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.
Sunday 2 May 2021
Wednesday 28 April 2021
billiard balls & bowling green bowles, turnt correctly
We quite enjoyed perusing these antique furniture trade cards (see previously) from the shops and emporia of old London—reportedly discovered in a secret drawer of a hypothetical cabinet. There are carpenters and casket-makers, upholsters as well as looking-glass and chair manufacturies.
Monday 19 April 2021
shake shack
In the aftermath of the April 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires that ravaged San Francisco over five thousand refugee shelters were constructed to replace the tent cities that emerged in Golden Gate Park and other areas to prevent a follow-on public health crisis. Most of the sturdier habitations—cottages (it reminds us of this image) for which tenants paid a $2 per month rent—have been demolished over the ensuing century but at least a few dozen remain, conserved by a following of dedicated residents. More from JWZ and the San Francisco Chronicle at the link above.
catagories: ๐, ๐ช️, antiques, architecture
Friday 9 April 2021
7x7
tsugite: software that generates traditional Japanese joinery (previously) that can be 3D printed or precision cut
prince albert in a can: a collection of fish tin labels from a digital museum dedicated to the Portuguese canning industry
cosmic nature: artist Yayoi Kusama exhibits at New York’s Botanical Garden
tune-dex: the real-fake book of jazz standards, essential to musicians in the 1970s
dingbat: thirty select works of Mid-Century Modern print for inspiration
beer is proof god loves us and wants us to be happy: brew theorems post US National New Beers’ Eve ahead of the anniversary of rescinding parts of the Volstead Act that allowed for consumption of higher proof beer
ukiyo-e: the unintentional ASMR of a master printmaker at work
Monday 5 April 2021
7x7
snuggling cygnets: avian photography of the year, also known as b-poty for short—via Colossal
untitled pizza movie: documenting change in New York City slice-by-slice
aqen the ferryman: Cairo hosts a parade for a score of royal mummies moving to a new museum—via Super Punchsalvator metaversi: art historian turns supposed last Leonardo into an NFT to help out the family who sold it to unscrupulous art dealers
theatre of machines: intricate gear illustrations from Agostino Ramelli (see also here and here)
scenes from a mall: footage from the Southdale Centre’s grand opening in 1956
knock knock: a swan terrorising a neighbourhood in Northampton—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links
Wednesday 31 March 2021
6x6
berggeschrei: Saxon princes collected, modelled miniature mountains and enjoyed miner cos-play
#oddlysatisfying: the hypnotic and self-soothing qualities of visual ASMR
it’s not a cult thing: an interview with the real estate agent selling this ‘sexy funeral Goth house’ in Baltimore—via Super Punch
erard square action: a tool that measures a piano key’s up- and down-weight
slamilton: a basketball musical of Space Jam meshed with Hamilton—see previously—that works better than it should, via Waxy
den hรผgel hinauf: Amanda Gorman’s inspirational US presidential inaugural poem (see also) will be published in German
Sunday 28 March 2021
notions
Via Nag on the Lake’s always splendiferous Sunday Links (lots more to explore there), we are directed to a wonderful collection of antique trade cards of various London emporia for all one’s clogg, peruke, bunnbaking needs and more—retail or wholeลฟale. Developed at the end of the seventeenth century parallel to rise of cheap priniting, the advertising ephemera were business cards of a sort and included specific, detailed directions to the merchants’ stores, referencinf signage that could be quite elaborate, as no standardised system of street addresses existed at the time—see also. Be sure to check out Spitalfield’s Life bookshop for more treasuries of old London.
