Via ibฤซdem, we are directed towards a companion website to complement a documentary which affords us a chance to revisit the Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj, a short-lived micronation just outside of Italian territorial waters off the coast of Rimini, an artificial pylon engineered by the soi sont president Giorgio Rosa, a property developer with ties to the puppet government of the World War II Republic of Salรฒ with hopes of establishing a self-funding enterprise through an independent regime of taxation, philately and sovereign citizenship. Much more to explore at the links above.
Saturday 19 November 2022
Wednesday 9 November 2022
6x6 (10. 288)
elektrisk kjรธretรธy: a retrospective look at how A-ha inspired and informed Norway’s early adoption of electric vehicles—via Things Magazine
taposiris magna: archaeologists discover a nearly mile long tunnel deep under a temple near Alexandria on the search for Cleopatra’s lost tomb—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links
market cap: major online retailer first company to lose one trillion dollars in stock value—see alsostenography: more on shorthand (see previously) in ancient Greek and Roman texts
nit-picking: oldest inscription bearing a full sentence found on a Canaanite comb
terrain de stationnement: France to require all existing and new parking lots to be covered with solar panels
Thursday 20 October 2022
untenured (10. 241)
Holding office for a tumultuous forty-five days (the shortest of the United Kingdom’s sixty-eight) though spanning two monarchs and some cabinet reshuffling, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister after a week marked by market crashes, an exodus of deputies and general lack of confidence in her leadership abilities built momentum for a general election. This collapsed government that upheld the conservative, Tory party totems of Brexit and austerity speaks to the abject failure of such regressive, nihilist politics that are out-of-step and untethered from the electorate. The party will choose a new prime minister by 28 October but does not preclude a Labour government being established.
Tuesday 4 October 2022
7x7 (10. 195)
also sprach zarathustra: Raquel Welch dances to a disco-funk version of the Strauss classic
information overload: a survey of pictorial statistics’ evolution to the infographic
great chain of being: Evard d’Espinque illustrates the fifteenth century De Proprietatibus Rerumthis lady is for turning: after precipitating markets instability and provoking decent from within the party, the Prime Minister and Chancellor walk back unfunded tax cuts for the rich
fancy dress party: Jane Asher’s book of costumes
search engine: glean answers to queries from passages in literature, conversation rather than Google Search—via Swiss Miss
phone a friend: 1-900 hotlines in the United States
daisy, daisy—give me your answer, do: witnessing a demonstration of the IBM 704 in 1961 inspired Arthur C Clarke
Wednesday 28 September 2022
7x7 (10. 176)
moonage daydream: an interview with Brett Morgen on the subject of his latest documentary—see previously
rupture: Nordstream pipelines have sprung a leak, sabotage suspectedafforestation: a volcanic eruption is helping to rewild island
eyewall: Hurricane Ian’s path of destruction as it reaches Florida
omnishambles: the budget plan of PM Truss and Chancellor Kwarteng garners rebuke from Germany, the US and the IMF as the Pound Sterling approaches parity with the dollar
mahsa: the death of a young woman in the custody of Iran’s morality police has touched off protests against the government
let all the children boogie: an Australian museum brought the original hand-written draft of David Bowie’s Starman at auction
Sunday 25 September 2022
sip (10. 167)
Via tmn, our attention is again directed towards bespoke, luxury fallout shelters, bunkers, panic rooms flogged (also a punishment for criminal offences for the not so well-appointed) to the rich and powerful—only this time, the glamorous, underground residences, replete with fake skies over courtyards with swimming pools, private theatres, wine cellars, conference centres and showcase galleries and garages, or anything else the client can imagine, are being pushed on the influx of multi-millionaires resettling in the United Arab Emirates. What do you thinK? The firm offering such fantastical and secure retreats is a Swiss company called Oppidum—the Latin term for a fortified city. I thought only pharaoh in his pyramid could only be so entombed.
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ฑ, ๐ณ️, Middle East
Wednesday 7 September 2022
fahrkarte (10. 115)
Though happy to pay full fare and subsidise public transportation, I do miss the 9-Euro bus and regional train scheme offered during the past three months to help offset high fuel prices and inflation besetting Germany chiefly for the simplicity and making local travel a bit easier to navigate, explore and reducing congestion and do hope that it comes back in some form. It was a really inopportune ending, coinciding with the start of the school year and a drastic reduction of services in Wiesbaden, going on the Saturday schedule for some routes. A group of activist is campaigning for its return by establishing a fund to cover the fines (60 € or more) for those members fined for riding without a ticket—and encouraging members to display a tag for potential fare collectors or inspector that they are intentionally riding without a valid ticket, so as to avoid the more serious charge of defrauding the transport-providers and only incur the lesser fine for “Schwarzfahrer”—fare-dodging. While an organisation is free to offer amnesty for its members and champion the return of a cheap, flat-rate, their actions could also be legally construed as public incitement to commit a crime—through ticket evasion.
