After launching three weeks earlier from Chateau-d’ลx in the canton of Vaud, psychiatrist and avid balloonist Bertrand Piccard—hailing from a long-line of adventurers, along with co-captain Brian Jones, became the first team on this day in 1999 to successfully circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon. With the help of a ground-crew of meteorologists, they accomplished this feat by negotiating atmospheric currents and jet-streams and had no means of forward propulsion other than being borne aloft by the winds.
Thursday 21 March 2019
Tuesday 15 January 2019
spoiler alert
Wednesday 27 December 2017
these kids today with their y2k
For those who have become accustomed to using the turn of the century or fin de siรจcle as a way to reckon future and past dates I’m sure have already come to wrestle with the sobering fact that the Year 2000 Computer Bug will attain the age of majority soon and that 1970 is not thirty years in the past but more like nearly five decades and hardly futuristic.
We nonetheless appreciated this collection of popular culture call-backs that the times inspired—from novelty songs, sitcom staples, class-action suits and survival guides for the technological apocalypse soon to visit humanity. Ultimately, there was no ensuing disaster and tigers did not rain from the heavens (no matter how we might try to frighten ourselves) and while I know that there’s little commonality about this non-event and the esteem for which we have for other, real impending disasters which may not be repaired with a simple patch are nonetheless within our power to prevent and part of me wonders if that boy-who-cried-wolf, survivor-mentality does not somehow resign some to leave everything to invisible hand, trickle-down providence. What do you remember about those last tense moments but forcing oneself to abandon and partying like it was 1999? What media digest do you remember prophesying the worst? I suppose the y2k worries and shared memories will perhaps even more so than the prevalence of connectivity and virtual personae be the shibboleth that separates one generation from the next.
catagories: ๐ถ, ๐บ, 1999, 2000, holidays and observances, networking and blogging
Monday 17 July 2017
aye, aye captain!
Speaking of Bikini Bottoms (which makes one wonder if there’s not some sinister message behind the world crafted by a marine biologist turned animator), our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, points out that today among many other things in 1999 (not counting the pilot that first aired in May of that year), the Nickelodeon network premiered SpongeBob SquarePants as a regularly scheduled programme. Whatever opinion one has formed for the show, its longevity, I’d venture, does demand some respect.
catagories: ๐บ, 1999, holidays and observances
Wednesday 11 January 2017
7x7
bowie.net: prescient 1999 BBC News Night interview with David Bowie regarding the emergent world wide web
urban league: a primer on why cities grew where they did
track 61: an intrepid team of urban spelunkers explore FDR’s custom train car underneath Grand Central Station, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake
hic sunt leones: the Phantom Atlas chronicles how we filled in the gaps of our geographic knowledge with centuries of fictitious locations
time and tide: beach installation of mirrored poles captures the reflected sunrise and sunset
shyriiwook: woman goes into labour wearing a Chewbacca mask
curds and whey: a dairy factory in the western Turkish province of Afyonkarahisar boasts a circular viewing gallery around its central courtyard that offers visitors a demonstration of cheese-making
catagories: ๐น๐ท, ๐, ๐บ️, ๐ง, ๐, 1999, architecture, networking and blogging, Star Wars
Wednesday 5 October 2016
choosy moms choose jif
On the fifth of November, 1999 an auto-de-fรฉ was proclaimed in order to rid the emerging on-line environment of an image file format (.gif) that most considered to be clunky and unsuited for facilitating the quick transfer of information.
First invented in 1987, this lossless (uncompromised, except for richness of colour) yet compressible image extension was the industry standard yet showed no potential that it would ever be the rendering for anything but static pictures and was being pressed aside by one lobby or another—even the idea of a “GIF tax” was being proposed to banish the Graphic Interchange Format, the bailiwick of Compuserve and Netscape. The cinemagraph, the parlour-trick that’s best suited for what we think of as GIFs nowadays in conjunction with browser protocols and later the looping video clip, was not perfected until 2011 but would have probably never materialised unless it had been allowed to incubate, maybe selfishly, during the intervening decades. Read all about the history and development of the GIF and get a primer on how image compression algorithms work in Popular Mechanics article at the link up top.
catagories: ๐ก, ๐, 1987, 1999, networking and blogging
Thursday 19 May 2016
it came from the cineplex or darth by darthwest
The summer blockbusters are championed by a duo of my favourite bloggers, Bob Canada and Dr. Caligari, we are treated to a comprehensive preview of the 2016 box-office, which is predictably franchised, derivative and cannibalistic. I too wish I had invested in the punctuation mark known as the colon for all the subtitles. By the miracle of assiduous chronicling, however, the fact that there is nothing new under the sun is revealed by marking that on this day in 1999, the Star Wars saga (among other events) released its first prequel. Some clever individual, we also find, is bucking the tread with a brilliant mingling of Hitchcock and Lucas