Thursday 18 March 2021
100% birgitta
Pictured here among the influential and aspirational on the beach in Ibiza in crocheted attire, we quite enjoyed learning about the crafter and dyer become wardrobe artist and celebrity in her own right Stockholm native Birgitta Bjerke who turned the patchwork of old-timey bedspreads into fashion that the rock royalty of the mid- to late 60s with icons like Jimi Hendrix, Roger Daltrey, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger sporting her outfits. Much more at Collectors’ Weekly at the link above.
tragomaschalia
From the June 1953 issue of Esquire—courtesy of Weird Universe—we are directed towards bedding with a strange gimmick that really stretches metaphor with these sheets treated with chlorophyll which apparently would at the same time attract livestock and fulfil the preferences of goatherds and shepherdesses who would rather sleep in the great outdoors. There’s one made up fear (see also) but made not in the obvious word. If one’s present linens are wanting, one is advised to “deter aegiphobia”—not a real word and presumably one should avoid the fear of covering up, aegis—“and rest assured.” The other menacing word, even footnoted from Aristophanes, is ฯฯฮฑฮณฮฟฮผฮฌฯฯฮฑฮปฮฟฯ but not meaning agoraphilia or claustrophobia but rather referring our little bedmate above armpits smelling like a he-goat, in use both figuratively and in clinical-settings. There is quite a bit going on here and I’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary advertisement that has this many levels I think.
Tuesday 2 March 2021
telex
Via Weird Universe—striking us as rather incredulous as well that we’ve not blogged about this topic before though there are some corresponding posts (see here and here)—we are introduced to commercial code, a method adopted by companies to save on cablegram expenses when telegraph companies charged per word or character and thus elaborate and competing systems of encoding and decoding were developed and broadly used from the 1870s through the 1950s, both for general use and industry jargon. Secondarily a means of keeping communications private and confusing unless one had the right reference book, some systems used less common words as a cipher for a series of phrases on the same subject and sometimes included non-words, like HAUBARER for “charterers will allow the option of carrying horse for the ship’s benefit,” BYOXO for “are you trying to weasel out of our deal,” ENBET for the “captain has gone insane,” AZKHE for a clean bill of health and COSNOSCO as shorthand for “dining out this evening; send my dress clothes here.” More to explore at Weird Universe at the link up top including a good resource of scanned codebooks.
Saturday 27 February 2021
deep nostalgia
We learn that a genealogy company is offering a fully automated service to reanimate one’s old photographs by applying the same sort seamlessly predictive technology behind deep fakes, transforming perhaps staid and distant images in the same sort of way that Live photos or Harry Potter photojournalism captures a few seconds of posing and framing the shot. It seems like a clever idea to image one’s relatives smiling and mugging for the camera. Learn more at Gizmodo’s io9 at the link above.
Monday 22 February 2021
5x5
vanishing london: the Topographical Society laments and documents changes to the city—1900 to 1939
a murder of crows: a captivating thread about accidentally creating a fiercely loyal avian regimen
kaitenzushi: a 1948 proposal to move diners from course to course
genius loci: an investigation into the character Tom Bombadil from the Middle Earth legendarium
forwarding address: moving a Victorian mansion in San Francisco
catagories: ๐, ๐ฝ, antiques, architecture, Tolkien
Tuesday 16 February 2021
7x7
penn station’s half century: vignettes of the original New York Beaux Arts transportation hub painstaking brought to life to experience the station prior to its 1957 demolition and renovation
delightful creatures: drone captures manatees and dolphins frolicking in Florida Everglades
raven story: Alaska Tlingit artist features on new US postage stamp with a depiction of the trickster spirit
poisonous green: the paint that might have been the death of Napoleon and other toxic tinctures—see previously
de-programming: interviews with children of parents radicalised by QAnon trying to get their moms and dads back
morph and mindbuffer: a mesmerising hypersurface of a globe composed of expanding isohedrons
preservation watch: conservationists fear that the iconic, Art Deco lobby of the McGraw-Hill Building might be under threat
Thursday 4 February 2021
fainting couch
With due deference to one of the greatest historical armchair adventurers and confinement veterans Xavier de Maistre, we quite enjoyed this thoughtful and thoroughgoing essay from Hunter Dukes on the postures of transportation and how cushion and cortege and increasing sophistication in seating and upholstery parallels literary conventions and enabled one to truly escape one’s surroundings and mentally travel to new worlds. Consider that one popular design for a chaise longue was an asymmetrical day-bed called le Mรฉridienne, a sloping affair made for a mid-day rest. Like a modern gaming chair, one’s sedentary comforts influence and inform one’s imagination and engagement and a gauge of one’s willingness to let the world come to them. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.