Monday 15 August 2022
private equity (10. 064)
Reinforcing the reality that the US is the biggest tax haven, the carried interest loophole, whose perennial but feeble attempts at reform nearly cost the US government and people a significant legislative win in terms of environmental protection and financial recovery, represents the bonus cut an investment manager—arguably a fee earned for enhancing the performance of stock portfolio—which are not in America taxed as regular earnings. Although the concept dates back to the sixteenth century and the age of colonialism—ships’ captains taking a share of profits ultimately earned on goods carried or transported as a way to build and maintain boat and crew and avoiding the prohibition against usurious loans, the idea was not codified, incentivised until 1913 and the explosion of domestic hydrocarbon exploration. Applying a lesser tax liability to the explorers’ profit (versus the share that the partners received) based on the above reasoning that the explorers were also shouldering a risk if their venture was unsuccessful, the immediate returns were classified as capital gains and due to the difficulty of assessing future value, taxes on carried interest can be deferred until cashed out. This is why poor-mouthing billionaires take out successive loans rather than reify their worth on paper. Moreover, with this continued concession to current regulations, wealth managers, hedge fund operators and the like are able to further exploit the returns on an investment above and beyond their individual exposure to the total profits earned by gambling with other people’s money, taxed at about half what earners in a much lower income bracket would be liable for.
Tuesday 12 July 2022
7x7
smacs 0723: astronomers unveil the first colour pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope—see more, see previously
power plant: an interactive map of energy and industry from the European Commissionecovado: a sustainable, locally-sourced alternative to the imported avocado
empire rollerdome: New York street photographer Patrick D Pagnano captures 1980s roller disco—via Messy Nessy Chic
€/$: euro, US dollar at parity
maps mastery: a profile of expert-level GeoGuessr players—via Waxy
zero-g: researchers at Kyoto University design artificial gravity architecture
Saturday 9 July 2022
8x8
carina nebula: first five subjects for JWST announced
a pharmacopeia with balneological appendix: a primer and point of departure for the mysterious pre-Renaissance volume, the Voynich Manuscript—see previouslyputt-putt for the fun of it: a time-capsule of miniature golf courses
trap daddy: spoof Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia introduces us to a catch-phrase for the deception hoax—see also, see previously
jubilee: inflexibility applied to finance and debt contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire
spatter platters: morbid 1960s teen tragedy songs
hushed-tones: a neural network makes a nature documentary about ants
hudf: JWST takes deepest image of the Cosmos without even trying plus other space news briefs
Tuesday 28 June 2022
8x8
cutting-corners: skimpflation and other consumer caveats
section 30 order: Holyrood to hold second independence referendum in October
edutainment: a new volume on poet Emily Dickinson concludes with a Math Blaster style game from LitHub
wade in u.s.a.: protest is the court of last resortwhite rabbits: an unsung group of women sculptors employed during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893—via Messy Nessy Chic
adobe flash: watch a time-lapse of a luxury villa with pool built out of mud and bamboo via Everlasting Blรถrt
allons-y alonzo: assonances, alliterations and vowel harmonisation in French and other languages
coffee siren: the origins of the ubiquitous cafรฉ mascot (see also here and here)
Saturday 25 June 2022
8x8
morning chorus: a suspended hotel suite in Sรกpmi cladded with three-hundred fifty birdhouses
meanwhile margaret atwood says hold my beer: teach and student, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, spar over which dystopian vision is more plausible
don’t say g*y: Disney introduces its first openly closeted cast of charactersmakeup and monobrow: a quick survey of the female eyebrow in art
border and backsplash: the mosaic tile museum of Gifu—over ten-thousands exemplars, many rescued from buildings slated for demolition
i had hoped that god would work one of his signature miracles and spare me from is also signature “horrible pain in childbirth” curse: the Virgin Mary reclaims her nativity narrative
stonk-and-go: the US Securities and Exchange Commission weighs sweeping change to curtail meme-driven trades
a doghouse for eddie: charmingly, Frank Lloyd Wright (previously) builds a home for a canine and his human companion
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐จ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐ชถ, architecture, libraries and museums
Thursday 23 June 2022
scheduled territories
Also known as the above legal entity the sterling area came into being in 1931 when the pound was unpegged from the gold standard and a number of countries, mostly Commonwealth nations, either employed the £ or had a fixed rate of exchange with it, effectively came to an end on this day in 1972 when the British government unilaterally applied exchange controls to all its participants—with the exception of the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands—with the departure of forty-five members from the economic bloc in protest of UK monetary policies. Once the most robust and coherent currency areas, the realisation trade with the continent was more important that historical preferential trading with former parts of the empire prompted the UK to seek closer ties with the European Communities—the Common Market—and devalued, floated the pound ostensibly to halt outflow and flight to the US dollar but many saw it at the time as a concession to France’s objection to UK membership in the organisation that would go on to become the European Union, which repealed its veto the following year. Coincidentally, this day also marks the 2016 anniversary of the Brexit referendum.
