurated on this day in 1971 to commemorate the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s first voyage along this part of the Australian Gold Coast, the original source of the lighthouse’s signal being a laser-beam as part of an experimental approach to develop more efficient warning beacons. The technology however did not work according to plan and the lighthouse was retrofitted with a traditional light source in 1975.
Wednesday 14 April 2021
7x7
being vaccinated does NOT mean you can gyre and gimble in the wabe: COVID-19 safety protocols in the Jabberwocky
i’ve hidden the plans in an r2 unit: watch Carrie Fisher’s screen-test for the role of Princess Leia—see also
murder offsets: a fine is a price, paying for the right to do wrong, like papal indulgencespage left blank intentionally: the missing portion of the CIA report on astral projection (previously)—via Things Magazine
man tanna: the kastom tribe of Vanuatu mourn the passing of Prince Phillip
nature’s palette: an anniversary re-print of Patrick Syme’s expansion on Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour—previously
see my poncey boots—teach myself to cook: Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl sing about lockdown and conspiracy theorists
Wednesday 7 April 2021
you’ve got to be carefully taught
Based on a Pulitzer Prize winning book published two years before, the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical South Pacific debuted on Broadway on this day in 1949 and was an instant success with audiences for its standards and candid portrayal of prejudice—particularly with the lieutenant’s song in the title. Preambled by the spoken line that “racism is not born in you… it happens after you are born” before breaking into song, while the show was touring on a junket in the southern United States, law makers in Georgia introduced a bill banning subversive, Moscow influenced entertainment—adding a showtune justifying interracial marriage was a fundamental threat to American values and the American way of life. The number stayed in the show and is also referenced in Hamilton’s “My Shot”—“I’m with you but the situation is fraught, you’ve got to be carefully taught.” The musical won ten Tony awards and a medley of standards from the 1958 movie version can be found below.
Wednesday 17 March 2021
lost horizon
Not only a surpassing financial failure like the first attempt to adapt the story by James Hilton for the big screen just as Frank Capra’s 1937 try, the 1973 fantasy musical edition by Charles Jarrott and Bruce Bacharach was nearly career-ending for all involved. Released for general audiences on this day and initially panned, excoriated by critics, it has not improved with age nor attained the status of a cult classic. The 1933 novel by the same author of Goodbye, Mister Chips was propelled in the cultural consciousness not by the adaptations but in part by dint of the media format its publishing house, Simon & Schuster, issued it in—printed as Pocket Book #1 and of course gave the language Shangri-La, which was the original name of the presidential retreat in Maryland, later designated Camp David.
Sunday 7 March 2021
rรผckwanderer
Describing the route wherein a word travels from its originating language to a second foreign one and is re-introduced with a nuanced meaning from the first, reborrowing occurs in a wide range of languages through various processes—some simple and straightforward in cases of etymological twinning like host and guest, warranty and guarantee, ward and guardian all French influences as the diglossia between stable and table (drab, dirty cows and pigs to beef and pork) or calquing—that is, adopting a foreign term directly as was the case with off-the-shelf fashions translated first in French as prรชt-รก-porter in the early 1950s and then reclaimed by English speakers a few years later. Other migrating words take more circuitous round-trips and one can imagine future scenarios with blended meanings. The German term for a tuxedo—ein Smoking from smoking jacket comes to mind (similiarly a frock coat or redingote crisscrossed the Channel several times) and other examples include the Dutch derivation of cookie (from koekje) and the Dutch word cookie for the web-browser token as well as the Japanese borrowing of the English term animation as ใขใใก (anime) and then readopted in English to indicate a particular style of animation from Japan. Conversely, e-mail as with regular mail comes from the French “malle-post,” though the French word email already carried the meaning enamel and so employ un courriel from courrier รฉlectronique first coined in bi-lingual Quebec and formally made part of the parlancesoon there after.
Sunday 28 February 2021
s11e16
Airing on this day in 1983, the series finale of M*A*S*H (see also) “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” was until the Super Bowl of 2010 the most-watched event in television history and retains the title as the television episode with the most viewership, with an audience of over one hundred million tuned in. Taking place in the last days of the Korean War as ceasefire is declared (27 July 1953), the characters cerebrate decamping for a last time the mobile army surgical hospital and reflect on the fighting’s effects and legacy.