Monday 25 January 2021
6x6
hair flashes: some MidCentury styling tips from the British Pathรฉ archives
salvator mundi: an inconspicuously missing five-hundred-year old copy of the world’s most expensive painting (previously) found in a wardrobe in Naples
home edition: a meditative Tiny Desk Concert from pianist Max Richter
elevator pitch: Michael Dorn’s suggestion for a franchise series from the point-of-view of the Klingon Empire sounds intriguing
mpaa: a brief history of the PG-13 rating for US box-offices—see also
boneshaker: antique footage of cyclists in the days before suspension and shock-absorbers
Saturday 23 January 2021
7x7
dog and ferret sundries, etc: a fantastic hardware catalogue from the 1930s
the roaring twenties: the Sea Shanty craze of a century before—via Strange Companymidori: the relatively modern distinction between blue and green in Japan—see previously
tag yourself: medieval owl alignment chart
arkaphones: a resounding retrospective to artist Terry Adkins, who created sonic monuments
for all the latest medical poop, call surgeon general c. everett koop: the fortune and failure of the post executive branch career of the doctor’s branded medical advice website
ghost signs: self-appointed guardian of fading signage, collecting it before it vanishes altogether—we can all do this
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ถ, ๐ฌ, ๐, ๐ฑ, antiques, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, networking and blogging
Tuesday 12 January 2021
thaumatrope
From our infinitely engrossing antiquarian, JF Ptak Science Bookstore, not only do we learn the image for demonstrating the formation and oscillation of drops is the above titled optical toy or tool “wonder turner” that gives the illusion of motion and progression (see also here and here), moreover there is accidental poetry is addressing the airy gravity of the nature of bubbles and membranes. An excerpt from an early Nature article speaks to this: “He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones, of bubbles in large and small tubes, of bubbles of air in a liquid, and of one liquid in another, of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids, of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity and with various degrees of surface tension at the surfaces.” Much more to explore at the link up top.
Monday 11 January 2021
logic gates
Via Pasa Bon! we are presented with an educational toy in the form of a mechanical computer invented and marketed in 1965 by John “Jack” Thomas Godfrey called the Digi-Comp II that used marbles rolling down an incline through customisable, programmable interventions, like a pinball game (Flipperkast) or pachinko to teach coding. These basic calculations were accomplished—less kinetically—on the predecessor game with gears and latch circuits as a demonstration of binary logic. Much more to explore at the link up top including a giant model and a Lego version of the visual calculator.
Tuesday 22 December 2020
6x6
schrรถder staircase: prize-winning optical illusions
well, the spam, eggs, sausage and spam—that’s not got much spam in it: McDonald’s in China releases a special, limited edition burgerevery day, the same, again: miscellany from the New Shelton wet/dry
black mirror: a Claude glass was a handheld Instagram filter of artists and sightseers in the late 1700s
back contamination: NASA’s efforts to contain a lunar pandemic (see previously) that never came to pass and what lessons it can teach us in this current situation
frame-included position shift: another impressive optical illusion
Friday 11 December 2020
7x7
repetition: an exploration of built-environments as an audio-visual landscape of infinite regression
a pigment of our imagination: the illusory nature of colour
nationally determined contributions: European Union agrees to more than halve its carbon emissions by 2030—via Slashdot
awesome sauce: a safari-pak of canned-meats from 1967
road gritters: track Scotland’s fleet of snow-plows in real time by name
training a generation of future karens: this scholastic kids books series are clearly coding adults as happy and confident with their life choices as monsters and misfits—via Super Punch
a universe of imagination: revisiting a classic and inspiring documentary (previously) on cosmology on its sixtieth anniversary
catagories: ๐จ๐ฆ, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ก️, ๐ฝ, ๐ฌ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ญ, ๐บ️, ๐ง , antiques, transportation