Friday 27 May 2022
8x8
city in a bottle: a bit of micro-coding from Frank Force (previously) decoded—via Waxy
kr: the Icelandic Graphic Design Association (FรT, Fรฉlag รญslenskra teiknara) issues a challenge to come up with a glyph for their krรณna
nรฉcessaire: a French borrowing—see also—for kit and carryenough: TIME magazine’s cover lists the two-hundred thirteen US cities that have had mass-shootings this year, so far
social sentinel: a look at the dubious pre-crime predictive software that ill-serves society and the reliance on tech to come to the rescue in general
party line: last bank of public phones removed from New York City—see also here, here, here and here
swiss miss: Tina Roth Eisenberg celebrates her seventeenth blogoversary tesserae: MIT Lab develops autonomous modular tiles to create structures and habitats in space
Sunday 24 April 2022
the snake in the tunnel
Following a referendum in France the day before that admitted the UK, Ireland and Denmark into the Common Market, on this day in 1972 at a summit in Basel the members of the European Economic Community agreed to install an exchange system to limit fluctuations in rates in order that the basket of European currencies would be consistent with the US dollar. With the titular nickname (Schlange im Tunnel, le Serpent monรฉtaire europรฉen), the arrangement was the first attempt to peg the Mark, the Franc and the Pound Sterling to one another that ultimately led to the creation of the euro and was precipitated by the Nixon Shock of the previous year with the repeal of the Bretton Woods system. This coordination, cartel was a method to control appreciation and depreciation and retain relative stability until the following year when the dollar began to float freely and member nations diverged in their response.
Friday 15 April 2022
7x7
who’s in your wallet: personalities and personages on banknotes—via Waxy (who is turning twenty)
simoom: a decade of dust storms
hurrian hymn: paean to Mesopotamian goddess Nikkal is the oldest know surviving work of notated musicfound photos: saved from oblivion and shared—via Things Magazine (plus a lot more to check out)
alphabet truck: the whole ABCs on the backside of lorries captured by Eric Tabuchi—via Pasa Bon!
meme-maker: Dutch national library offers a tool to scour medieval illustrations and marginalia—see also here and here
the colour of money: a survey of banknote hues from the archives
catagories: ๐ช, ๐ถ, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐ท, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, Middle East, The Simpsons
Wednesday 30 March 2022
alรพing considered
Friday 4 March 2022
for what it’s worth
Via Kottke we are directed to a highly compelling project from Dillon Marsh that visualises mines in South Africa with a scale model representing the specie, minerals or gemstones extracted from it—like in this composite photograph of the Jubilee Mine in the Namakwa District and the sixty-five-hundred tonnes of copper ore dug from the Earth. Gains seem particularly marginal, inefficient and pathetic in comparison to all the hardships in cost of human toil and exploitation and environmental damage. More at the links above.
Thursday 3 March 2022
8x8
wild chapluns and pea beasts: the vibrant art of Maria Prymachenko, via Kottke
ill-gotten assets: those who are tracking the jets, yachts and other property of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, via Maps Mania (with more resources)
subway hands: a collection by Hannah La Follette Ryan—via Everlasting Blรถrt
blades & brass: a 1967 short to commemorate the first indoor hockey match, held on this day in 1875
nostromo: a sixty-second Alien remake using household items (see also)
try to keep up: five news take-aways for today
megamix: Hood Internet (previously) celebrates entering the Naughts with a 90s retrospective, via Boing Boing
world central kitchen: chef and humanitarian Josรฉ Andrรฉs helps out in Ukraine, via Super Punch
Wednesday 23 February 2022
chipping norten
catagories: ๐, ๐ฑ, architecture